Human behavior as automatons → decision making / psychology
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Solutions:
- Plan ahead, don’t work at the seat of your pants
- Take less decisions. Not everything is important most information is useless or redundant. filter out everything you won’t make notes about. Avoid procrastination, energy used up in the wrong direction.
- Eat and sleep
When people get tired decision quality gets noticeably worse – @danziger.etal_2011 (this study has been disputed, but the point still stands)
Also:
This pattern is readily evident in Fig. 1, which plots the proportion of favorable rulings by ordinal position for 95% of the observations in each decision session. The plot shows that the likelihood of a ruling in favor of a prisoner spikes at the beginning of each session
When tired, decision quality decreases, logical, but stil often overlopoked (eg, overtime)
Sources - Decision Fatigue: A Modern Phenomenon?
“Decision fatigue is the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make additional decisions becomes worse.”
— Baumeister & Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (2011)
ISBN: 978-0143122234
Study 1: Judicial Decisions and Fatigue
- Judges were more likely to grant parole earlier in the day.
- Favorable decisions dropped from ~65% to nearly 0% before a break.
Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). “Extraneous factors in judicial decisions.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 108(17), 6889–6892.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1018033108
Study 2: Shopping Choices and Cognitive Load
- Participants asked to make repeated shopping decisions later performed worse on a math task.
- Demonstrates how decision-making depletes mental resources.
Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., et al. (2008). “Making choices impairs subsequent self-control.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(5), 883–898.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.5.883
(Primary) local Sources
Transclude of How-Willpower-Works--Decision-Fatigue-and-How-to-Avoid-Bad-Choices#^time–James Clear Source of this article: @danziger.etal_2011
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. It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational trade-offs in decision making. Decision fatigue may also lead to consumers making poor choices with their purchases. … 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. decision fatigue
Michael Lewis- Obama’s Way - Vanity Fair:
remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”🔗
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research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”🔗
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You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state.🔗
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What doctors wish patients knew about decision fatigue - American Medical Association:
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Fleeting notes
See also: Decision-making - Wikipedia How does DF fall in the overall picture of decision making?
When there are too many options, we tend to feel overwhelmed, anxious, stressed or otherwise out of sorts. This is / leads to decision fatigue, a state of mental overload that can impede our ability to make additional decisions.