Impulsive? Indecisive? You May Have “Decision Fatigue”

Mornings are way better for making important decisions — research into “decision fatigue” shows that impulsiveness and inertia take over after we’ve made too many choices in a day.

Reading Time: 2 min 

Topics

Researchers who analyzed more than 1,100 decisions by a parole board found this startling statistic: “Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.”

That stat opens a long and engaging piece by John Tierney in the August 21 New York Times Magazine on what he calls “decision fatigue”:

The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor.

Too many decisions leaves our brains tired, writes author John Tierney.

Image courtesy of Flickr user abardwell.

In “Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?” Tierney lays out the current thinking.

It goes like this: As the day wears on, and choices keep coming at you, “the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways.”

The first shortcut our brain takes: impulsiveness. Acting without fully putting the energy into thinking about consequences.

The second shortcut: inertia. As Tierney puts it, “instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.”

Decision fatigue, he notes, has implications for customer relationships. Consumers can be manipulated to give in to recommendations if presented with a long series of options. Consider this experiment Tierney relates, when customers were given the opportunity to order options for their new cars at German car dealerships:

The car buyers — and these were real customers spending their own money — had to choose, for instance, among 4 styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colors for the interior.

As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was.

Topics

More Like This

Add a comment

You must to post a comment.

First time here? Sign up for a free account: Comment on articles and get access to many more articles.

Comments (3)
Do You Have Decision Fatigue?
[...] Krantcents · 0 comments    Do you have decision fatigue?  What is that?  In MIT Sloan Management Review, I learned that parole boards approved paroles 70% of the time in the morning versus 10% of the [...]
Link Resource # 23: Sept 04–Sept 07 « Dactylonomy of Web Resource
[...] Impulsive? Indecisive? You May Have "Decision Fatigue" [...]
Mike Stapenhurst
Totally agree with this article! As an IT project manager in a very large organization I was faced with many decisions on a daily basis. Once I learned to handle only the top two or three, and sleep on the rest things became easier to handle. Not only that - I think I made better choices as well.