In decision making and psychology, decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making. [1] [2] It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational trade-offs in decision making. [2] Decision fatigue may also lead to consumers making poor choices with their purchases.
There is a paradox in that "people who lack choices seem to want them and often will fight for them", yet at the same time, "people find that making many choices can be [psychologically] aversive." [3]
For example, major politicians and businessmen such as former United States President Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg have been known to reduce their everyday clothing down to one or two outfits in order to limit the number of decisions they make in a day. [4]
Decision fatigue is a phrase popularised by John Tierney, and is the tendency for peoples’ decision making to become impaired as a result of having recently taken multiple decisions. [5]
Decision fatigue has been hypothesised to be a symptom, or a result of ego depletion. [6] It differs from mental fatigue which describes the psychobiological state that results from a prolonged duration of demanding cognitive tasks, such as multi-tasking or switching between various tasks. [7]
Some psychologists and economists use the term to describe impairments in decision making resulting specifically from a long duration of having to make decisions. [8] Others view factors such as complexity of the decisions being made, repeated acts of self regulation, [9] physiological fatigue, and sleep deprivation [10] as implicated in the emergence of decision fatigue.
Decision fatigue is thought to be a result of unconscious, psychobiological processes, and is a reaction to sustained cognitive, emotional and decisional load, as opposed to a trait or deficiency. [6] Decision fatigue is an emergent construct [6] that has several possible applications in the fields of healthcare psychology, behavioural economics and healthcare policy.
Behavioural attributes of decision fatigue tend to reflect an underlying state of ego depletion and may symbolise an unconscious method whereby individuals adapt their behaviour to prevent further depletion. Individuals experiencing decision fatigue are more prone to avoidant behaviours, such as procrastination; Sjastad and Baumeister demonstrated that decision fatigued individuals are less willing to engage in planning, and were more avoidant, compared to controls. [11] Decision fatigue may also induce passive behaviours, such as inaction and decision avoidance. [12] Furthermore, individuals experiencing decision fatigue may display less persistence when putting effort into decision making, and thus may be prone to choosing the ‘default’ option. [13] They may also be prone to impulsive, erratic or short-sighted behaviour. [14]
Decision fatigue may also alter cognitive functioning. Some studies suggest that decision fatigue impairs cognitive abilities, especially executive functioning and reasoning abilities. For example Kathleen Vohs and Roy Baumeister found that the more that people had made frequent and deliberate choices, the less able they were to persist on a math task, regardless of how tired they were or how long they spent on the task. [15]
There is evidence to suggest that decision fatigue may impact physiological endurance and self control. This was demonstrated in a series of studies which showed that participants who had made a long series of choices were less able to tolerate a bad-tasting drink, and were less able to tolerate pain, compared to controls. [16] This indicates that decision fatigue impairs physiological as well as cognitive self-control.
Trade-offs, where either of two choices have positive and negative elements, are an advanced and energy-consuming form of decision making. A person who is mentally depleted becomes reluctant to make trade-offs, or makes very poor choices. [1] Jonathan Levav at Stanford University designed experiments showing how decision fatigue can leave a person vulnerable to sales and marketing strategies designed to time the sale. [17] "Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people...can't resist the dealer's offer to rustproof their new car." [18]
Dean Spears of Princeton University has argued that decision fatigue caused by the constant need to make financial trade-offs is a major factor in trapping people in poverty. [19] Given that financial situations force the poor to make so many trade-offs, they are left with less mental energy for other activities. "If a trip to the supermarket induces more decision fatigue in the poor than in the rich – because each purchase requires more mental trade-offs – by the time they reach the cash register, they'll have less willpower left to resist the Mars bars and Skittles. Not for nothing are these items called impulse purchases." [1]
Decision fatigue can lead people to avoid decisions entirely, a phenomenon called "Decision avoidance". [20] [21] [3] In the formal approach to decision quality management, specific techniques have been devised to help managers cope with decision fatigue. [22] Other forms of decision avoidance used to bypass trade-offs and the emotional costs of decision making can include selecting either the default, or status quo options, where these are available. [20]
Decision fatigue can influence irrational impulse purchases at supermarkets. During a trip to the supermarket, trade-off decisions regarding prices and promotions can produce decision fatigue, hence by the time the shopper reaches the cash register, less willpower remains to resist impulse purchases of candy and sugared items. Sweet snacks are usually featured at the cash register because many shoppers have decision fatigue by the time they get there. Florida State University social psychologist Roy Baumeister has also found that it is directly tied to low glucose levels, and that replenishing them restores the ability to make effective decisions. This has been offered as an explanation for why poor shoppers are more likely to eat during their trips. [1]
The "process of choosing may itself drain some of the self's precious resources, thereby leaving the executive function less capable of carrying out its other activities. Decision fatigue can therefore impair self-regulation". [3] "[S]ome degree of failure at self regulation" is at the root of "[m]ost major personal and social problems", such as debt, "underachievement at work and school" and lack of exercise. [23]
Experiments have shown the interrelationship between decision fatigue and ego depletion, whereby a person's ability for self-control against impulses decreases in the face of decision fatigue. [24]
Baumeister and Vohs have suggested that the disastrous failure of men in high office to control impulses in their private lives may at times be attributed to decision fatigue stemming from the burden of day-to-day decision making. [24] Similarly, Tierney notes that "C.F.O.s [are] prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening", after a long day of decision-making. [18]
With regard to self-regulation in legal regulation: One research study found that the decisions judges make are strongly influenced by how long it has been since their last break. "We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break." [25]
Several studies have indicated that decision fatigue can increase reliance on mental shortcuts and biases.
A study by Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso from Columbia Business School showed that the percentage of favourable rulings by judges on parole boards in a prison dropped gradually (from around 65% to almost 0%) within each ‘decision session’ recorded, but would return to around 65% after a break. [26] This suggests that judicial rulings were increasingly determined by biased assumptions as decision fatigue increased.
Another demonstration of the relationship between decision fatigue and increased susceptibility to biased decision making was that of journal editors reviewing manuscripts. This study found that when the number of manuscripts discussed per meeting increased from 10 - 19 to over 20, the rate of rejection increased from 38% to 44%. When the number of manuscripts an editor had to read a day increased from 1-2 to 3 or more, the number of manuscripts rejected without peer review increased by 6%. [27] This indicates that the greater decision fatigue editors experienced (whether alone or working in collaboration), the greater their bias towards rejecting manuscripts emerged.
Decision fatigue increases consumers' reliance on cognitive biases, such as anchoring and framing effects, making them more prone to quick, biased choices under conditions of mental exhaustion.
Individuals experiencing fatigue may experience a greater degree of decisional conflict. Decisional conflict is a state wherein an individual is uncertain about which course of action to take when deciding between various options involves regret, risk or challenge to their values. [28] As decisional fatigue impairs one’s ability to make decisions efficiently, makes one prone to over reliance on heuristics and biases, reduces one’s ability to make trade offs and can even make one avoid making decisions, decisional conflict is likely to arise from decision fatigue.
Decision fatigue might also increase levels of decisional regret. [29] If an individual is aware that their decision making abilities are impaired, or if they are experiencing decisional conflict as a result of decision fatigue, they may anticipate the regret they can experience as a result of post-decisional feedback on the outcomes they didn’t choose. [30] This anticipation of regret may influence decision making, and can further impair the individual's ability to make rational decisions.
This relationship between decisional fatigue, regret and conflict was demonstrated in a recent study that aimed to find the impacts of decision fatigue on nurses working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers concluded that decision fatigue could be a determinant of psychological outcomes among nurses, and clinical outcomes among patients and their family members. [31] Additionally, the decisional conflict and regret that arises from decision fatigue may impact the mental health and the decision making ability of healthcare workers, and those in occupations that demand long decision-making sessions.
Several psychologists have challenged the effects of ego depletion, such as decision fatigue, on multiple grounds. [32] One replication effort including 23 laboratories did not find an ego depletion effect to be significantly different from zero. [33] This indicates that existing evidence may not be sufficient to support the existence of an ego depletion effect. Furthermore, even when an ego depletion effect does replicate, there is substantive heterogeneity in the effect size in the literature and the average effect size is small. [34] As there is little evidence for ego depletion, then the existence of decision fatigue comes into question.
Stanford University Professor of Psychology Carol Dweck found "that while decision fatigue does occur, it primarily affects those who believe that willpower runs out quickly." She states that "people get fatigued or depleted after a taxing task only when they believe that willpower is a limited resource, but not when they believe it's not so limited". She notes that "in some cases, the people who believe that willpower is not so limited actually perform better after a taxing task." [18]
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.
Self-esteem is confidence in one's own worth, abilities, or morals. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs about oneself as well as emotional states, such as triumph, despair, pride, and shame. Smith and Mackie define it by saying "The self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, is the positive or negative evaluations of the self, as in how we feel about it ."
In psychology, decision-making is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rational or irrational. The decision-making process is a reasoning process based on assumptions of values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.
A self-serving bias is any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner. It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors. When individuals reject the validity of negative feedback, focus on their strengths and achievements but overlook their faults and failures, or take more credit for their group's work than they give to other members, they are protecting their self-esteem from threat and injury. These cognitive and perceptual tendencies perpetuate illusions and error, but they also serve the self's need for esteem. For example, a student who attributes earning a good grade on an exam to their own intelligence and preparation but attributes earning a poor grade to the teacher's poor teaching ability or unfair test questions might be exhibiting a self-serving bias. Studies have shown that similar attributions are made in various situations, such as the workplace, interpersonal relationships, sports, and consumer decisions.
Moral Psychology is the study of human thought and behavior in ethical contexts. Historically, the term "moral psychology" was used relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development. This field of study is interdisciplinary between the application of philosophy and psychology. Moral psychology eventually came to refer more broadly to various topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics of the field are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral satisficing, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character, altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotion, affective forecasting, and moral disagreement.
Self-control is an aspect of inhibitory control, one of the core executive functions. Executive functions are cognitive processes that are necessary for regulating one's behavior in order to achieve specific goals. Defined more independently, self-control is the ability to regulate one's emotions, thoughts, and behavior in the face of temptations and impulses. Thought to be like a muscle, acts of self-control expend a limited resource. In the short term, overuse of self-control leads to the depletion of that resource. However, in the long term, the use of self-control can strengthen and improve the ability to control oneself over time.
A hot-cold empathy gap is a cognitive bias in which people underestimate the influences of visceral drives on their own attitudes, preferences, and behaviors. It is a type of empathy gap.
Self-regulation theory (SRT) is a system of conscious, personal management that involves the process of guiding one's own thoughts, behaviors and feelings to reach goals. Self-regulation consists of several stages. In the stages individuals must function as contributors to their own motivation, behavior, and development within a network of reciprocally interacting influences.
Social rejection occurs when an individual is deliberately excluded from a social relationship or social interaction. The topic includes interpersonal rejection, romantic rejection, and familial estrangement. A person can be rejected or shunned by individuals or an entire group of people. Furthermore, rejection can be either active by bullying, teasing, or ridiculing, or passive by ignoring a person, or giving the "silent treatment". The experience of being rejected is subjective for the recipient, and it can be perceived when it is not actually present. The word "ostracism" is also commonly used to denote a process of social exclusion.
Regret is the emotion of wishing one had made a different decision in the past, because the consequences of the decision one did make were unfavorable.
Roy Frederick Baumeister is an American social psychologist who is known for his work on the self, social rejection, belongingness, sexuality and sex differences, self-control, self-esteem, self-defeating behaviors, motivation, aggression, consciousness, and free will.
Ego depletion is the idea that self-control or willpower draws upon conscious mental resources that can be taxed to exhaustion when in constant use with no reprieve. When the energy for mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired, which would be considered a state of ego depletion. In particular, experiencing a state of ego depletion impairs the ability to control oneself later on. A depleting task requiring self-control can have a hindering effect on a subsequent self-control task, even if the tasks are seemingly unrelated. Self-control plays a valuable role in the functioning of the self on both individualistic and interpersonal levels. Ego depletion is therefore a critical topic in experimental psychology, specifically social psychology, because it is a mechanism that contributes to the understanding of the processes of human self-control. There have both been studies to support and to question the validity of ego-depletion as a theory.
Temptation is a desire to engage in short-term urges for enjoyment that threatens long-term goals. In the context of some religions, temptation is the inclination to sin. Temptation also describes the coaxing or inducing a person into committing such an act, by manipulation or otherwise of curiosity, desire or fear of loss something important to a person.
In psychology, impulsivity is a tendency to act on a whim, displaying behavior characterized by little or no forethought, reflection, or consideration of the consequences. Impulsive actions are typically "poorly conceived, prematurely expressed, unduly risky, or inappropriate to the situation that often result in undesirable consequences," which imperil long-term goals and strategies for success. Impulsivity can be classified as a multifactorial construct. A functional variety of impulsivity has also been suggested, which involves action without much forethought in appropriate situations that can and does result in desirable consequences. "When such actions have positive outcomes, they tend not to be seen as signs of impulsivity, but as indicators of boldness, quickness, spontaneity, courageousness, or unconventionality." Thus, the construct of impulsivity includes at least two independent components: first, acting without an appropriate amount of deliberation, which may or may not be functional; and second, choosing short-term gains over long-term ones.
Self-enhancement is a type of motivation that works to make people feel good about themselves and to maintain self-esteem. This motive becomes especially prominent in situations of threat, failure or blows to one's self-esteem. Self-enhancement involves a preference for positive over negative self-views. It is one of the three self-evaluation motives along with self-assessment and self-verification . Self-evaluation motives drive the process of self-regulation, that is, how people control and direct their own actions.
Michael Inzlicht is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto recognized in the areas of social psychology and neuroscience. Although he has published papers on the topics of prejudice, academic performance, and religion, his most recent interests have been in the topics of self-control, where he borrows methods from affective and cognitive neuroscience to understand the underlying nature of self-control, including how it is driven by motivation.
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength is a book about self-control, co-authored by Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University, and New York Times journalist John Tierney. The book outlines Baumeister's research on ego depletion, surveys why people do not have effective self-control and outlines techniques for improving one's self-control.
Neal Roese is a Canadian-American psychologist best known for his research on counterfactual thinking and regret. He holds the SC Johnson Chair in Global Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In over 100 publications, his scholarly research examines basic cognitive processes underlying choice, with a focus on how people think about decision options, make predictions about the future, and revise understandings of the past. Roese is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Researcher degrees of freedom is a concept referring to the inherent flexibility involved in the process of designing and conducting a scientific experiment, and in analyzing its results. The term reflects the fact that researchers can choose between multiple ways of collecting and analyzing data, and these decisions can be made either arbitrarily or because they, unlike other possible choices, produce a positive and statistically significant result. The researcher degrees of freedom has positives such as affording the ability to look at nature from different angles, allowing new discoveries and hypotheses to be generated. However, researcher degrees of freedom can lead to data dredging and other questionable research practices where the different interpretations and analyses are taken for granted Their widespread use represents an inherent methodological limitation in scientific research, and contributes to an inflated rate of false-positive findings. They can also lead to overestimated effect sizes.
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help)