Decision-making table irrational patterns

The exercise runs on candour, and the quality of the table is decided by the two examples you pick. A safe example, chosen because it is easy to explain, produces four columns of nothing: you cannot identify egocentric thinking in a decision you already consider defensible. The examples that work are the ones you would rather not write down, where you can now see that you decided first and reasoned afterwards. Nobody is asking for a confession of anything serious; ordinary decisions are plenty, such as assuming a colleague's motive without checking, going along with a group you privately disagreed with, or choosing the option that protected your own convenience while telling yourself it served someone else. Write each example concretely enough that the pattern named in column two is actually visible inside the situation you have described, rather than asserted about it in the abstract where a reader has to take your word for it.

Columns two and three ask for different things and are easy to blur. Column two wants the pattern of irrational or unethical decision-making, named from the course material. Column three wants the underlying tendency of mind: egocentrism, which treats your own perspective as the standard, sociocentrism, which substitutes the group's view for judgement, and the pathological tendencies such as self-justification, self-deception and the wish to preserve a comfortable self-image. One is the shape of the decision and the other is the disposition that produced it. Column four then asks how the keys to sound decision-making would have changed the outcome, and this is where the exercise earns its place, so be specific about what a different approach would have required you to do differently at the moment of the decision rather than describing what you have concluded since. Use the course's own vocabulary throughout, because it is what the rubric is written in.