firecat

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? by JOHN TIERNEY

Long article. Summary excerpt:

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.

I'm going to summarize the results of several studies mentioned in the article. I don't know whether they were good studies or whether the results also apply outside the experimental conditions.

Parole boards are more likely to grant parole earlier in the day. (This is an example of the second shortcut described in the excerpt: Do nothing.)
Avoiding temptation (or exercising self-control) causes fatigue and leaves a person less likely to avoid other temptations in the near future or more likely to give up on difficult tasks.
Having to make a series of choices causes the same thing.
Decision-making is more fatiguing than mental effort spent on studying information or following directions.
If you are making a series of complex choices such as configuring a car to purchase, you are more likely to going with whatever is presented as the "default" later in the process. If the first set of choices is especially complex, for example, picking among 50 different suit fabrics for a bespoke suit, you'll start going for defaults sooner.
Choice-making fatigue is worse when you have to consider tradeoffs, such as whether you can afford to purchase a staple at a discount. This means poor people are more likely to be in a state of decision fatigue.
Consuming something sugary mitigates the effects of decision fatigue, whereas experiencing pleasure does not. This is true for dogs as well as humans.
Sugar combats decision fatigue because the activity of the brain changes when it is low on glucose.
Parole boards are more likely to grant parole immediately after a meal.
People spend 3-4 hours a day exercising self-control.
Desires for relaxing and goofing off are harder to resist than other desires.
People do best at decision-making if they understand that decision-making ability fluctuates and gets depleted, and structure their life to avoid making too many decisions and avoid making decisions late in the day.

A lot of nitpicking can be done about this article, especially the way it conflates decision-making and what it calls "avoiding temptation" (which is not well-defined). Overall I think it's getting at something real.

But having read all this, what I don't understand is, if this is true, why are choices seemingly continually increasing? Why are there 50 different suit fabrics if it makes people tired and cranky to decide among them?

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/730905.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cleverthylacine

I'm suspicious of the recent trend in the media to highlight this, because it seems like the more authoritarian and fearful our culture becomes, the more people are interested in this research. None of this information is all that new; what's new is that suddenly people want to pay more attention to this information.

Here's the thing. People are very different, and having a wide variety of options available is a very good thing for that reason. What's not good is the way that this is handled. For instance, if you go to a good tailor, and you tell them how much money you have to spend, and they take a look at your colouring and get a sense of your style, they will not show you 50 fabrics. They will show you 10 or 11 fabrics in your price range that won't make you look like a badly boiled egg. What's confusing is when, in order to make more money, the people whose job it is to advise you are removed from the equation and you're left to look at all 50 fabrics on a monitor screen.

If you watch Say Yes to The Dress, you see that in a bridal salon, there may be 1000s of dresses, but they only show a client about 5 and they get seriously annoyed when the family/friends start pulling out stuff. This isn't because they're big meanies, it's because family/friends are going on how the dress looks, and the bridal salon attendants are considering whether the dress will flatter the client's body shape, whether the colour will flatter the client's skin, what the client's expressed price range is, and whether the dress comes in their size. (There was an issue on that show where the father had pulled out a dress that the bride loved, but it didn't come in size 26, and another one where the mom had pulled out this gorgeous dress that the bride loved, but it cost $10000, that they didn't have, and seeing it just made the bride unhappy with everything she had liked before that she could afford.)

Everyone wants to say that choices are the problem, when the actual problem is:

1) we don't train people to use logic and make choices in school, which increases decision fatigue.

2) we are forever increasing the age of adulthood and lengthening the time we spend parenting and the time that people in privileged classes are allowed to get off scott free for bad behaviour because they're 'kids', which trains people not to make decisions at all and not to make good ones when they do, which increases decision fatigue.

3) advertising and the internet increase decision fatigue by making people aware of "choices" that are not really choices at all. For instance, things that you can't actually afford aren't choices. Things that come in another country may not be choices either. I stupidly overspent on an item from Japan when I could have bought it locally because I wanted the bigger version. If I hadn't known the bigger version existed I'd probably have been happy with the smaller one and spent about $70 less. As it was I agonised over the decision for weeks and am happy with the one I got in large part because of the relief I felt--and this was nothing hugely life altering, it was a Japanese designer bag that I loved.

4) after we spend 18 years teaching you not to make good decisions, not teaching you how to make decisions, and making you aware of everything in the world (and specifically of those items that are created for people who are not you that are markers of their higher status than you, creating a desire for things you don't naturally want or need because they become signifiers of an easier life), we judge you harshly for your decisions, and the less actual power and resources you have, the harsher we judge you, which even increases decision fatigue that much more. (For instance, the fact that people freak out if they see you buy steak with food stamps makes the decision to do so when it's warranted by celebration or whatever that much harder, and makes your other decisions harder as well.)

So what I'm seeing here is that TPTB are seizing upon decision fatigue as a way of making people believe that they didn't actually want to be free, when what's really going on is people are being deprived of good guidance, badly educated, and having everything they really can't have shoved in their face as an ideal to aspire to 24/7.

From:

evilawyer

So what I'm seeing here is that TPTB are seizing upon decision fatigue as a way of making people believe that they didn't actually want to be free, when what's really going on is people are being deprived of good guidance, badly educated, and having everything they really can't have shoved in their face as an ideal to aspire to 24/7.

Confabulate and confound = great way to control the masses.

From:

cleverthylacine

A classic abuser gaslighting tactic is to flood people with bad information, make them so tired that they make bad decisions, then convince them that they are bad decision-makers and need their decisions made for them.

I see a lot of this at work in politics right now.