> Yet I’m clearly making an error, one that reveals a deeper decision-making bias whose cumulative cost is sizable: Like most people, I conduct relatively few experiments in my personal life, in both small and big things.

I think this is related to learning. Once you've learned a particular task (say, writing a unit test) you don't "relearn" it every time you want to execute the task again. Instead you "reenact" it - it's more automatic and can be done more quickly and with less focus and concentration. Each unit test is unique - but the tooling and concepts that surround it are already there.

Reenacting vs. learning may be one reason behind brand loyalty and habit. It simply takes more mental effort to re-evaluate and re-learn than to coast off a previous decision. It's more work, even if it's something minor like trying a different brand of soda. We can only "spend" so much attention and care during our waking hours.

The value of a habit is that you make a decision once and project it into the future as an automatic response. The notion that these automatic responses are somehow flawed or need to be optimized away, or optimized to produce some economic advantage, is suspect.

What _is_ valuable is understanding that these automatic responses are as much a part of human cognition as our deliberative attention. We should be re-evaluate them periodically and try to understand the effect they have on the trajectory of our lives.