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Summer Reading List 2021: Five Books that Changed my Mind

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Career Development, Coaching Practice, Creative Thinking, Intuition, Leadership, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

This past year gave me a fair amount of time to read and listen to audiobooks. Here are five books I found truly impactful, in that they managed to change some of my fundamental previous assumptions and opinions.

Steven Pinker (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Steven Pinker presents a passionate and persuasive defense of reason, science and progress. He shows with an abundance of data how a commitment to humanitarian values has kept winning – in the long run – dramatically and consistently over the destruction and chaos that would be the easier and more natural course. It is an uplifting as well as urgent perspective that challenges lazy dogmas from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

To get a first impression and hear his own voice, here’s Steven Pinker in an interview with Shankar Vedantam on the “Hidden Brain” podcast:

Beyond Doomscrolling

Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, & Ola Rosling (2018).  Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. 

You may know Hans Rosling from his classic and widely shared 2006 TED talk:

This book offers explanations of why people – including highly educated people – are shockingly and systematically wrong about global trends and facts. Our instincts dramatically distort our perspective: from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them; e.g., poor vs rich etc) to the way we consume media (where fear rules), to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).

The two books above share a similar perspective, but they are different enough (and counterintuitive enough!) that I found it very worthwhile to read both. In fact, I suspect I should read them both again in the near future, lest I forget.

Malcolm Gladwell (2019). Talking to Strangers. 

I’ve often found Malcolm Gladwells’s books worth reading, but hard to summarize. This one is no exception. If I had to summarize my take-home, it would be: “stop assuming”. I might be very wrong about other people, no matter how great I think my intuition is. (This past year I’ve listen to both “Talking to Strangers” and his older “David and Goliath” as audiobooks in short succession, and found them both similarly entertaining, informative, relevant for race politics, and thought-provoking, but only half satisfying.)

Sharna Fabiano (2021). Lead and Follow. 

Much has been written about leadership, but very little about followership in organizations (in fact, my spellchecker doesn’t even recognize “followership” as a word). As an internationally recognized dance artist and teacher, Sharna Fabiano has a deep understanding of the complementary nature of those roles in Argentine tango.

In her words: “To a dancer, improvisation does not mean “winging it” or making it up as you go along. Rather, it implies a highly refined system of communication built through specific methods of training. Improvisation for dancers is a synergy between leading and following actions that is greater than the sum of its parts. We already know a lot about leading at work, but not many of us understand how to follow with intelligence, power, and grace, as dancers do. It’s time we learned.”

Sharna Fabiano presents a coaching model that helps us think about those roles and the skills they require through three phases of increasing sophistication: 1. Connection, 2. Collaboration, and 3. Co-creation. It’s a very practical and well written book. As a reader, you don’t need to know anything about tango to understand the metaphors and their applicability to specific challenges in the workplace.

Steve Dalton (2020). The 2-Hour Job Search. 

What I liked least about this book was its title. I took me a while to figure out what exactly the two hours refer to, and I found the best explanation – and indeed the best book summary – here. The book’s focus is on how to get you interviews as efficiently and quickly as possible, without all the emotional investment that comes with a lot of other career advice. One reason I’ve already recommended it to several clients is that it has very useful templates and easy-to-follow guidelines for requesting and conducting informational interviews.

Steven Dalton’ approach circumvents the online job application process altogether. His approach takes into account the fact that many smaller companies never post their jobs online at all (and did you know that almost 99% of US employers have fewer than 100 employees?*), as well as that the odds for online applications are quite terrible, especially for people without very clearly defined and sought-after skills.

* According to 2016 data from the Census Bureau, firms with fewer than 500 workers accounted for 99.7 percent of businesses, and firms with fewer than 100 workers accounted for 98.2 percent.

Ursina reading an entirely different book from the ones on her Summer Reading List

What have you all read or listened to recently? As always, please let me know your favorites! Contrary to what this post might suggest, I also enjoy fiction, escapism, and otherwise simply pleasurable entertainment. Would love to hear your recommendations!

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


The Role of the Brand on Choice Overload

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I’m excited to share the publication of a new research paper from a collaboration with my colleagues Raffaella Misuraca, Francesco Ceresia, and Palmira Faraci in the journal “Mind and Society”:

Misuraca, R., Ceresia, F. Teuscher, U., & Faraci, P. (2019). The Role of the Brand on Choice Overload. Mind and Society. 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-019-00210-7

[Full text available on request.]

Research Paper: The Role of the Brand on Choice Overload

ABSTRACT:
Current research on choice overload has been mainly conducted with choice options not associated with specific brands. This study investigates whether the presence of brand names in the choice set affects the occurrence of choice overload. Across four studies, we find that when choosing among an overabundance of alternatives, participants express more positive feelings (i.e., higher satisfaction/confidence, lower regret and difficulty) when all the options of the choice set are associated with familiar brands, rather than unfamiliar brands or no brand at all. We also find that choice overload only appears in the absence of brand names, but disappears when all options contain brand names—either familiar or unfamiliar. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

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Decision Skills Matter

Posted on by by Posted in Financial Decisions, Health Decisions, Intuition, Risk and Uncertainty

To what extent do decision skills matter in real live? Do these skills actually lead to better decision outcomes and fewer unpleasant life events?
Decision Skills Matter
Or, more specifically: do people who perform better on hypothetical decision tasks also make better real-world decisions, to the extent that they experience better outcomes over the course of their lives?

Let’s take a step back. Based on all the different theories of what counts as a “rational” choice, we know that some people perform better in the kinds of choices that are typically presented in research studies. There are people, for example, who are less affected than others by the way information is presented to them (in other words, they are better able to resist framing effects). Or, while most people are overconfident most of the time, some people actually have a pretty accurate level of confidence into their own judgments. There are also people who are better able to abandon a bad plan that involves sunk costs, while others are more prone to keep throwing good money after bad. We also know that these decision skills are related to other cognitive abilities, and that they can be taught and improved with explicit instructions and practice. (Check out the list of references below for just a sample from a large body of research.)

The question is though: do people who perform better on those sorts of tasks also make better real-world decisions? And most importantly, can those better decisions be measured by better outcomes? Are “skillful” decision-makers, as defined by those measures, perhaps better able to avoid bad life events?

Apparently, the answer is a robust YES, across different ways of measuring the quality of decisions and the quality of decision outcomes.

For example, in one study, the researchers gave people hypothetical tasks to measure their decision skills. The test they used is called A-DMC, for Adult Decision Making Competence, and it measures skills such as resistance to framing effects, ability to disregard sunk costs, over- and under-confidence, or the ability to process complex information in a decision.

The researchers then asked people about a variety of stressful life events that could result from poorly made decisions. The events ranged from serious (declaring bankruptcy, being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes) to minor (getting blisters from sunburn, throwing out groceries you bought because they went bad). Other examples of stressful life events included missing a flight, getting kicked out of a bar, having your driver’s license revoked, or having spent a night in a jail cell.

It turned out that people who performed better in hypothetical decision tasks (as seen in high A-DMC scores) were indeed less likely to have experienced such negative life events.

Other research has also linked performance on decision-making competence tasks to better real-life outcomes, such as fewer suspensions among students.

It is important to note that not everyone is dealt the same hand when it comes to avoiding stressful life events. For example, people from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds are exposed to more negative life events. Also, poor decision outcomes are more common among younger people. However, the relationship between decision-making competence and better decision outcomes was still significant even after the researchers controlled their analysis for socio-economic status and age.

Granted, even the soundest decision-making processes cannot guarantee good outcomes. Given all the uncertainties in life, unpleasant surprises are often inevitable, even to skilled decision makers. However, what these studies confirm is that across time, people, and decisions, good decision processes predict good decision outcomes on average.

After knowing this, it bears repeating: decision-making competence can be taught and improved. Several independent research groups across different countries, using different types of interventions at schools, have shown clear improvements in decision skills as a result of targeted decision education.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

Selected References:
Blais, A.-R., Thompson, M. M., & Baranski, J. V. (2005). Individual differences in decision processing and confidence judgments in comparative judgment tasks: The role of cognitive styles. Personality and Individual Differences, 38(7), 1701–1713.
Brady, S. S., & Matthews, K. A. (2002). The influence of socioeconomic status and ethnicity on adolescents’ exposure to stressful life events. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 27(7), 575–583.
Bruine de Bruin, W., Parker, A. M., & Fischhoff, B. (2007). Individual differences in adult decision-making competence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(5), 938–956.
Del Missier, F., Mäntylä, T., Hansson, P., Bruine de Bruin, W., Parker, A. M., & Nilsson, L.-G. (2013). The multifold relationship between memory and decision making: An individual-differences study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39(5), 1344–1364.
Jacobson, D., Parker, A., Spetzler, C., Bruine de Bruin, W., Hollenbeck, K., Heckerman, D., & Fischhoff, B. (2012). Improved learning in U.S. history and decision competence with decision-focused curriculum. PloS One, 7(9), e45775.
Levin, I. P., Gaeth, G. J., Schreiber, J., & Lauriola, M. (2002). A New Look at Framing Effects: Distribution of Effect Sizes, Individual Differences, and Independence of Types of Effects. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 88(1), 411–429.
Lui, V. W. C., Lam, L. C. W., Luk, D. N. Y., Chiu, H. F. K., & Appelbaum, P. S. (2010). Neuropsychological performance predicts decision-making abilities in Chinese older persons with mild or very mild dementia. East Asian Archives of Psychiatry, 20(3), 116–122.
Marin, L. M., & Halpern, D. F. (2011). Pedagogy for developing critical thinking in adolescents: Explicit instruction produces greatest gains. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 6(1), 1–13.
Parker, A. M., Bruine de Bruin, W., & Fischhoff, B. (2015). Negative decision outcomes are more common among people with lower decision-making competence: an item-level analysis of the Decision Outcome Inventory (DOI). Cognition, 6, 363.
Parker, A. M., de Bruin, W. B., & Fischhoff, B. (2007). Maximizers versus satisficers: Decision-making styles, competence, and outcomes. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(6), 342–350.
Reyna, V. F., & Farley, F. (2006). Risk and Rationality in Adolescent Decision Making Implications for Theory, Practice, and Public Policy. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 7(1), 1–44.
Stanovich, K. E. (1999). Who Is Rational?: Studies of Individual Differences in Reasoning. Psychology Press.
Stanovich, K. E., Grunewald, M., & West, R. F. (2003). Cost–benefit reasoning in students with multiple secondary school suspensions. Personality and Individual Differences, 35(5), 1061–1072.
Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2008). On the relative independence of thinking biases and cognitive ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(4), 672–695.
Teuscher, U. (2003). Evaluation of a Decision Training Program for Vocational Guidance. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 3(3), 177–192.

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Age Differences in Decision Making Skills

Posted on by by Posted in Intuition, Risk and Uncertainty

A recent study confirms it again: older adults do well with decisions that require emotional skills.

Old age affects our decision-making skills in quite complex ways. Some cognitive skills decline with age, while emotional skills may even improve. This leads to interesting findings: older people do worse on some decision tasks, but they do just as well as younger adults on those same tasks when they get to experience them, rather than read instructions. This recent study, for example, used two ways to present gambling tasks. In the “description-based” task, people received information about different card decks: the probability of winning or losing, and the amount of money that could be won or lost with each card drawn from that particular deck. In the “experience-based” task they received none of that information – they were simply given four card decks, from which they had to start picking cards and figure out over time which card decks were more advantageous than others. In other words, people got to experience wins and losses over time and build an “intuition” as to which gambles are worth playing, and which are worth avoiding, without ever knowing the underlying probabilities for sure. (The researchers used the famous Iowa Gambling Task – which, I just discovered, you can get as a free iPad app).

Age differences in decision making skills
While older adults (aged 64-90) managed to win less money overall in the description based task, they did just as well as younger adults (aged 18-32) in the experience-based task.

This is in line with the idea that our decision-making skills rely on two systems:

  1. The affective or experiential mode, which is fast, automatic, intuitive, and builds from our experiences in similar situations.
  2. The deliberative mode, which is is effortful, conscious, analytical, logical, relatively slow, controlled, limited by our working memory capacity, and therefore linked to general intelligence.

As we get older, it is normal for our working memory capacity to decline, in particular the speed with which we can juggle information, and therefore it is not surprising that our deliberative decision-making skills also suffer. However, our affective or experiential abilities seem to remain intact into old age.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Selected References:
Bechara, A., Damasio, A. R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S. W. (1995). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. In J. Mehler & S. Franck (Eds.), Cognition on cognition (pp. 3–11). Cambridge, MA, US: The MIT Press.
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R. (2005). The Iowa Gambling Task and the somatic marker hypothesis: some questions and answers. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(4), 159–162. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.02.002
Bruine de Bruin, W., Parker, A. M., & Fischhoff, B. (2007). Individual differences in adult decision-making competence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(5), 938–956. http://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.5.938
Cauffman, E., Shulman, E. P., Steinberg, L., Claus, E., Banich, M. T., Graham, S., & Woolard, J. (2010). Age differences in affective decision making as indexed by performance on the Iowa Gambling Task. Developmental Psychology, 46(1), 193–207. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0016128
Huang, Y. H., Wood, S., Berger, D. E., & Hanoch, Y. (2015). Age differences in experiential and deliberative processes in unambiguous and ambiguous decision making. Psychology and Aging, 30(3), 675–687. http://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000038
Johnson, M. M. S. (1990). Age Differences in Decision Making: A Process Methodology for Examining Strategic Information Processing. Journal of Gerontology, 45(2), P75–P78. http://doi.org/10.1093/geronj/45.2.P75
MacPherson, S. E., Phillips, L. H., & Della Sala, S. (2002). Age, executive function and social decision making: A dorsolateral prefrontal theory of cognitive aging. Psychology and Aging, 17(4), 598–609. http://doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.17.4.598
Peters, E., Hess, T. M., Västfjäll, D., & Auman, C. (2007). Adult Age Differences in Dual Information Processes: Implications for the Role of Affective and Deliberative Processes in Older Adults’ Decision Making. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(1), 1–23. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2007.00025.x
Salthouse, T. A., & Babcock, R. L. (1991). Decomposing adult age differences in working memory. Developmental Psychology, 27(5), 763–776. http://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.27.5.763


Decision Styles: Are Some Better Than Others?

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I was excited to find a new study about decision styles and how they relate to decision qualities.

We know that people have different ways of approaching decisions – or different decision styles. Several studies have suggested the existence of five distinct styles:

baddecisions

1) Rational
An example item in a questionnaire would be:
“I make decisions in a logical and systematic way.”

2) Intuitive
E.g.,“When I make decisions, I tend to rely on my intuition.”

3) Avoidant
E.g.,“I avoid making important decisions until the pressure is on.”

4) Dependent
E.g.,“I rarely make important decisions without consulting other people.”

5) Spontaneous
E.g.,“I generally make snap decisions.”

One big question is: are some of these styles better than others? Or in other words, can decision styles distinguish between “good” decision makers and “bad” decision makers? It would be interesting to know, for example, if decision makers with a more “rational” style generally make better or worse decisions than people with a more “intuitive” style.

A recent study by Nicole Wood and Scott Highhouse attempted to answer exactly this question. They found some interesting answers indeed:

  • While intuitive decision-makers rated themselves as the best decision makers, their peers did not agree with those high opinions. It was on the contrary the rational decision style that was related to higher quality decisions, when the decisions were judged by others, rather than the decision makers themselves.
  • None of the other decision styles (avoidant, dependent, or spontaneous) explained much difference in decision qualities at all. Only the avoidant style was somewhat related to low self-ratings, but with a small effect size, and none of those decision styles were related to peer ratings in any way.

Additionally, the researchers looked at personality styles, which have been much more extensively studied in the past already, and are at this point better understood than decision styles. They found that conscientiousness, as a personality trait, is also a characteristic of people who are judged as good decision makers by their peers.

To put this most recent study into perspective: the new findings line up well with previous research supporting the idea that careful decision processes lead to good outcomes. For example, it is already known that careful decision makers are more satisfied with their careers, and that they perform better in school. There are also several studies showing that rational thinkers are less likely to be tricked by typical biases and errors that most people fall for.

Taken together, there is a growing body of research suggesting that careful decision-making predicts decision quality in a number of contexts, and that a rational decision style is effective and beneficial in many areas of life.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Sources, references and more info:
More information about the measure “General Decision Making Style” (GDMS) on the website of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (JDM)
Baiocco, R., Laghi, F., & D’Alessio, M. (2009). Decision-making style among adolescents: Relationship with sensation seeking and locus of control. Journal of Adolescence, 32, 963–976.
Crossley, C., & Highhouse, S. (2005). Relation of job search and choice process with subsequent satisfaction. Journal of Economic Psychology, 26, 255–268.
Curseu, P. L., & Schruijer, S. G. L. (2012). Decision styles and rationality: An analysis of the predictive validity of the general decision-making style inventory. Educational and Psychology Measurement, 72, 1053–1062.
Denes-Raj, V., & Epstein, S. (1994). Conflict between intuitive and rational processing: When people behave against their better judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 819–829.
Epstein, S., Donovan, S., & Denes-Raj, V. (1999). The missing link in the paradox of the Linda conjunction problem: Beyond knowing and thinking of the conjunction rule, the intrinsic appeal of heuristic processing. Personality and Social Psychological Bulletin, 25, 204–214.
Epstein, S., Lipson, A., Holstein, C., & Huh, E. (1992). Irrational reactions to negative outcomes: Evidence for two conceptual systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 328–339.
Epstein, S., Pacini, R., Denes-Raj, V., & Heier, H. (1996). Individual differences in intuitive–experiential and analytical–rational thinking styles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 390–405.
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A.-G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G⁄Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 175–191.
Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., et al. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public- domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 84–96.
Kirkpatrick, L. A., & Epstein, S. (1992). Cognitive-experiential self-theory and subjective probability: Further evidence for two conceptual systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 534–544.
Loo, R. (2000). A psychometric evaluation of the General Decision-Making Style Inventory. Personality and Individual Differences, 29, 895–905.
Scott, S. G., & Bruce, R. A. (1995). Decision-making style: The development and assessment of a new measure. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 55, 818–831.
Wood, N. L., & Highhouse, S. (2014). Do self-reported decision styles relate with others’ impressions of decision quality? Personality and Individual Differences, 70, 224–228.

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Featured Video: How to Make Hard Choices

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I would love to hear what other people take away from this TED talk. Is it helpful? I have lost the distance to the topic, so I want to say: “yes, sure, but there’s more! there’s help! there are tools!” But I guess that’s not her point. She does make other valid points, however her talk still leaves me wondering: would she know how to approach a decision more systematically, if she wanted to? I hope so, because I’ve seen so many times how helpful that can be. Even if in the end, yes, it does come down to personal values.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Book Recommendation: The Upside of Irrationality

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Dan Ariely (2011). The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic.

Dan Ariely is a great thinker, scientist and story-teller. In this book, he weaves personal anecdotes and research findings together to help us gain insight into our own irrational minds.

Recognizing our own behaviors and thinking patterns is a great stepping stone towards improvement. But rather than assume we could do better and be more rational (which I do believe is important and possible too, at least sometimes…), Dan Ariely suggests we should find ways to make our own irrationalities work in our favor. I find this mindset very useful in practice. In particular, he suggests many methods of how the “right” choice can become the “easy” choice for us. Those are great strategies to set us up for success.

In general, I’m a big advocate of making things as easy as possible on ourselves. There will always be enough hard choices left, where we can use all the mental resources we have left.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Self-Assessments: The Myth of Personality Types

Posted on by by Posted in Coaching Practice, Intuition, Self-Assessments

Or: Mind the Bell-Curve

First off, here’s a fun article about the Myers Briggs (MBTI) that I wish I had written myself. It speaks from my heart.

But even apart from the Myers Briggs, any theory claiming that people come in distinct personality “types” (e.g., the “Eneagram”, “True Colors”, “Are you a dog or a cat person?”, etc.) has a very fundamental problem: none of those types make sense, for two simple reasons. (Geoffrey Miller explains them in more detail and eloquence in his book “Spent”, which I had reviewed earlier on this blog.)

1. Personality traits have been documented in a huge body of research. After decades of studies by a multitude of independent groups, and after many data-driven revisions of initial theories, one dominating model suggest that there are five distinct factors, also known as the “Big Five”. They have been labeled Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. There’s also a newer model that finds six dimensions (adding the factor of Honesty/Humility to the other slightly modified five factors).

In those models, each of the dimensions is normally distributed, along a bell-curve (as is the case for  almost any other conceivable human trait). This means that most people find themselves somewhere in the middle of each of those dimensions, being moderately conscientious, agreeable, etc, with fewer people having extreme traits. The dichotomies of typologies (such as feeling vs thinking; or judging vs perceiving in the Myers Briggs) simply don’t make sense if the underlying traits have a bell-curve distribution.
The bell curve also explains why these tests are notoriously unreliable, meaning that most people fluctuate between different types if they take the tests repeatedly.

personality traits

2. The five or six personality factors are statistically independent of each other. That is to say, knowing a person’s score on some of those factors gives you no information whatsoever about all the other aspects of their personality.

Together, points 1. and 2. are what statisticians call a multivariate normal distribution: each dimension shows a normal distribution with most people near the middle, and each dimension is independent of the others.

Together, they also tell us that distinct personality types are an illusion.

Why, then, are we so fascinated by them, and why do we find it so intriguing to be assigned to a specific type? I’m assuming it has to do with our talent for story-telling and pattern-seeking, but I would welcome other people’s thoughts on that topic.

With regard to the Myers Briggs, I also take issue with the idea that different people should be “thinking” vs “feeling”, or “sensing” vs “intuitive” types. I believe we all need to do all of the above, not either/or. But that would be a topic for a whole new post. In fact, it’s the topic of a whole book we already wrote.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Decision Fatigue: Time for a Break Now?

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Health Decisions, Intuition, Neuroscience, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

It turns out that making decisions is tiring and wears us out, more so than other (similarly difficult) mental tasks. At this point, a large body of research shows that whenever we make many choices in a row, the quality of our decisions gets worse over time.

 Examples: one study looked at more than a thousand parole decisions made by experienced judges at an Israeli prison. At the beginning of the day, the judges were likely to give a favorable ruling about 65 percent of the time. As the morning wore on, the likelihood of a criminal getting a favorable ruling steadily dropped to zero. After the lunch break, however, the likelihood of a favorable ruling would immediately jump back up to 65 percent. And then, as the hours moved on, the percentage of favorable rulings would fall back down to zero by the end of the day. Regardless of the crime, a prisoner was much more likely to get a favorable response if their parole hearing was scheduled either early in the morning or immediately after a food break, than if it was scheduled near the end of a long session. In other words, the outcome of a decision was highly influenced by how many decisions the judges had already made previously.
Experimental studies have also shown that people are less able to exert self-control after making a series of choices. In one experiment people made choices among consumer goods or college course options, whereas others thought about the same options without making choices. Making choices led to many different forms of reduced self-control afterwards: less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and poorer performance on math problems. It is noteworthy that making actual decisions seemed to wear people out a lot more than just thinking about options. 

Decisions that are especially taxing are those that involve self-control. For example, when people fended off the temptation to eat M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations later on.
Nourishment and Recovery
Self-control tasks and decisions also require more glucose in the brain than other mental tasks. Low or hypoglycemic levels of glucose lead to impaired decision making, poor planning, and inflexible thinking. In contrast, simple psychomotor abilities, such as responding quickly to certain cues, seem relatively unaffected by glucose levels.

Rest and Sleep

This pattern is in line with other things we know about impulsive behavior and typical self-control problems. For example, research on addiction and criminal behavior suggests that self-control failure is most likely during times of the day when glucose is used least effectively, and when people are tired. We also know, for example, that alcohol reduces glucose throughout the brain and body and likewise impairs many forms of self-control.

 What is it about decision-making and self-control in particular that makes them so susceptible to glucose? 
Prefrontal CortexThe answer to this question is still somewhat controversial. One reason is probably that since self-control processes are so costly, requiring larger amounts of glucose than other tasks, they’re also be the first to be impaired when glucose drops. Another reason could be that when glucose drops, the brain functions that are most central to survival (e.g., breathing, physical coordination) have first dibs on available glucose, not leaving enough for more advanced mental operations.Both of these ideas are consistent with the general rule that abilities that developed last are the first to become impaired when resources are limited. Self-control, planning and decision-making are all processes that involve the frontal areas of the brain – the pre-frontal cortex, to be specific. This area is the most recently developed part of our brain in evolutionary history, and it is also the part that takes longest to mature fully in human adolescents and young adults. 

What does this mean for us?

While metabolically healthy adults can fast without their blood glucose levels being affected, they still need rest to recover from decision fatigue. Sleep and rest replenish the ability to exert self-control.

The finding that that our psychomotor abilities are not as easily impaired as our abilities for judgment and decision-making suggests that we may often not realize our impairment, because the very capacity (judgment!) that we would need to recognize it is the first one to be impaired. This means planning is essential!

  • Get enough breaks, rest and sleep
  • Avoid making important decisions when tired
  • Plan ahead to get into healthy routines

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling, LLC

References:
Baumeister, R. F. (2002). Ego Depletion and Self-Control Failure: An Energy Model of the Self’s Executive Function. Self and Identity, 1(2), 129– 136.
Boksem, M. A. S., Meijman, T. F., & Lorist, M. M. (2005). Effects of mental fatigue on attention: An ERP study. Cognitive Brain Research, 25(1), 107– 116.
Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(17), 6889–6892.
De Jonge, J., Spoor, E., Sonnentag, S., Dormann, C., & van den Tooren, M. (2012). “Take a break?!” Off-job recovery, job demands, and job resources as predictors of health, active learning, and creativity. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 21(3), 321–348.
Gailliot, M. T., Baumeister, R. F., Nathan, C., Maner, J. K., Ashby, E., Tice, D. M., Brewer, L. E., & Schmeichel, B. J. (2007). Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(2), 325–336.
Gailliot, M. T., & Baumeister, R. F. (2007). The Physiology of Willpower: Linking Blood Glucose to Self-Control. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11(4), 303–327.
Hagger, M. S.; Wood, C.; Stiff, C.; Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2010). Ego Depletion and the Strength Model of Self-Control: A Meta-Analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136 (4), 495–525.
Henning, R. A., Jacques, P., Kissel, G. V., Sullivan, A. B., & Alteras-Webb, S. M. (1997). Frequent short rest breaks from computer work: effects on productivity and well-being at two field sites. Ergonomics, 40(1), 78–91.
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Lieberman, H. R. (2003). Nutrition, brain function and cognitive performance. Appetite, 40 (3), 245–254.
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Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94 (5), 883–898.


Featured Video: Can You Make Yourself Smarter?

Posted on by by Posted in ADHD, Creative Thinking, Intuition, Performance, Academic Achievement

This RSA talk by Dan Hurly is a bit slow (I recommend listening to it while doing something else, rather than watching), but I found the content excellent, well-researched and important.

(The actual talk starts at 1:30 and ends at 27min, the rest is Q&A.)

Here’s why I believe it’s so important:

1. Smartness matters. 
Intelligence is often underrated as a geeky and nerdy quality, irrelevant for practical purposes, or even worse, as being a hindrance for emotional and intuitive skills. That’s very wrong: general intelligence is highly related to emotional and social skills, and even to health and longevity.

2. Yes, we can become smarter.
Therefore I think we should make that effort – not just for ourselves, but for the coming generation. Let’s remember that the children who are now in school are the ones that will make decisions for us when we’re old. Let’s give them the best possible chances of becoming smart!

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


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