Post by Banjo on Sept 17, 2011 12:46:14 GMT 7
I found this interesting, particularly the examples involving the parole board.
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 8.50am): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud; Case 2 (heard at 3.10pm): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault; Case 3 (heard at 4.25pm): 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 analysing 1100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges 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 per cent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 per cent of the time.
The odds favoured the prisoner who appeared at 8:50am - and he did in fact receive parole. The other two prisoners were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.
There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges' behaviour, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford Graduate School of Business 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 so-called "decision fatigue" can make footballers prone to dubious choices late in the game and business chiefs prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and non-executive, 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 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 one of two very different ways: either to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to think through the consequences (sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?); or the ultimate energy saver - do nothing. 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 US 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) and his 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.
These tests demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to wolf down lollies or freshly baked chocolate-chip biscuits, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterwards they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, such as working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower as like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.
A postdoctoral fellow, Jean Twenge, started working at Baumeister's laboratory right after planning her wedding. As Twenge studied the results of the lab's ego-depletion experiments, she remembered how exhausted she felt the evening she and her fiancé went through the ritual of registering for gifts. Did they want plain white china or something with a pattern? Which brand of knives? How many towels? What kind of sheets? Precisely how many threads per square inch? "By the end, you could have talked me into anything," Twenge told her new colleagues. For a real-world test of their theory, the lab's researchers went into that great modern arena of decision making: the suburban mall. They interviewed shoppers about their experiences in the stores that day and then asked them to solve some simple arithmetic problems. Sure enough, the shoppers who had already made the most decisions in the stores gave up the quickest on the maths. When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too.
Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars. The idea for these experiments also happened to come in the preparations for a wedding, a ritual that seems to be the decision-fatigue equivalent of Hell Week. At his fiancée's suggestion, Levav visited a tailor to have a bespoke suit made and began going through the choices of fabric, type of lining and style of buttons, lapels, cuffs and so forth. "By the time I got through the third pile of fabric swatches, I wanted to kill myself," Levav recalls. "I couldn't tell the choices apart anymore. After a while my only response to the tailor became, 'What do you recommend?' I just couldn't take it." Levav ended up not buying any kind of bespoke suit but he put the experience to use in a pair of experiments conducted with academics from Germany, Switzerland and Colombia. One involved asking MBA students in Switzerland to choose a bespoke suit; the other was conducted at German car dealerships, where customers ordered options for their new sedans. The car buyers - and these were real customers spending their own money - had to choose, for instance, among four styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colours for the interior.
As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in they would start settling for whatever the default option was. By manipulating the order of the car buyers' choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up paying more.
Similar results were found in the experiment with custom-made suits: once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions - the ones with the most options - they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less.
Ever wondered why sweet snacks are featured prominently at the cash register? With their willpower reduced after all that shopping, people are especially vulnerable to sweets and soft drinks and anything else offering a quick hit of sugar. While supermarkets figured this out a long time ago, only recently did researchers discover why.
The researchers at Baumeister's lab set out to test something that in America is called the Mardi Gras theory - the notion that you could build up willpower by first indulging yourself in pleasure, the way Mardi Gras feasters do just before the rigors of Lent. Chefs in his lab whipped up lusciously thick milkshakes for a group of subjects. Sure enough, the shakes seemed to strengthen willpower by helping people perform better than expected on their next task. So far, so good. But the experiment also included a control group who were fed a tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy gunk. It provided them with no pleasure, yet it produced similar improvements in self-control. The result was embarrassing for the researchers; Matthew Gailliot, the graduate student who ran the study, stood looking down at his shoes as he told Baumeister about the fiasco.
Baumeister didn't think the study wasn't a failure, though. Something had happened, after all. Even the tasteless gunk had done the job, but how? If it wasn't the pleasure, could it be the calories? The brain, like the rest of the body, derived energy from glucose, the simple sugar manufactured from all kinds of foods.
To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister's lab tried refuelling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless sweeteners tasted similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people's self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices and, when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff.
Despite this series of findings, brain researchers still had some reservations about the glucose connection. Sceptics pointed out that the brain's overall use of energy remains about the same regardless of what a person is doing. Among the sceptics was Todd Heatherton, who worked with Baumeister early in his career and eventually became a pioneer of what is called social neuroscience: the study of links between brain processes and social behaviour. He believed in ego depletion, but he didn't see how this neural process could be caused simply by variations in glucose levels.
To observe the process - and to see if it could be reversed by glucose - Heatherton and his colleagues recruited 45 female dieters and recorded images of their brains as they reacted to pictures of food. Next the dieters watched a comedy video while forcing themselves to suppress their laughter - a standard if cruel way to drain mental energy and induce ego depletion. Then they were again shown pictures of food, and the new round of brain scans revealed the effects of ego depletion: more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain's reward centre, and a corresponding decrease in the amygdala, which ordinarily helps control impulses. The food's appeal, in other words, registered more strongly while impulse control weakened - not a good combination for anyone on a diet. But suppose people in this ego-depleted state got a quick dose of glucose? What would a scan of their brains reveal?
The results of the experiment were announced earlier this year during Heatherton's speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world's largest group of social psychologists. Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by ego depletion - a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him.
Heatherton's results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain's total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term things.
The discoveries about glucose help explain why dieting is a uniquely difficult test of self-control - and why even people with phenomenally strong willpower in the rest of their lives can have such a hard time losing weight.
As the body uses up glucose, it looks for a quick way to replenish the fuel, leading to a craving for sugar. After performing a lab task requiring self-control, people tend to eat more sweet snacks but not other kinds, such as chips. The mere expectation of having to exert self-control makes people hunger for sweetness. A similar effect helps explain why many women yearn for chocolate and other sugary treats just before menstruation: their bodies are seeking a quick replacement as glucose levels fluctuate.
A sugar-filled snack or drink will provide a quick improvement in self-control, but it's just a temporary solution. It's better to have a steady supply throughout the day of glucose that you get from eating proteins and other more nutritious foods.
The benefits of glucose were unmistakable in the study of the Israeli parole board. In mid-morning, the board would be served a sandwich and a piece of fruit during a break. The prisoners who appeared just before the break had only about a 20 per cent chance of getting parole, but the ones appearing right after had around a 65 per cent chance. The odds dropped again as the morning wore on, and prisoners really didn't want to appear just before lunch: the chance of getting parole at that time was only 10 per cent. After lunch it soared up to 60 per cent, but only briefly. Remember that Jewish Israeli prisoner who appeared at 3.10pm and was denied parole from his sentence for assault? He had the misfortune of being the sixth case heard after lunch. But another Jewish Israeli prisoner serving the same sentence for the same crime was lucky enough to appear at 1.27pm, the first case after lunch, and he got parole. It must have seemed to him like a fine example of the justice system at work, but it probably had more to do with the parole board's glucose levels.
IT'S easy to be overwhelmed by choices in this modern world. A typical computer user looks at more than three dozen websites a day; while at work, it's all too easy to follow a link to YouTube or Facebook, or to buy something on Amazon. The cumulative effect of these temptations isn't obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on holiday, whom to hire, how much to spend - these all deplete willpower, and there's no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain's regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful (and alcohol causes self-control to decline further).
"Good decision-making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it's always there," Baumeister says. "It's a state that fluctuates." His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don't schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations such as all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it's available for emergencies and important decisions.
"Even the wisest people won't make good choices when they're not rested and their glucose is low," Baumeister points out. That's why the truly wise don't restructure the company at 4pm. They don't make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. "The best decision-makers," Baumeister says, "are the ones who know when not to trust themselves."
John Tierney's essay is adapted from a book he wrote with Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (Allen Lane, $35), to be published in Australia in January
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 8.50am): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud; Case 2 (heard at 3.10pm): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault; Case 3 (heard at 4.25pm): 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 analysing 1100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges 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 per cent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 per cent of the time.
The odds favoured the prisoner who appeared at 8:50am - and he did in fact receive parole. The other two prisoners were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.
There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges' behaviour, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford Graduate School of Business 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 so-called "decision fatigue" can make footballers prone to dubious choices late in the game and business chiefs prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and non-executive, 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 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 one of two very different ways: either to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to think through the consequences (sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?); or the ultimate energy saver - do nothing. 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 US 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) and his 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.
These tests demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to wolf down lollies or freshly baked chocolate-chip biscuits, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterwards they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, such as working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower as like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.
A postdoctoral fellow, Jean Twenge, started working at Baumeister's laboratory right after planning her wedding. As Twenge studied the results of the lab's ego-depletion experiments, she remembered how exhausted she felt the evening she and her fiancé went through the ritual of registering for gifts. Did they want plain white china or something with a pattern? Which brand of knives? How many towels? What kind of sheets? Precisely how many threads per square inch? "By the end, you could have talked me into anything," Twenge told her new colleagues. For a real-world test of their theory, the lab's researchers went into that great modern arena of decision making: the suburban mall. They interviewed shoppers about their experiences in the stores that day and then asked them to solve some simple arithmetic problems. Sure enough, the shoppers who had already made the most decisions in the stores gave up the quickest on the maths. When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too.
Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars. The idea for these experiments also happened to come in the preparations for a wedding, a ritual that seems to be the decision-fatigue equivalent of Hell Week. At his fiancée's suggestion, Levav visited a tailor to have a bespoke suit made and began going through the choices of fabric, type of lining and style of buttons, lapels, cuffs and so forth. "By the time I got through the third pile of fabric swatches, I wanted to kill myself," Levav recalls. "I couldn't tell the choices apart anymore. After a while my only response to the tailor became, 'What do you recommend?' I just couldn't take it." Levav ended up not buying any kind of bespoke suit but he put the experience to use in a pair of experiments conducted with academics from Germany, Switzerland and Colombia. One involved asking MBA students in Switzerland to choose a bespoke suit; the other was conducted at German car dealerships, where customers ordered options for their new sedans. The car buyers - and these were real customers spending their own money - had to choose, for instance, among four styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colours for the interior.
As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in they would start settling for whatever the default option was. By manipulating the order of the car buyers' choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up paying more.
Similar results were found in the experiment with custom-made suits: once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions - the ones with the most options - they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less.
Ever wondered why sweet snacks are featured prominently at the cash register? With their willpower reduced after all that shopping, people are especially vulnerable to sweets and soft drinks and anything else offering a quick hit of sugar. While supermarkets figured this out a long time ago, only recently did researchers discover why.
The researchers at Baumeister's lab set out to test something that in America is called the Mardi Gras theory - the notion that you could build up willpower by first indulging yourself in pleasure, the way Mardi Gras feasters do just before the rigors of Lent. Chefs in his lab whipped up lusciously thick milkshakes for a group of subjects. Sure enough, the shakes seemed to strengthen willpower by helping people perform better than expected on their next task. So far, so good. But the experiment also included a control group who were fed a tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy gunk. It provided them with no pleasure, yet it produced similar improvements in self-control. The result was embarrassing for the researchers; Matthew Gailliot, the graduate student who ran the study, stood looking down at his shoes as he told Baumeister about the fiasco.
Baumeister didn't think the study wasn't a failure, though. Something had happened, after all. Even the tasteless gunk had done the job, but how? If it wasn't the pleasure, could it be the calories? The brain, like the rest of the body, derived energy from glucose, the simple sugar manufactured from all kinds of foods.
To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister's lab tried refuelling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless sweeteners tasted similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people's self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices and, when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff.
Despite this series of findings, brain researchers still had some reservations about the glucose connection. Sceptics pointed out that the brain's overall use of energy remains about the same regardless of what a person is doing. Among the sceptics was Todd Heatherton, who worked with Baumeister early in his career and eventually became a pioneer of what is called social neuroscience: the study of links between brain processes and social behaviour. He believed in ego depletion, but he didn't see how this neural process could be caused simply by variations in glucose levels.
To observe the process - and to see if it could be reversed by glucose - Heatherton and his colleagues recruited 45 female dieters and recorded images of their brains as they reacted to pictures of food. Next the dieters watched a comedy video while forcing themselves to suppress their laughter - a standard if cruel way to drain mental energy and induce ego depletion. Then they were again shown pictures of food, and the new round of brain scans revealed the effects of ego depletion: more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain's reward centre, and a corresponding decrease in the amygdala, which ordinarily helps control impulses. The food's appeal, in other words, registered more strongly while impulse control weakened - not a good combination for anyone on a diet. But suppose people in this ego-depleted state got a quick dose of glucose? What would a scan of their brains reveal?
The results of the experiment were announced earlier this year during Heatherton's speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world's largest group of social psychologists. Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by ego depletion - a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him.
Heatherton's results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain's total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term things.
The discoveries about glucose help explain why dieting is a uniquely difficult test of self-control - and why even people with phenomenally strong willpower in the rest of their lives can have such a hard time losing weight.
As the body uses up glucose, it looks for a quick way to replenish the fuel, leading to a craving for sugar. After performing a lab task requiring self-control, people tend to eat more sweet snacks but not other kinds, such as chips. The mere expectation of having to exert self-control makes people hunger for sweetness. A similar effect helps explain why many women yearn for chocolate and other sugary treats just before menstruation: their bodies are seeking a quick replacement as glucose levels fluctuate.
A sugar-filled snack or drink will provide a quick improvement in self-control, but it's just a temporary solution. It's better to have a steady supply throughout the day of glucose that you get from eating proteins and other more nutritious foods.
The benefits of glucose were unmistakable in the study of the Israeli parole board. In mid-morning, the board would be served a sandwich and a piece of fruit during a break. The prisoners who appeared just before the break had only about a 20 per cent chance of getting parole, but the ones appearing right after had around a 65 per cent chance. The odds dropped again as the morning wore on, and prisoners really didn't want to appear just before lunch: the chance of getting parole at that time was only 10 per cent. After lunch it soared up to 60 per cent, but only briefly. Remember that Jewish Israeli prisoner who appeared at 3.10pm and was denied parole from his sentence for assault? He had the misfortune of being the sixth case heard after lunch. But another Jewish Israeli prisoner serving the same sentence for the same crime was lucky enough to appear at 1.27pm, the first case after lunch, and he got parole. It must have seemed to him like a fine example of the justice system at work, but it probably had more to do with the parole board's glucose levels.
IT'S easy to be overwhelmed by choices in this modern world. A typical computer user looks at more than three dozen websites a day; while at work, it's all too easy to follow a link to YouTube or Facebook, or to buy something on Amazon. The cumulative effect of these temptations isn't obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on holiday, whom to hire, how much to spend - these all deplete willpower, and there's no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain's regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful (and alcohol causes self-control to decline further).
"Good decision-making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it's always there," Baumeister says. "It's a state that fluctuates." His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don't schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations such as all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it's available for emergencies and important decisions.
"Even the wisest people won't make good choices when they're not rested and their glucose is low," Baumeister points out. That's why the truly wise don't restructure the company at 4pm. They don't make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. "The best decision-makers," Baumeister says, "are the ones who know when not to trust themselves."
John Tierney's essay is adapted from a book he wrote with Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (Allen Lane, $35), to be published in Australia in January