Do people base their decisions on facts or assumptions?

You're talking about likelihood and probability, and that depends whether the perp can actually control their behavior or not. If someone feels no remorse and doesn't even see that they did anything wrong, then in all likelihood they will repeat the crime because it isn't and wasn't a crime 'to them'.

That raises another very important point. We believe our sources of information if we think our sources are reliable. In this case (and perhaps there's an emotional component to this also), your friend considers her words to be reliable. I sometimes take for granted what is told to me is true just because the person who told me is usually truthful or reliable, only to discover that the person had made a mistake or made an assumption. So the information the person gave me was false. But I'll never forget one incident during my college days. There was an election on campus to elect members of the student council, and there were two main parties, the liberal and conservative parties. On the day of the election, the school newspaper quoted a member of the conservative party, "Vote for our party because we represent white people." As you can imagine, they lost the election because everyone thought they were racist. After the election, the reporter of the school newspaper who wrote that article confessed that he fabricated that story and that no one in the conservative party made that statement. He didn't apologize for doing it. He was not punished by the university for doing it. And he said that when he graduates from college, he wants to become a professional journalist. So how do we know if the information being fed to us by a particular source, is actually true?

I am very skeptical of 'public' sources of information for exactly the example you pointed out. Politicians, newscasters, journalists, the whole lot of them tend to use their overblown reach of the media as ways to feed info to the public which may be OPINIONS and EDITORIAL content rather than FACTS. Yes, this risk is also present with friends, but friends and people I actually know are less likely to purposely mislead me or misrepresent something on purpose just to make a buck, scare me, or convince me to do or not do something. Besides, a friend doesn't gloat over playing someone for a fool but the media sure seems to.

You do raise an important point. I also rely on my own personal experiences to sometimes guide my decision-making. I think most human beings do this out of necessity. For example, if I played with matches as a child and got burned, then I learned from that experience not to play with matches again. But, I also realize that experiences can have a negative impact as well. I remember serving on jury duty and we were trying to decide how much an auto accident victim was entitled to receive in compensation. One juror said "the wimp" should receive nothing. When we asked why, this juror said that when he experienced a serious injury, he just bore it "like a man" without complaint, so this "wimp" should be a man and bear it without complaint also. So I'm curious to find out, how do we evaluate if our experience is leading us to the right decision?

Within a group of people - say on a jury, you have to weigh the decision based on the collective experiences of the members present. There will always be a person who is way outside the norm on either end of the scale, that's just a given, and I think that's why a jury is comprised of 12 people lol. If you're making a decision together with a significant other or a spouse, you weigh that decision taking both persons' feelings and opinions into account. If it's a sole decision, then you just have to be open minded, as well as use your experience as a guide. I believe life is more of an experiment than we realize, and success or 'the right decision' is dependent on making it to the end of your journey with fewer regrets. Personal success and the right choices are not static or absolute values. There are times when I wish we could just cheerfully exclaim 'do over!' if something didn't turn out the way we hoped. Things get complicated when we become adults.

Thanks. People told me that I should have a youthful outlook. So I took their advice and decided to have the mind of a 5-year old;-) But seriously, my co-workers and supervisors tell me I ask too many questions. So that's why I thought this username was appropriate.

That's actually pretty good. Most people I know don't do that. The lawyer who taught the class did say we should take time to gather the facts and get input or feedback from others. So hopefully, this increases your chances at arriving at the truth.

I forgot to mention that this lawyer also taught that in the absence of facts or evidence, one of the things we should do is get the other side of the story because there are always at least two sides to every story. I remember talking to a friend, who was on the verge of divorce, about one conflict that occurred between him and his wife, and got one version of the story. I talked to his wife who is also a friend and got a completely different version of the story. I thought at first that one of them was lying. After further investigation, I discovered both of them were telling the truth. What happened was that each of them omitted portions of the same event, or incident, which they didn't consider important. But once I got the whole picture by getting all the details, both their stories made sense. So you're absolutely right about needing to get both sides of the story. But as I mentioned earlier, we may need to go beyond just getting both sides, and dig further to get at the truth.