Decisions, decisions
by Bernard McGrath, Inspection Validation Centre

A Happy New Year to you all, and thank you for deciding to come back for another year. Have you made any New Year’s resolutions yet? If you have, do you know why you chose those resolutions? If you haven’t, then do you know why you chose not to? Because, either way, you will have made a decision and the basis for the decisions we make is not always logical and reasoned. Does the following seem familiar?
Customer: “Can I have a glass of lemonade please?”
Bar person: “Do you want a bottle or draught?”
Customer: “Draught will do.”
Bar person: ”Do you want a half or a pint?”
Customer: “A half.”
Bar person: ”Do you want ice?”
Customer: “No thanks.”
Bar person: ”Do you want a slice of lemon?”
Customer: “Arrrrrgh! I just want a lemonade, not an interrogation!”

Just the shear quantity of decisions that we are faced with in a day can lead to decision fatigue. It is estimated that we make somewhere between 2,500 and, if you happen to have ordered a few lemonades, 10,000 decisions per day. And this can have big repercussions. An article in the New York Times in August 2011 reported on research showing that judges were more likely to opt for the easier decision, for them of course, of rejecting parole in the afternoon than in the morning when they were fresher. The mental work of making decisions uses up energy and makes us fatigued. We then more readily take shortcuts to reach our decisions.

Having evolved over a long period of time, we have got many such shortcuts to call upon. And the trouble is we are blind to our own blindness in decision making. In a recent radio interview, Daniel Kahneman cited such an example. When people were asked how much they would pay for insurance that paid out £100,000 in the event of death, they were willing to pay more for one which specifically paid out for dying in a terrorist attack than one which paid out for dying anyhow. The reason for this is that the fear of terrorism is stronger than the general fear of dying, and this fear motivates a higher willingness to pay for insurance. This process is called attribute substitution, where judgement of a complex attribute is simplified by the use of a more easily calculated attribute.

There are many more examples. Anchoring, where we rely too heavily, or ‘anchor’, on one trait or piece of information. The bandwagon effect, which is related to groupthink and herd behaviour; this is the tendency to decide to do something because many other people are doing the same: it could be why you chose that New Year’s resolution! Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. Similarly, experimenter’s or expectation bias leads experimenters to believe and publish data that agree with their expectations for the results of an experiment, and to disbelieve or downgrade data that appears to conflict with those expectations. Due to the endowment effect, people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it. This is also referred to as the sunk cost effect. Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented, is called the framing effect. Zero-risk bias is the preference for deciding in favour of reducing a small risk to zero over that of achieving a greater reduction in a larger risk. With the pseudocertainty effect we have the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes. And these are just a selection!

It may be worthwhile to look at some of these shortcuts in more detail in a future article, but for now it is relatively easy to see how they may impact on the reliability of NDT. What is more, reaching decision fatigue through your work could then impact on your decisions when you go home, leading to poor  decisions regarding such things as diet, alcohol consumption and other lifestyle choices. The good news is that the impact of decision fatigue can be reversed by both rest and an intake of glucose.

So, I suggest that the New Year’s resolution you should make is to only make a resolution after you have had a good night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast!

Please note that the views expressed in this column are the author’s own personal ramblings for the purpose of encouraging discussion within the NDT Newspaper. They do not represent the views of the IVC, Serco Assurance or the HSE who funded the PANI projects.

Letters can be mailed to The Editor, NDT News, Newton Building, St George’s Avenue, Northampton NN2 6JB. Fax: 01604 89 3861; Email: ndtnews@bindt.org or email Bernard McGrath direct at Bernard.McGrath@sercoassurance.com