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Boards spend significant time reviewing organizational decisions. They examine capital allocation, AI, transformation priorities, risk appetite, succession, cyber exposure, regulatory matters and major strategic trade-offs. What they may see less clearly is the conditions under which those decisions are being made. Decision fatigue is often treated as a personal productivity issue: too many meetings, emails and approvals and too little time to think. That is real but incomplete. In complex organizations, decision fatigue is becoming a governance risk………Continue reading…
Source: Forbes
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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.
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.” 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 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. Decision fatigue has been hypothesised to be a symptom, or a result of ego depletion. 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.
Some psychologists and economists use the term to describe impairments in decision making resulting specifically from a long duration of having to make decisions. Others view factors such as complexity of the decisions being made, repeated acts of self regulation, physiological fatigue, and sleep deprivation 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. Decision fatigue is an emergent construct that has several possible applications in the fields of healthcare psychology.
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.
Decision fatigue may also induce passive behaviours, such as inaction and decision avoidance. 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. They may also be prone to impulsive, erratic or short-sighted behaviour. 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. 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. 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. 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.”Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people…can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car.”
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. 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.
Decision fatigue can lead people to avoid decisions entirely, a phenomenon called “decision avoidance”. In the formal approach to decision quality management, specific techniques have been devised to help managers cope with decision fatigue. 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.
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