Last updated on August 23, 2011
“Decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and CFOs prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.
Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. 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.”
This is from an excellent article by John Tierney in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine.
I think self-control problems constitute one of the most interesting areas of research in the social sciences. I will always remember my introduction to the topic, in Ted O’Donoghue’s graduate behavioral economics class — one of the first taught anywhere — in 2003. The biggest revelation in terms of how to think about self-control problems came when Ted explained that one’s present-day self did not have the same preferences for the future as one’s future self. This was the basis of his widely cited 1999 paper on procrastination with Matt Rabin titled “Doing It Now or Later.”
The bottom line appears to be that humans only have a limited supply of willpower, both at a given point in time and over time.
To see why we have a limited supply of willpower at a given point in time, think about how it is considerably easier to do one thing requiring self-control well than it is to do two such things. This is why we are often advised to tackle our problems one by one — quit smoking, then lose weight — rather than do it all at once — quit smoking and lose weight at the same time.
The excerpt above illustrates why we have a limited supply of willpower over time. But it also works in more insidious ways. Think of how you fill your cart with salmon and green vegetables when you go shopping for groceries on Sunday, but when Wednesday arrives and your colleague asks you if you want to go out for lunch, you ditch your healthful homemade lunch for less healthful cafeteria food.
This also explains why you pack your Netflix queue with the American Film Institute’s top 100 movies, but when Friday rolls around and you’ve had a few glasses of wine at dinner, you decide to watch Office Space on television instead of the Gone with the Wind DVD from Netflix that has been sitting on your coffee table for a few weeks.