Decision Fatigue

Have you ever wondered why CEOs like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg wear the same or similar T-shirts every day? Do you find yourself eating chocolate at night after superbly controlling your diet through the day? It’s not just because your bodies are tired; your mind is too.

Decision Fatigue is a term coined by Roy Baumeister and it simply states that as people make more decisions, their ability to make good ones diminishes. He suggested that the mind is like a muscle; the more you exercise it, the more energy it depletes. The experiment goes like this: one group had to make a lot of difficult decisions and another had to make easy or almost no decisions. After this, they were given a test to resist tempting snacks or solve difficult problems, and they found that on average, the people that made difficult decisions throughout the day made worse decisions in the test.

A shocking example of this is in the 2011 study of Israeli Parole Judges found that, while in the morning the prisoner had a 65% chance of getting a parole, had a near zero chance if the case was held in the evening. A simple case of Decision Fatigue has been the difference between freedom and prison. It shows how important it is to make big decisions earlier in the day.