Non-decision decisions

Someone recently asked Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg why he always wears a grey T-shirt. The questioner actually got a $50 answer to a 99 cent question. It went, in part, like this:

“I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community. And there’s actually a bunch of psychology theory that even making small decisions around what you wear, or what you eat for breakfast, or things like that, they kind of make you tired and consume your energy.”

From what I can tell after an extraordinarily brief look at the literature, Zuckerberg is correct. Having to make too many decisions, big or small, induces decision fatigue. So the easy thing to do is to cut down on the number of decisions you have to make, and instead substitute some default choices. Call them non-decision decisions.

His statement provides a whole bunch of us with an almost irrefutable defence to the charge that we are just trying to cover up the fact that we dress like slobs. “You see, I wear this ketchup-stained sweatshirt every day, not just because I want to save the environment and save us work, but also because what is truly important is the well-being of my family, and I don’t want to have my mind sullied by trivial details like whether the sweatshirt is due for a wash, and if it is, what sweater or shirt and tie I should wear instead; so that I can concentrate on the really big decisions, like how I can save to pay for our dear little Tiny Tim’s tuba lessons.”

By way of a more upscale example, a former boss used to be approached several times a day by anxious subordinates faced with some sort of sky-is-falling crisis. His attitude was that just about half of all crises, viewed in the cold light of the next day, weren’t really crises at all; so that just refusing to be drawn into an immediate decision gave him an even chance of being right. And for the real crises, the issues usually became clearer after the overnight wait. So I guess you could say that he adopted the default rule of always postponing a crisis decision.

Somewhat similar to the default decision is the random decision. In a recent study, rats (poor rats: I hope they got more than rodent minimum wage for this gig and due thanks in the research paper) had to learn how to earn a reward. As the reward-dispenser’s behaviour became harder for the rats to predict, their reponse was to abandon rational choice and adopt random behaviour. You can sort of see it from an evolutionary standpoint. A rat realizes it is up a against a smarter competitor. So, to try to gain the upper hand, it resorts to non-predictable behaviour. The study authors speculate that humans might usefully resort to random decision-making to find their way out of depressions stemming from feelings of helplessness.

There may also be a very practical, day-to-day use for random decisions. For example, if you are going out to a restaurant for a fancy meal with your life partner to celebrate a special occasion, your menu choice can’t be put off. You could adopt the Zuckerberg default approach and say that you will always choose the shepherd’s pie, thinking that this will free up your intellect to engage in scintlillating conversation with your partner. However, this is liable to put your partner into a bad frame of mind (“Our special night, and there you go again with your shepherd’s pie! You’re so predictable you’re downright boring!”). So you can either sweat the really small stuff on the choice, or go random, and resolve simply to pick, say, the fourth item on the menu—unless it’s liver, in which case you drop down an item, unless that leads you to sweetbreads, in which case you move up one, unless that takes you to ratatouille, in which case you are probably back to the shepherd’s pie approach.

It’s bad enough that we so often feel miserable making decisons, either because we spend too much or too little time considering every possible factor, because we make them too hastily or procrastinate, because we revisit them too often or not enough, or because we rely too much or too little on gut instinct. So I think it’s nice to be able to give ourselves permission to make a non-decision decision every now and then. Especially if we own and run a multi-zillion dollar company. And if we happen to like grey T-shirts.

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca