[jsanford9292]

First sentence states:

"When faced with a decision, people may know which choice gives them the best chance of success, but still take the other option."

THIS CAN BE RATIONAL.

"Best chance of success" ignores weightings.

Say Spruce St. is slower than Main St. by 2 mins on a normal day. And Main St. had a 90-min delay yesterday. If there is even a 3% chance that Main St. has a similar delay today, it is smarter to take Spruce St.; even though Main St. has the best "chance" of success (97% of the time you will get home faster with Main St.).

Maybe the actual study does not make this mistake, but the wording of the article certainly does.

[taneq]

Exactly. Another thing (also illustrated by your example) is that consequences can be really nonlinear with respect to your scoring function, whatever that is. Take investing, for example - the "rational" thing to do is to mortgage everything, leverage yourself to the hilt and buy as many hot button shares as possible. This totally ignores the fact that, while you'll eventually come out on top, going bankrupt will end your game with a massive loss. Or in your case, maybe +/- 5 minutes is pretty linear but if you're 45 minutes late then you'll get fired. You'd never risk it to save 2 minutes.

[jsanford9292]

Precisely. Decision-making is more complicated than it seems and people actually intuit a lot of it (such as nonlinear consequences).