You have to make decisions both large and small throughout every single day of your life. What do you want to have for breakfast? What time should you meet a friend for dinner? What college should you go to? How many children do you want to have?

When faced with some decisions, you might be tempted to just flip a coin and let chance determine your fate. In most cases, we follow a certain strategy or series of strategies in order to arrive at a decision.

For many of the relatively minor decisions that we make each and every day, flipping a coin wouldn't be such a terrible approach. For some of the complex and important decisions, we are more likely to invest a lot of time, research, effort, and mental energy into coming to the right conclusion.So how exactly does this process work? The following are some of the major decision-making strategies that you might use.

The Single-Feature Model

This approach involves hinging your decision solely on a single feature. For example, imagine that you are buying soap. Faced with a wide variety of options at your local superstore, you decide to base your decision on price and buy the cheapest type of soap available. In this case, you ignored other variables (such as scent, brand, reputation, and effectiveness) and focused on just a single feature.

The Additive Feature Model

This method involves taking into account all the important features of the possible choices and then systematically evaluating each option. This approach tends to be a better method when making more complex decisions.For example, imagine that you are interested in buying a new camera. You create a list of important features that you want the camera to have, then you rate each possible option on a scale of -5 to +5.Cameras that have important advantages might get a +5 rating for that factor, while those that have major drawbacks might get a -5 rating for that factor. Once you have looked at each option, you can then tally up the results to determine which option has the highest rating.

The Elimination by Aspects Model

The elimination by aspects model was first proposed by psychologist Amos Tversky in 1972. In this approach, you evaluate each option one characteristic at a time beginning with whatever feature you believe is the most important. When an item fails to meet the criteria you have established, you cross the item off your list of options. Your list of possible choices gets smaller and smaller as you cross items off the list until you eventually arrive at just one alternative.