Decision Fatigue Leads to Bad Decision Making

It takes effort to make decisions and when confronted with numerous decisions to make, people get fatigued. These aren’t just big decisions (what should I do with my life?), but also small ones (what should I wear? what should I eat for dinner). This impairs a person’s ability to make further decisions (or avoid them).

However, it’s unclear whether this is a consistent phenomenon. Research by Carol Dweck reveals decision fatigue primarily affects people who believe willpower runs out quickly. Decision fatigue is also related to studies on ego depletion, which has since been debunked.

  • Non-Monetary Transaction Costs

    Every financial transaction, no matter how simple or fast, has non-monetary transaction costs. For example, the mental overhead of making a decision “is it worth it?”, even for tiny amounts, adds up. In a world that is fully monetized and filled with micro transactions, the non-monetary transaction costs would be stifling.

  • Grammarly Comes Close to Being an Organizational Linter

    Grammarly improves the overall level of communication within an organization, but if you think of it as an organizational linter it does much more. It eliminates a class of common feedback that would otherwise need to repeated for each work product for each person (with some decay curve as new employees internalize these rules). Even better would be if it could lint the structure of documents (i.e. a minto linter) and not just grammar and phrasing.