Decision Fatigue and Self-Worth in Executives

An earlier version of this article opened with the sentence “the research on decision fatigue is well-documented”. That sentence was the least accurate one in it.

Both pillars it rested on have been badly shaken, and the honest version of this subject is more useful than the confident one. So the corrections come first.

The Depletion Finding Did Not Replicate

Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven and Tice published the founding study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1998: people who resisted chocolate afterwards gave up sooner on difficult puzzles. Self-control looked like a resource that gets used up.

Then came the replications. A multi-laboratory registered replication led by Hagger and colleagues in 2016, across 23 labs and 2,141 participants, “did not find an ego-depletion effect”. Vohs and colleagues ran a larger version in 2021 across 36 labs and 3,531 participants and also “failed to find an ego-depletion effect”, reporting d = 0.06, which they describe as “an order of magnitude smaller than the effect size estimate in the original Hagger meta-analysis”.

Carter and McCullough had already found in 2015 that once publication bias was controlled for, the pooled estimate was “small (d = .2) and not significantly different from zero”.

More than five and a half thousand participants across two pre-registered multi-site efforts, and the effect does not appear. That is not a small caveat attached to a finding. It is the finding not being there.

The Judges Study Is Contested Too

The other standard illustration is Danziger, Levav and Avnaim-Pesso’s 2011 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reporting that parole was granted in 65 per cent of cases at the start of a session and dropped to nearly zero before a meal break.

That one has three problems. Weinshall-Margel and Shapard argued in 2011 that “case ordering is not random”: unrepresented prisoners usually go last, and represented prisoners sharing an attorney may be ordered strategically by counsel, making the pattern “likely an artifact of the order of case presentation”. Glöckner showed in 2016 that cases with a lenient outcome take longer, so they would not be scheduled just before a break, and that simulations of this alone substantially overestimate what looks like fatigue. And Lakens has pointed out that “the size of the effect in the original study is impossibly large”.

In fairness to the authors: they recoded their data in response and their results held in their own analyses. The study has not been withdrawn. What is contested is the interpretation, and that is the part this article was borrowing.

Also removed: a claim that doctors prescribe more conservatively in the afternoon, for which no source was found, and an example about executives approving budgets at nine in the morning, which was invented and placed in the same list as if it were a result.

What Is Left, and Why It Is Still Worth Reading

Strip out the research and the observation that prompted the article survives, because it never needed the research.

A senior role concentrates decisions. The strategic ones are the smaller share. Most of the volume is questions escalated upward, ambiguities that need resolving, and situations where someone requires you to be certain so that they can proceed. That volume is a fact about the job, not a claim about psychology.

What follows is a reading rather than a finding. Make enough calls and some will be wrong. The wrong ones accumulate into a visible sample. And at some point the question quietly changes from whether a particular decision was right to whether your judgement is still reliable.

That shift is the thing worth noticing, and it does not require a depletion mechanism to explain. It only requires a numerator that grows with volume.

Why the Shift Does Damage

Crocker and Wolfe described contingencies of self-worth in Psychological Review in 2001: the specific domains in which a sense of being worthwhile is staked on how things turn out. In those domains, they write, “people typically have the goal to prove themselves rather than the goal to learn, grow, or improve themselves”.

Apply that to someone whose worth is staked on judgement. A wrong call is then not information about a decision. It is information about them, which makes each subsequent call more expensive to make and much more expensive to get wrong.

They also describe the arrangement as “a trade-off between increased motivation and increased emotional vulnerability”. The same staking that makes someone take the decisions seriously is what makes the accumulating errors land personally.

Two Problems, Not One

The structural problem is volume, and the remedies for it are unglamorous and well known: fewer decisions reaching you, protected hours for the ones that need judgement, delegation with frameworks that let other people decide without you in the room.

The other problem is what a wrong call is allowed to mean. Addressing only the first leaves the second running, which is why a quieter calendar sometimes fails to restore anything.

An earlier version of this article claimed that executives with stable self-worth make better decisions under pressure. That is a plausible guess and there is no evidence here for it. What can be said is narrower: someone who does not have to defend their self-image with each call has fewer things to attend to while making it.

And if the self-doubt has stopped looking like a question about workload and is affecting how you function, that belongs with a licensed professional. Nothing here substitutes for one, including the assessment below.

A Note on Why This Article Was Wrong

Decision fatigue is one of the most quoted ideas in management writing, and both of its best-known supports are in trouble. It stayed quotable because the idea is intuitive and the corrections are less interesting than the original.

That is worth more than the original claim was. A finding that feels obviously true is exactly the kind that gets repeated without checking, including here.

What Your Judgement Is Carrying

If being wrong has started to cost more than the error itself warrants, the question is what the judgement has been asked to hold up. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth currently rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying more than it should. It takes about ten minutes, and it opens a conversation rather than closing one. Begin your profile here.

If this was worth your time, there is a letter. One short piece a week on identity, self-worth and the arithmetic of senior work. It costs nothing, and leaving takes one click. See what arrives.

References

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252
Hagger, M. S., et al. (2016), multi-laboratory registered replication of ego depletion, 23 labs, 2,141 participants.
Vohs, K. D., et al. (2021), multi-site replication, 36 labs, 3,531 participants.
Carter, E. C., & McCullough, M. E. (2015), meta-analysis correcting for publication bias.
Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Weinshall-Margel, K., & Shapard, J. (2011), on case ordering.
Glöckner, A. (2016), simulations on the hungry judge effect. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1930297500004812
Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108, 593–623. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.108.3.593

Decision Fatigue and Self-Worth: The Link Nobody’s Talking About