A marketing presentation at the University of Minnesota's business school last week had me furiously taking notes, not because of the marketing insight but because of what sounded like terrific life advice.
The wisdom came from Kathleen Vohs, the first of two presenters that day. She was clearly no stranger to this audience made up of marketing executives, Carlson School of Management colleagues and students, judging by the whooping and hollering that followed her introduction.
Marketing happens to be what she teaches, but she has at least one foot in psychology and neuroscience. She has had lots of research interests but might be best known for working on the problem people seem to have with getting worn down by making decisions.
As she described it, people do want choices in their lives and will be unhappy if someone tries to limit them. On the other hand, the very act of choosing is taxing. And people can quickly burn out through a limited capacity to make good decisions and end up fuzzyheaded.
Once making all of these decisions has worn people down, a problem frequently called decision fatigue, it's a sure bet that their willpower is depleted, too. Decision fatigue and loss of self control are very closely related.
One of the ways Vohs demonstrated a relationship between self control and decisionmaking was in a simple experiment she described, to see how long students could keep their arms in an aquarium filled with ice and water. This was a mostly harmless way to measure pain tolerance and willpower.
Students from one group were asked to make a bunch of product decisions before sticking their arms in the tank. Another group had no choices to make. As you maybe guessed, the volunteers who had made the product choices pulled their arms out a lot sooner than the other volunteers.
This phenomenon of crumbling self-control is what could explain why, after a trying day of rapid-fire decisions at work along with a quick trip to Target, someone could come home and put away a full box of Girl Scout cookies before dinner without really thinking about it.