Willpower depletion

On: Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

By JOHN TIERNEY

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.

Case 3 heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.

The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.

There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. 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. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.

Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

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And… what would God do?

As a read through this fascinating article, I wondered how the study of religion could contribute to this discussion. I had to think about this because I was in the middle of teaching a course on the Semitic religions. Specifically, when reading this article, we just finished discussing the definitions and functions of prayers.

In Islam, as well as in Christianity and Judaism I presume, there is a common practice, a special prayer performed by the adherents when they are faced with a number of options with little variance. Let’s say a student, graduating on top of her class, applies for work. Three top companies offer her a job. They are all three great employers, located in great cities, and offered her similar compensation packages. It turns out that a religious person, faced with these options, would perform special prayers, asking God to direct her to the “right” option. Generally, she would perform the prayers and then sit back and wait for a sign. This sign could manifest itself in many forms. It could be a gut feeling that she would experience, the name of one of the three companies being featured in the front page of the newspaper that she pick up the first thing in the morning, or a dream. In all cases, the adherent removes the anxieties of decision making by passing the responsibility of deciding to a higher authority.

Since the article referred to former president Bush, the “Decider,” we should be reminded of another common connection: the “Decider” decided on the War in Iraq through the process that we just described. He claimed that God instructed him to invade Iraq; it was the right thing to do! So the willpower depletion is not limited to food choices and color options. Indeed, it touches on all aspects of human behavior. The religious angle just adds another dimension to this already compelling theme.

Neuroscientists have already started thinking and examining the religious mind. Through the aid of fMRI, these scientists are able to map the brain and determine which region is responsible for what religious activities. Perhaps these scientific explorations of decision making processes and the role of religion could be applied to further explore the workings of the mind; and importantly, explain why we get mentally lazy… I mean depleted.