Is Conditioning required for Decisions to be made…

The basic premise is 'does the act of deciding require for habits to be called upon to make the decision?'
That is, do you need to call upon habits in order to make a decision?
Rather than just choosing an act, you get in touch with the habit that would cause such an act.
This would contrast with being entirely in the moment when deciding, without relying on habits.
One way to understand this is to ask yourself to make a decision, then, see if you rely on your habits to truly make that decision...

I think some conditioning does take place when preparing ourselves to make a decision...
When we encounter a situation we set ourselves to the challenge, beyond just 'acting', we set off a number of triggers to prepare...
Also, psychologically speaking all that conscious and unconscious conditioning leads us to act in a particular way for a particular situation, which we must briefly go through each time we use such conditioned habits... this kind of things takes place in NLP, eg. 'future pacing'...
I think we do need to improve on some habits, but sometimes the habit is just a preference, just consider the decision known as a 'no-brainer'. The improvements we make could be considered as conditioning to the habits that need to be progressed.
Anything that we can have direct influence over can have the terms 'habit' or 'conditioning' apply to them in one way or another... and thinking is one of those things...
I think you can appear intelligent without learning as such, some examples are just the plant life, computers and parts of the body which accompany thinking, and enhance thinking but are not controlled by the thinker, just the nature of their body... (although I guess that that is a tangental thing to say)
As to the dogma of the past leading to future decisions, you are right in that you can always find new ways to act, but where there have been little choice in the matter the dogma (or beliefs) of the past, you will be stuck with whats there. The past continuing to produce the same decision time after time, no matter whether beneficial or harmful...
After reading this. 'do you still think conditioning as harmful or frowned upon?' (where all you may be doing evaluating the situation, then preparing for, and triggering the correctly conditioned habits)

You could be reliant on a good conditioning system though... Yeah?...
I believe a moment of short-term conditioning takes place when we make a decision...
You can even condition yourself to trigger yet another conditioning system and so on...
A psychologist may argue that all mental work is either a result of conscious or unconscious conditioning...
I think what you were getting at is that some habits are considered bad habits, ones we've conditioned ourselves to act for, but could well be improved upon... I agree... but the way out of bad conditioning is better conditioning... yeah?