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

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redbird

The study, if it's valid, helps make sense of something in my life: I tend to eat most of my vegetables early in the day, in the form of salads for lunch and the like. This is deliberate, and partly situational (a handy salad bar near work, and the desire for more variety than I can easily manage at home without wasting vegetables). But if resisting temptation uses energy, and even a woman who likes salad is sometimes tempted by a pizza or a brisket sandwich, I'm more likely to go for the salad at noon and the pizza at 9 p.m.

The driver for that array of choices isn't just people who want to be able to choose from lots of different things, because it feels like having more stuff. A chunk of it is that different people want different things, and the market can be additive: I go through catalogs looking for purple shirts, for example. Someone else wants a particular shade of green. The next person wants a blue or red shirt with buttons and a chest pocket. That can produce a page that shows a shirt in 17 different shades: and if I'm lucky the one purple one is a shade I like. But I can quickly say yes or no, because it either does or doesn't come in purple. The person who thinks "that's a nice style, what color should I get?" probably has to spend more time on it.

To some extent, I deal with this by trying to make patterns and treat things as solved problems. The last time I went to Boston, the train was called over the PA system and I moved toward the gate. The person next to me asked if that was the Boston train, because she hadn't heard them clearly, and I realized that what I had heard was the train number, not the destination. I didn't decide to make a note of my train number: but the 1:00 train from New York to Boston always has the same number, and after a while it stuck in my brain.

Lots of people do this sort of thing, though they may not think of it in those terms. At one of the places I get breakfast on my way to work, I sometimes have to interrupt the guy and say "no, egg roll" because he remembers that I usually get a bialy. Most people get one thing every morning; many of them also always get breakfast in the same place (that includes the large number who make their own breakfast at home, of course).
And even there, many people get the same breakfast every morning, but to satisfy his customers the guy with the cart has a few kinds of bagels, several other sorts of roll, and a variety of different donuts and Danishes.