When you are handed exactly two choices, stop and generate at least one more before choosing, including doing nothing, doing both, doing part, doing it later, or pursuing the underlying goal in a different way.

How to do it

1. 1Hear "either A or B" as a claim to be checked, not as a description of reality. Ask: are these really exhaustive? Are they really exclusive?
2. 2Run a quick list of standard alternatives: neither; both; some of each; not yet; a smaller trial first; the same goal by another route; asking someone else; changing a constraint that both options assume.
3. 3Ask what the choice is for. Options are means; once the end is stated ("we need to cut costs by ten percent"), other means usually appear.
4. 4Ask who framed the choice and what they gain from each of the offered options. In sales, both options are frequently ones the seller is happy with ("the standard or the premium?").
5. 5If you have a minute, use it on the vanishing-options test: suppose neither A nor B were available. What would you do then?
6. 6When a real either-or remains after this, choose. The aim is to make sure you are choosing from the real menu, not to avoid choosing.

When to use it

• •A proposal is framed as "either we do this or disaster follows".
• •A salesperson or negotiator offers two packages and asks which you prefer.
• •A political or moral question is presented as a choice between two camps.
• •You are framing a decision for yourself as "whether or not" to do one thing.

Counters

Evidence and how strong it is

People tend to evaluate the options in front of them and seldom notice what has been left out. Fischhoff, Slovic and Lichtenstein (1978) showed that when whole branches were removed from a list of possible causes of a problem, even experts barely registered the omission and did not shift enough probability to "other". In organizational decisions, Nutt's (1999) study of several hundred strategic decisions found that managers who considered only one course of action, a "whether or not" choice, had markedly higher failure rates than those who developed multiple alternatives. Work on opportunity-cost neglect found that merely reminding consumers that not buying leaves money for something else changes choices (Frederick et al. 2009), which shows how rarely the unstated option is considered spontaneously. In logic, the false dilemma is a standard fallacy whose remedy is to find the omitted alternative or to show that both horns can be true (Walton 2008). Evidence strength: good experimental and observational support for the problem and for the value of generating alternatives; the specific conversational habit is untested practitioner advice.

1. Fischhoff, B., Slovic, P., & Lichtenstein, S. (1978). Fault trees: Sensitivity of estimated failure probabilities to problem representation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 4(2), 330-344
   Evidence that people, including experts, fail to notice options omitted from a presented list.
2. Nutt, P. C. (1999). Surprising but true: Half the decisions in organizations fail. Academy of Management Executive, 13(4), 75-90
   Observational evidence that decisions framed around a single alternative failed more often than those in which several alternatives were developed.
3. Frederick, S., Novemsky, N., Wang, J., Dhar, R., & Nowlis, S. (2009). Opportunity cost neglect. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(4), 553-561
   Experiments showing that people rarely consider unstated alternatives unless prompted, and that a simple reminder changes choices.
4. Walton, D. (2008). Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press
   The logical analysis of the false dilemma and the responses of finding an omitted alternative or denying that the options are exclusive.