Decision Fatigue: The more decisions we make, the less sound they are

In a fascinating article in The New York Times (Aug 17, 2011), John Tierney examines the solid experimental work behind the emerging concept of “decision fatigue,” a powerful, demonstrable, and previously unrecognized effect that renders us less and less capable of sensible decisions as we make more and more of them. In essence, self-control turns out to be not a municipal water supply, steady and almost uninterruptable, but a rain-barrel under a roof corner: use it up and it’s gone until the next rain.
Tierney looks at the results of years of work by Roy Baumeister, at Case Western and then at Florida State, and some of his colleagues and former students, but introduces that work with a startling study from Israel. There the decisions of an Israeli parole board were examined for patterns: would Arab Israelis, say, get tougher sentences than Jewish Israelis? No, it turned out. Instead, a different and quite unexpected pattern emerged: cases heard in the first part of the mornings and just after lunch were far more likely to be granted parole than cases heard late mornings or late afternoons: “Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.” The parole board turned out to be a poster case for decision fatigue.
What Baumeister’s experiments with mental discipline had demonstrated was that there’s “a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control”; will-power is “a form of mental energy that [can] be exhausted.” His results were confirmed in an ingenious experiment conducted in German car dealerships. There, customers ordering options for their new sedans turned out to have their choices strongly affected by the order and complexity of the options offered—to the tune of more than 1,500 euros. “Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy wheel rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered and [therefore] how much willpower was left in the customer.”
So it was with the Israeli parole board. Granting parole is a decisive action, an uneasy choice that carries risk: the offender may reoffend and again tear at the social fabric. Withholding parole preserves the status quo while keeping the parole option for later. In a way, it’s a decision not to decide. So, while their supply of willpower was good, the board could grapple with parole decisions on their complex individual merits; as they exhausted their supply of mental energy for self-control, they fell back on mental shortcuts, on safety, on putting off more mental struggle.
Just how was it, though, that willpower got resupplied overnight—and at lunchtime? Glucose, Baumeister’s lab was able to demonstrate. Again and again in their experiments, sugary lemonade restored willpower, but a control drink of artificially sweetened lemonade did not. The effect was even confirmed in dogs, in studies done at the University of Kentucky by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall: “After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.”
For overshoppers, the implications of decision fatigue are significant. Baumeister’s studies “show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower . . . Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to 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.” Overshoppers need to husband their self-control by structuring their lives. In “Decision Fatigue: Part 2” we’ll look at some examples of how they might do that.

In a word, yes.

And others are born to save.

This is the rough conclusion of Savita Iyer-Ahristani in her overview of a careful study of Swedish twins done by Stephan Siegel, at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, and Henrik Cronkvist, at Claremont McKenna College in California. Specifically, Siegel and Cronkvist conclude that 35% of saving or spending behavior is genetically based; and that this genetic inclination makes up the single greatest determinant of our financial behavior.

How did they tease out this knowledge, intertwined as it must be with parental, cultural, and economic influences? By using sophisticated mathematical techniques developed in quantitative behavioral genetics research and applying these to data from the Swedish Twin Registry (the world’s largest). They built on “an intuitive insight,” Siegel and Conkvist explain: “identical twins share 100 percent of their genes while the average proportion of shared genes is only 50 percent for fraternal twins; so if identical twins have significantly more similar savings behavior than fraternal twins, then there is evidence that the propensity for savings, at least partly, originates from an individual’s genetic composition.”

Siegel and Cronkvist are more measured in their conclusions than Iyer-Ahristani is in her summary of their study. They recognize the importance of parental values and of socio-economic status in the development of an individual’s savings behavior. But their data suggests that there is a strong and previously unidentified genetic component to saving or spending behavior, and they recommend that we use this knowledge to help manage our tendencies.

What does this mean for overshoppers? Probably that two powerful forces are at work in their habit. In the psycho-social sphere, overshopping is generally a doomed attempt to fill an important and underlying psychological need. Now we can add that it’s something of an instinct.

Lest we get too deterministic, however, there are new developments to suggest that we can significantly impact our saving or spending tendencies. At Washington State University, professor Jeff Joireman has shown that financial self-control, like a muscle, can be strengthened through regular exercise. After as little as two weeks of either mental or physical exercise, his subjects showed increased ability to resist impulse buys. A more exotic approach, presently being studied at Columbia and NYU, among other places, uses TMS—transcranial magnetic stimulation—to regulate specific parts of the brain that have now been identified as governing spending or saving behavior. In the lab, anyway—which is as far as this technique has gone—TMS can temporarily transform a spender into a saver (or vice versa).

Where are we then? At a place that gives overshoppers reason to hope. While we now know that there are genetic as well as psychological underpinnings to most compulsive buying, we also know that the behavior is modifiable. In the next few years, as the neuroscience behind spending or saving behavior gets even clearer, we may have powerful new tools for altering spending behavior.

We are all familiar with the popularized image of the shopaholic. Think Isla Fisher in the 2009 hit movie, “Confessions of a Shopaholic.”  But growing research shows that the bag-laden fashionista is not the only one struggling to kick the habit.

 For many people, the word shopaholic conjures images of a colorfully-dressed, designer bag-laden young woman who is unable to peel her eyes away from the newest pair of Prada shoes.  However, knowing what we now know about the origins and motivators that drive compulsive buying, we must begin to ask: why is this issue considered a women’s addiction?

Over the past few years, men’s spending habits have been investigated, and the results of this research is speaking for itself: not only do men overshop, but they often outspend women in certain commercial domains.  According to an article in Tech News Daily, men outspend women on social game goods and there is evidence from a recent study by PayPal in England, that men are more likely to spend more online than women, come to the internet to shop more than women, and buy things online, for example health and beauty products, that are more traditionally associated with women’s purchasing.  Dr. Barış Önen Ünsalver, a Turkish psychiatrist who specializes in this behavior, has recently published a book in which she characterizes shopaholism through a decidedly ungendered lens.

With case-study after case-study appearing in our media (see The Sun’s article: Confessions of a Male Shopaholic), the cat is finally creeping out of the bag.  Compulsive spending is no more specific to women than it is to handbags or bracelets.  In a world of highly sophisticated advertising and a deeply powerful consumer culture, it comes as no surprise that both men and women are overspending in the hope that they are purchasing what they really need: be it an improved self-image, a more luxurious lifestyle, or even simply the ability to keep up with the spending that the see going on around them.

In The Sun article, the stories of Huw, Ollie and Chris show us something a little different about the way men spend.  While female shopaholism is characterized as the “smiled upon” addiction (picture a woman with her nose pressed to a store window – not hard to do, is it?), a growing body of literature on male shopping behavior shows that men spend in more covert ways.  From online spending to sneaking out of the house to snap up a new pair of jeans, men’s overspending habits seem to be skulking under the stigma that this “Shopaholic club” is girls-only.

Hopefully, with greater and greater numbers of men coming out of the shopping closet to talk about their spending, this stigma will start to fall away, giving both men and women the opportunity to see that they are not alone, and that their overshopping habits are a misguided attempt to close the gap between their real and their ideal selves rather than their gender.

Early on in my study of consumer behavior, I attended a national conference on eating disorders. Catherine Steiner-Adair, one of the keynote speakers, asked the audience what we thought were the two major activities traditionally pursued by women to deal with life’s ups and downs. The silence was palpable. She then answered her own question: “Dieting and shopping.” Her statement was instantly acknowledged throughout the room, first by a saddened hush, then with murmurs of agreement all around. That was 1991.  In the intervening twenty years, I’ve witnessed firsthand the intricate and complex relationship between shopping and eating, weight and wealth, being rich and being thin.

Kathleen Kingsbury, in a manuscript not yet in print, is examining that relationship. She looks at the history of women’s complicated connections with food, body image, and finance, and she highlights the nature of their linkages. And Diane Barth explored the some of the same territory in “When Eating and Shopping Are Companion Disorders” (Benson, I Shop, 268-87). There she observes that although “every therapist who works with eating disorders can provide anecdotal reports of binge eaters who binge-shop, anorexics who shoplift, bulimics who compulsively buy items they never use,” less expected combinations are also abundant. One anorexic “may also severely limit herself in regard to all purchases . . . while another shoplifts regularly and . . . a third goes on frequent shopping sprees.” Barth sees shopping and eating as two entirely normal ways to regulate and manage moods and feelings; they can soothe us when we feel “hurt, lonely, angry, or disappointed,” relax us when we feel “tense, overwhelmed, or over-stimulated,” or energize us when we feel sad or tired. They are connected, in other words, by their similar function in coping with affects. When people can’t regulate or tolerate their feelings, however, shopping and/or eating can become “repetitive, compulsive, and undifferentiated responses to a wide variety of emotions and experiences.”

Barth notes that people with shopping and eating disorders often have little sense of their own inner processes, little ability “to conceptualize emotional cause and effect.” They lack, she finds, “the ability to use words symbolically to help metabolize emotions.” So even when they can articulate what are apparently clear symbolic connections between their eating and shopping behaviors and, say, their childhood experiences, their symptoms don’t change.

A case in point: now that Jennifer Hudson’s weight loss has brought her from a size 16 to a 6, the singer admits to being addicted to shopping. Since she began enjoying her new body, Hudson has bought a lot of new clothes. “It got to a point where I could barely get in my bedroom,” she told InStyle magazine. When did she realize she had a problem? “Well, my bed is a canopy. I had nowhere else to throw the clothes. So I threw them on top of the canopy!” Hudson continues to shop whenever she travels. “Each city we go to, my suitcase won’t hold my new clothes, so we have to box them up and ship them home. Then I get back and want to try on everything I bought, so clothes are just everywhere.” Hudson seems at ease with the problem. Her shopping may not stop, she says, but her weight loss will: “you’re never going to see me skinny.”

In a recent piece for American Express Open Forum ( HYPERLINK “http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/lifestyle/article/being-rich-and-thin-go-hand-in-hand-jean-chatzky-” http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/lifestyle/article/being-rich-and-thin-go-hand-in-hand-jean-chatzky-), Jean Chatzky cites research showing that “your health and your wealth are inextricably linked,” including a recent German study demonstrating that “serious debt makes you twice as likely to be overweight or obese.” For people with both shopping and eating problems, she offers this six-step plan:

—Start with one thing first.
It’s not easy to tackle two daunting tasks at once. And dieting—whether with your stomach or your wallet—can be incredibly daunting. So pick either your weight or your money as your first focus.

—Deal with feelings of deprivation.
When you start reining in your spending so you have money to pay down your debt, you might actually gain a few pounds at first. Be on the lookout for your impulses to transfer from shopping to eating. When you’re trimming your spending, if it feels like deprivation, you’re going to try to fill yourself up in another way. Eating is the commonest other way. To minimize the chances of this happening, give yourself small manageable goals. Save $10 to put toward your debt this week, or drink water instead of soda.  Next week, you can aim to save $15 or start taking a walk on your lunch break.  If even that seems like too much, alternate so you focus on your weight one week and your debt the next.

—Once you’re feeling in control, layer.
You’ve dropped a few pounds or paid down a few hundred in debt and now you’re feeling pretty good, right?  In fact, what you’ve learned is impulse control.  You’ve given your willpower a workout.  Now it’s time to add on the second half of the equation.  You’ll see that the challenge you’ve already conquered will help you. When you get a grip on your finances and live in the black instead of in the red, you’ll be less stressed out, which helps reduce stress eating.  In the short term, losing weight increases your self-esteem, which could make you less prone to emotional eating and shopping. However, it could go the other way, like it did for Jennifer Hudson, so be on the lookout for rewarding yourself for losing weight by overshopping.

—Pick a new distraction.
If you substitute eating for shopping, or shopping for eating, you’re right back to where you started.  Instead, try to figure out what will meet your needs and not erode your life in the way that turning to food and to stuff does.  Call up a friend and see if she can get together for coffee, take a long walk, go on a run, or organize a space in your home that has gotten out of control.  All of these things can help quell the feelings that might drive you to shop and eat.

—Reward yourself.
We all need something to look forward to, and often, it’s easier to meet goals if we make them tangible.  Give yourself milestones, and when you reach them, have a mini-celebration: join a friend for a drink, get a manicure, have that cookie (just one) you’ve been wanting.  To keep yourself on track, think about what reaching your goals will mean.  If you pay off debt, you might have an extra $300 to put toward something you want, like the payment on a new car or a trip to the beach next summer. And if you shed the extra weight, you can wear a bikini on that trip with confidence, or play with your kids without getting winded.

—Finally (and this is not so much a step as a long-term change), delve deeper.
Once you’ve seen some early progress, it’s time to figure out why you’re overspending and why you’re overeating.  Often, it’s about loneliness. When you’re at the mall, you’re surrounded by people, and the sales clerks all want to make you happy. Another common root is low self-esteem.  You already feel bad about how you look, so you figure one donut won’t make a difference.  You need a boost, so you head to your favorite store, where you can try on a new outfit and everyone will tell you how amazing it looks on you.  Or maybe it’s plain old boredom.  You have too much downtime, at work or at home, so you’re constantly snacking and shopping online.  Whether you’re shopping or staring into the fridge, ask yourself a few simple questions:  Why are you here?  How do you feel?  Do you need this?  Keep in mind this mantra for overshoppers and overeaters: “you can never get enough of what you don’t  really need.”  Eating and shopping often spiral out of control because we’re trying to fill a void, but going about it in the wrong way.  Once you’ve pinpointed what really drives you to the store and the fridge—and often, it’s the same thing—you can start dealing with it in a constructive, lasting way.

Four recent reports from three continents—Europe, Africa, and Asia—point to the widening net of shopping addiction. Coupled with my recent post, “Compulsive Buying: A Passage to India?” there’s more and more evidence that it poses a serious and worsening global problem.

In a piece in the Austria Times, alarmingly titled “Every fourth Austrian threatened by shopping addiction,” Richard Wolf discusses a 2010 study of 1000 consumers. The study found that one in four Austrians goes on regular shopping sprees, with 19% classified as “clearly at risk” and 8% as “strongly at risk” of compulsive shopping. The most vulnerable group in the risk pool were young women, ages 14-24.

A Parisian research team who’ve published several scholarly articles about compulsive buying interviewed 200 consecutive women entering Les Galeries Lafayette, the famous Parisian department store. Using standardized criteria to diagnose compulsive buying and a questionnaire especially designed to assess compulsive buying and its consequences, they identified a staggering 32.5% of the women as compulsive buyers. Of course, since the sample consisted entirely of “shoppers in the act of shopping,” the prevalence is not likely to be as much in the population at large.

From Women24, an online magazine in South Africa, comes a piece by Corlia Erwee. Though she does not say where her data comes from, Erwee asserts that between 1% and 2% of the South African population, mostly women, are battling shopping addiction—a remarkable number given the still lopsided distribution of wealth in the ex-apartheid country.

Most surprising of all is Liu Rui’s recent anecdotal piece in the Global Times, “Shopping madness set to infect China.” While Rui relies on her personal knowledge of China rather than on peer-reviewed studies, she sees the boom in China’s economy as a double-edged sword, with economic winners often “showing off the wealth” with egregious sprees and displays of luxuries.

Recently, I discovered an article called “Attention Shopaholics” that was published in The Hindu, an Indian newspaper. To get a better idea about compulsive shopping in an Indian context, I contacted Dr. Sanjay Chugh, who was quoted extensively in the article.  He is the Senior Consultant Psychiatrist at the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi in addition to having an active private practice. Here’s the text of our conversation.

SC:  Before I begin to answer your questions, I think it is important for us to have some understanding of the context in which we are viewing Compulsive Buying.

India is a developing country. As you said, India has a huge amount of diversity in terms of culture, languages, beliefs, and socio-economic status. While you can see a lot of affluence in the metropolitan cities, you can also see abject poverty. The economy is improving and so is buying power.

Mental health has just begun to get some attention in India. There’s a great deal of work that’s required. The population is huge and the facilities are very limited. Til very recent times, consulting a psychiatrist was considered taboo. Now people, especially in the bigger cities, have started treating it like any other stream of medical help.

Disorders like Compulsive Buying are not considered a very serious matter by the general population. Shopping is considered to be a very normal behavior and also a mood elevator at times. Many people suffering with this disorder remain disguised for years because people feel that it is normal to shop.

AB: Do you know anything about the prevalence of compulsive buying in India? Does it seem to be on the increase as a result of modernization and globalization?

SC:  It would be difficult to give you statistics on this one but compulsive buying has been around for a long time now, and it is only on the rise. One explanation for this could also be the fact that now the levels of awareness about mental health issues are much better than before. People are not only able to recognize that compulsive buying could be a treatable disorder, but are also much more receptive to psychiatric / psychological help.

Yes, modernization and globalization along with the growing economy have all made it easier for an individual to become a compulsive buyer.

AB: Do you know if there are any published papers in Indian journals about compulsive buying?  I haven’t found any in my literature searches.

SC:  No, I do not know of any papers published on this subject in India. It is a very unlikely theme for a paper in India! If I come across one, I will let you know.

AB: How does it breakdown along religious and/or caste lines? What are the demographics of the typical, if there is one, compulsive buyer in India?

SC:  One will need to conduct a large scale, in-depth study to get the demographics on this one. In my own practice, I have come across mostly females exhibiting this disorder. The age group would begin roughly around early 20s. I can’t really give an end point to this one as very often, the family members would get the affected person here after years of damage and suffering.

AB: Does it affect both men and women and if so, in what proportion? Do they seem to buy different things?

SC:  Yes, if affects both genders. But in my experience, I have seen more women than men. Women tend to shop for things like clothes, accessories, shoes, cosmetics, bags etc. Men shop for gadgets, tools etc.

AB: What are the associated disorders among compulsive buyers in India?

SC:  Some of the associated disorders are OCD, Depression, Substance Abuse, and Eating Disorders.

AB: Are there therapists in India that you know of who treat this problem specifically?

SC:  In India, with the imbalanced demand-supply ratio, there are hardly any therapists who can stick to being specialists of one disorder. The therapists here need to cater to all sorts of disorders.

AB: Are there any treatment centers that focus on shopping addiction?

SC:  I am not aware of any dedicated centers of this kind in India, and I’m very sure I would have known of such a clinic.

AB: Are there recent economic and political developments that explain any of the things we’ve talked about?

SC:  Yes, in a way. The economic growth and the increased buying power of Indians has certainly added to this problem. Also, India is now much more open to imports and foreign stores /food chains etc. With a greater variety of things to buy, I am sure the temptations for the shopaholic only increase.

AB: In the U.S., compulsive buying is considered the “smiled-upon” addiction, because consumption fuels our economy.  How is it viewed in India? Of course, I realize that India is a very big country with many constituencies, so that there may not be a dominant Indian view of compulsive buying.

SC:  Well, this is one thing where the entire country might be united because, as I said earlier, buying is something that people associate with normal behavior. So, compulsive buying is not really considered to be a disorder. People may not like it and may suffer losses due to it, but it still takes some talking to make them understand that this is a disorder. All the cases we have seen so far at this center were brought in for some other disorder. It was only in the course of treatment that compulsive buying was discovered.

AB: What kinds of treatment approaches are currently used for compulsive buying in India?

SC: At my clinic, we largely use a lot of Cognitive Behavior Therapy with people who are compulsive buyers. I have also used Naltrexone in a lot of my clients. The other modalities that we often use in combination and have found good results with are Hypnotherapy and RTMS (Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation).

Having begun a dialogue, Dr. Chugh and I plan to check in with each other every so often to compare notes.

Although not all compulsive buyers are particularly interested in such distinctions, there’s some uncertainty among the mental health profession about whether to see overshopping as a genuine disorder or merely a bad habit, and more uncertainty about whether, if it is a disorder, it aligns more closely with the obsessive-compulsive spectrum or with the impulsive-control continuum.  In the journal Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience (2010; 12(2): 175-85), D.W. Black, M. Shaw, and N. Blum make a case for seeing compulsive shopping as a legitimate disorder on the impulse-control continuum.

In their article, “Pathological gambling and compulsive buying: do they fall within an obsessive-compulsive spectrum?” the authors point out that these questions assume greater importance now because final revisions to the DSM are being prepared, revisions that will soon culminate in DSM-5. Compulsive buying has for the first time been proposed for inclusion.

Examining both compulsive buying and pathological gambling in terms of their history, definition, classification, phenomenology, family history, pathophysiology, and clinical management, Black and his colleagues conclude that neither disorder belongs on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum. They recommend that gambling be left in its present place, among impulse-control disorders, and that compulsive shopping now be added to that family.

On November 10th, I was a member of the personal finance panel at the Texas Conference for Women in Houston. The panel, Rebound and Recover: Strategies for Emerging from the Recession and Taking Control of Your Finances, definitely delivered on the promise of giving the audience members practical skills and tools and I was delighted to be a part of it.

My fellow panelists were fellow New Yorker, Galia Gichon of Down to Earth Finance, Tina Pennington, co-author with her sister Many Williams of “What I Learned About Life When My Husband Got Fired”.and our moderator was Charlotte Stallings, a dynamic personal finance speaker in Houston, who is coming out with a book in December.

Galia has graciously allowed me to use her blog post of takeaways from the conference. Meeting Galia was the best part of the experience for me; she’s a smart, committed empathic personal finance coach, whose company, Down to Earth is an independent resource dedicated to educating clients– especially women–about investing and financial control. In addition to coaching, she offers teleseminars and teleclasses. Have a look at her website www.downtoearthfinance.com

Galia’s takeaways:

Investment Advice
The consensus seemed to be that many women are overwhelmed with choices in their 401ks. I offered the following advice. Start by consolidating old retirement plans to their current retirement plan. This includes old pensions you are able to rollover. The second part is to truly limit the number of mutual funds you have in your 401k. Pick one of each of the following categories: large cap, small cap, international and bond. The percentage you put in each depends on your age and risk level. A general rule of thumb is your age in bonds. If you are 35, you should have 35% of your total portfolio in bonds.

Another key piece of advice was using a financial calculator to determine how much you should be saving annually for retirement. My favorite ones are on kiplinger.com/tools. Even though most of us aren’t saving what we should be, you will most likely feel relieved to know your number.

Money Therapy
April Benson kept astounding the room with statistics and profound observations about our shopping habits and money philosophies! 25% of people shop for revenge, either against their spouse or parent. She also described shopping as a way of holding onto LIFE and putting off death as long as we can. She then went into her 6 questions you should ask yourself when you are shopping, such as “What if I wait?” and “Where will I put it?”. They will clearly make you spend more consciously, spend less and feel more in control of your money. I’m reading her book now and enjoying it tremendously, pick up a copy now.

Don’t Use Financial Terms
Tina Pennington kept saying she wasn’t an expert but she clearly knew much more than most individuals in the room. One point she brought up which struck a cord with me was when she was attempting to roll up her sleeves and learn about her financial situation, her sister, Mandy, asked if she knew what her assets and liabilities were. Tina stood there with a blank stare. Mandy then went on to explain they were simply what she owns and what she owes, which Tina easily could figure out. We get stuck very often on financial terms and they can be a huge obstacle to us moving forward. Take a step back and simplify it so you can actually move forward.

Needs Versus Wants
Charlotte Stallings, our eloquent moderator discussed her Needs Versus Wants cards. Attach them to a credit card so you can quickly make a decision before purchasing an item you may not need. Next time you buy something, think long and hard, do you need it or just want it?
I’ll be on the same panel at the Massachusetts Conference for Women on December 9th and it’ll be interesting, with all different co-panelists and a different moderator, to compare notes!