Decisiveness and Decision-Making

How are you at making decisions? Quick?  Slow?  Or do you procrastinate making a decision?  Do you see-saw back and forth, unsure of what to decide?  Decisiveness is the ability to make clear-cut and timely decisions with the appropriate amount of information.  And decision-making is the ability to efficiently and thoughtfully select one option among different choices.   This is a critically important skill for most jobs.  But not everyone is good at making decisions.  This cognitive ability is one of a dozen or so Executive Functions of the human mind.  For some, it comes easier than for others.  Why is that? Research shows that the brain works like a muscle.  It is strongest when it is rested and well fed.  But, when depleted, it becomes less effective.  This is true of many cognitive functions, but especially focus and decision making.  This should be taken into consideration when making decisions.

Becoming a Better Decision-Maker

The process of making decisions is one in which one identifies a decision to be made, gathers information, and assesses alternative resolutions. Using a step-by-step decision-making process can help with making more deliberate, thoughtful decisions by organizing relevant information and de­fining alternatives. This approach increases the chances that you will choose the most satisfying alternative possible.  Here are seven simple steps to flex your decision-making muscle:

Step 1: Identify the decision to be made. Try to clearly defi­ne the nature of the decision. This ­first step is very important.

Step 2: Gather relevant information about the issue.  Collect pertinent information before making the decision.  Determine what information is needed, the best sources for information, and how to get it. This step involves both internal and external homework.  Some information is obtained through a process of self-assessment. Other information is found online, in books, from other people, and other sources.

Step 3: Identify alternatives.  In collecting information, identify several possible paths of action, or alternatives.  Use imagination and additional information to construct new alternatives.  List all possible and desirable alternatives.

Step 4: Weigh the evidence.  Draw on information and emotions to imagine what it would be like if each option was carried out to the end. Evaluate whether the need identifi­ed would be met or resolved through the use of each alternative.  This is a difficult internal process.  But in going through the choices to their culmination, some options that seem to have a higher potential for reaching the goal will become more favorable.  Prioritize the options in order, based upon a value system.

Step 5: Choose.  Having weighed all the evidence, select the alternative that seems best for you. Or choose a combination of options.

Step 6: Act.  Begin to implement the choice made in Step 5.

Step 7: Review the decision made and its consequences.  Consider the results of the decision and evaluate whether or not it has resolved the need identifi­ed in Step 1.  If the decision made has not met the identifi­ed need, repeat certain steps of the process to make a new decision. For example, you might want to gather more detailed or somewhat different information or explore additional alternatives.

Decision Fatigue

While these steps help strengthen the decision-making muscle, there is more to effective decision making than just practicing.  After all, while the human mind is an incredible and powerful tool, it has its limits.  One of these limits has to do with decision-making, which is one of the mind’s many Executive Functions.  The limit has to do with the volume of decision-making done in a day.   It turns out that use of this particular executive function — a talent we all rely on throughout the day — pulls from a single source in the brain, and it has a limited capacity. When this resource is exhausted by one activity, our mental bandwidth becomes severely hampered for other activities even if they are unrelated.

Case in point.  A business owner is facing a very difficult decision about whether to purchase a small office building that can accommodate his existing company in a very nice neighborhood, or purchase a much larger building that will allow his business to grow for years but that is more expensive because it is twice the size and yet is in a less desirable neighborhood.  Clearly, the business can go about deciding this issue in many ways. Few people, however, would say that the decision is affected or influenced by whether or not the business owner had gotten enough sleep the night before having to make this decision.  Or if the business owner had just quit smoking and was fighting the urge to smoke prior to contemplating the two property’s features.  However, a decade of psychology research suggests that there are a lot of factors that affect the brain’s ability to make decisions.  Unrelated activities that tax the executive function have important lingering effects, and can disrupt anyone’s ability to make an important decision. In other words, the business owner might buy the wrong property just because he was trying to kick a nicotine habit or just hadn’t gotten enough sleep or any myriad of other things that might exhaust his cognitive abilities.

Taxing the Ability to Make Decisions

So what kinds of things tax one’s decision-making ability?  Until recently, researchers focused on activities that involved the exertion of self-control or the regulation of attention. Case in point.  It’s well established that strenuous cognitive tasks, such as taking the CPA or Bar exam, can make it harder to focus later that day. But recent results suggests that these taxing mental activities may be much broader in scope-and may even deplete the very common activity of making choices.

University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and colleagues conducted a series of experiments and field studies repeatedly to demonstrate that the mere act of making a selection depletes executive resources.  For example, they found that participants in one study who made more choices in a mall were less likely to persist and do well in solving simple algebra problems. In another study, students who had to mark preferences about the courses they would take to complete their degree requirements were much more likely to procrastinate on preparing for an important test. Because their minds were tired, they engaged in distracting leisure activities instead of studying.

The Effort Involved in Making Decisions

Why is making decisions so mentally depleting? Evidence implicates two important components: commitment and tradeoff resolution.  Commitment is predicated on the notion that committing to a given path or choice requires switching from a state of deliberation to one of implementation.  There is a transition that must be made of going from thinking about options to actually following through on a decision.  According to Vohs, this switch consumes executive resources. A related study by Yale University professor Nathan Novemsky and his colleagues found that the mere act of resolving tradeoffs is depleting. In one study, researchers found 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.  It’s the difference between having an opinion and having to own that opinion.

While this may seem silly and pointless, the facts about decision-making have important real world implications.  If making choices depletes one’s mental bandwidth for making additional decisions, then “downstream” decisions – those made later in the day – are likely to be adversely affected when forced to make a decision while having decision fatigue.

University of Maryland psychologist Anastasiya Pocheptsova and colleagues found this to be true.  People who had to regulate their attention — which requires executive control — made significantly different choices than those who did not. These different choices follow a very specific pattern.  Individuals became reliant on more a more simplistic, and often inferior, thought process, and were prey to perceptual decoys.   For instance, in one study, 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 the person’s attention and to ignore an interesting cue exhausted the limited resource of the executive functions, making it significantly harder to ignore the existence of the otherwise irrelevant inferior decoy.  What does that mean?  Simply that people with overtaxed brains made worse decisions.

If a lot of time is spent on a task that requires exercising self-control or even making many seemingly minor choices, then it is probably wise not to make a major decision. The carryover effect from a tired brain can strongly shape our lives

Quote of the Week
“It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”
Tony Robbins

© 2022, Keren Peters-Atkinson. All rights reserved.