Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain

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1 1 P a g e Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain By On Amir The brain is like a muscle: when it gets depleted, it becomes less effective. The human mind is a remarkable device. Nevertheless, it is not without limits. Recently, a growing body of research has focused on a particular mental limitation, which has to do with our ability to use a mental trait known as executive function. When you focus on a specific task for an extended period of time or choose to eat a salad instead of a piece of cake, you are flexing your executive function muscles. Both thought processes require conscious effort-you have to resist the temptation to let your mind wander or to indulge in the sweet dessert. It turns out, however, that use of executive function a talent we all rely on throughout the day draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain. When this resource is exhausted by one activity, our mental capacity may be severely hindered in another, seemingly unrelated activity. Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security. Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise. Unrelated activities that tax the executive function have important lingering effects, and may disrupt your ability to make such an important decision. In other words, you might choose the wrong job because you didn't eat a cookie. Taxing Tasks But what types of actions exhaust executive function and affect subsequent decision-making? Until recently, researchers focused on activities that involved the exertion of self-control or the regulation of attention. For instance, it's long been recognized that strenuous cognitive tasks such as taking the SAT can make it harder to focus later on. But recent results suggest that these taxing mental activities may be much broader in scope-and may even involve the very common activity of making choices itself. In a series of experiments and field studies, University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and colleagues repeatedly demonstrate that the mere act of making a selection may deplete executive resources. For example, in one study the researchers found that participants who made more choices in a mall were less likely to persist and do well in solving simple algebra problems. In another task in the same study, students who had to mark preferences about the courses they would take to satisfy their degree requirements were much more likely to procrastinate on preparing for an important test. Instead of studying, these "tired" minds engaged in distracting leisure activities.

2 2 P a g e Why is making a determination so taxing? Evidence implicates two important components: commitment and tradeoff resolution. The first is predicated on the notion that committing to a given course requires switching from a state of deliberation to one of implementation. In other words, you have to make a transition from thinking about options to actually following through on a decision. This switch, according to Vohs, requires executive resources. In a parallel investigation, Yale University professor Nathan Novemsky and his colleagues suggest that the mere act of resolving tradeoffs may be depleting. For example, in one study, the scientists show that people who had to rate the attractiveness of different options were much less depleted than those who had to actually make choices between the very same options. Choosy about Choices These findings have important real world implications. If making choices depletes executive resources, then "downstream" decisions might be affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a fatigued brain. Indeed, University of Maryland psychologist Anastasiya Pocheptsova and colleagues found exactly this effect: individuals who had to regulate their attention which requires executive control made significantly different choices than people who did not. These different choices follow a very specific pattern: they become reliant on more a more simplistic, and often inferior, thought process, and can thus fall prey to perceptual decoys. For example, in one experiment participants who were asked to ignore interesting subtitles in an otherwise boring film clip were much more likely to choose an option that stood next to a clearly inferior "decoy" an option that was similar to one of the good choices, but was obviously not quite as good than participants who watched the same clip but were not asked to ignore anything. Presumably, trying to control one's attention and to ignore an interesting cue exhausted the limited resource of the executive functions, making it significantly more difficult to ignore the existence of the otherwise irrelevant inferior decoy. Subjects with overtaxed brains made worse decisions. These experimental insights suggest that the brain works like a muscle: when depleted, it becomes less effective. Furthermore, we should take this knowledge into account when making decisions. If we've just spent lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even if we've just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably shouldn't try to make a major decision. These deleterious carryover effects from a tired brain may have a strong shaping effect on our lives.

3 3 P a g e How to Make the Right Choice By Dustin Wax Which job should you take? What car should you buy? Should you ask him to marry you? Are you ready for another baby? Is this house right for you, or should you keep looking before you make an offer? Life is full of hard choices, and the bigger they are and the more options we have, the harder they get. As it happens, our brains are fairly binary. They can react very quickly when presented with two options, especially when one s clearly better. Stand here and drown in the rising waters or jump onto that big rock and be safe? Easy choice. When presented with more options, though, we choke up. Jump onto the rock or climb the tree? We don t know which is clearly better, and research shows that most people will not choose at all when presented with several equally good options. Practice, experience, and rules of thumbs can help us to make those split-second decisions (for example, When in doubt, go left has done pretty well for me so far). Fortunately we don t normally face immediate, do-or-die decisions we usually have the luxury of working through a decision. Getting Past Pros and Cons The old chestnut of decision-making is the list of pros and cons. You make two columns on a piece of paper and write down all the positive things that will come of making a choice in one column and all the negative things in the other. In the end, the side with the most entries wins. But this strategy doesn t take into account the different weight that each positive or negative might have. If one of your pros is will make a million dollars and one of your cons is might get a hangnail, they don t exactly cancel each other out. Some people counter this problem by assigning point values to each item in their list. A huge income might be worth +20 points, while a tiny risk might be only 1. This helps make a more realistic assessment of your options. But pros and cons aren t always apparent or obvious, and the whole list-making process doesn t sit well with many people especially impulsive, seat-of-the-pants who might feel unnaturally hampered by the formality of the pro and con list.

4 4 P a g e Here are some other strategies for making big decisions. Not all of them will work for every person or for every decision, but they all have something to offer to help you clarify your thinking and avoid decision paralysis while the water rises around you. Analyze outcomes Working through a big decision can give us a kind of tunnel vision, where we get so focused on the immediate consequences of the decision at hand that we don t think about the eventual outcomes we expect or desire. When making a choice, then, it pays to take some time to consider the outcome you expect. Consider each option and ask the following questions: What is the probable outcome of this choice? What outcomes are highly unlikely? What are the likely outcomes of not choosing this one? What would be the outcome of doing the exact opposite? Thinking in terms of long-term outcomes and broadening your thinking to include negative outcomes can help you find clarity and direction while facing your big decision. Ask why five times The Five Whys are a problem-solving technique invented by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. When something goes wrong, you ask why? five times. By asking why something failed, over and over, you eventually get to the root cause. Why did my car break down? A spark plug failed. Why? It was fouled. Why? I didn t get a tune-up. Why? I was too busy playing GTA4. Why? Because I m miserable and lonely and the people in the game are the only ones that really love me. See? Your car broke down because you re a sociopath. Although developed as a problem-solving technique, the Five Whys can also help you determine whether a choice you re considering is in line with your core values. For instance: Why should I take this job? It pays well and offers me a chance to grow. Why is that important? Because I want to build a career and not just have a string of meaningless jobs. Why? Because I want my life to have meaning. Why? So I can be happy. Why? Because that s what s important in life.

5 5 P a g e Notice that you sometimes have to change how you ask why to keep the questions focused inward rather than outward to irrelevant external factors. It wouldn t do any good to ask Why does this job pay well and offer me a chance to grow since the important thing is that it does, not why it does. Follow your instincts Research shows that people who make decisions quickly, even when lacking information, tend to be more satisfied with their decisions than people who research and carefully weight their options. Some of this difference is simply in the lower level of stress the decision created, but much of it comes from the very way our brains work. The conscious mind can only hold between 5 and 9 distinct thoughts at any given mind. That means that any complex problem with more than (on average) 7 factors is going to overflow the conscious mind s ability to function effectively leading to poor choices. Our unconscious, however, is much better at juggling and working through complex problems. People who go with their gut are actually trusting the work their unconscious mind has already done, rather than second-guessing it and relying on their conscious mind s much more limited ability to deal with complex situations. The Choice is Yours Whatever process you use to arrive at your decision, your satisfaction with your decision will depend largely on whether you claim ownership of your choices. If you feel pressured into a choice or not in control of the conditions, you ll find even positive outcomes colored negatively. On the other hand, taking full responsibility for your choices can make even failure feel like a success you ll know you did your best and you ll have gained valuable experience for nest time.