Make Decisions You Can Stomach

Have you ever impulse-bought food in a supermarket, only to arrive home and find it’s lost its appeal?

Even in the span of half an hour, I’ve been known to change my mind about the food I just bought and save it for another day, rummaging around in my fridge for an alternative.

It turns out, it’s not just me who struggles to predict what a future version of myself would enjoy eating, doing or being. Psychologists have determined that we’re often wrong about what we want, especially when we’re convinced we’re right.

Decision-making on an empty stomach

When I’m browsing supermarket shelves at the end of a long day, I’m hungry, making me indecisive and prone to impulse buys. When I stock up on groceries after dinner, I have a clear list in mind and am in-and-out fast without much deliberation.

Psychologists refer to such emotional extremes as “hot and cold empathy gaps”. Hot emotional states occur when our emotions are influenced by hunger, sexual desire, fear, exhaustion or other strong emotions. Cold emotional states are more rational and logical.

These hot and cold extremes act as anchor-points for tastes, behaviours and beliefs. In a hot emotional state of hunger, my shelf-scanning registers sweet treats. Back home in a cold state after dinner, my decision may differ.

Are decisions best-served cold?

In Daniel Kahneman’s famous study where hungry judges dealt more stringent sentences before lunch, it’s clear that hot emotional states are not best-suited to decision-making.

It follows that adopting a rational state of mind before making a decision is not a bad idea, but it is bad advice. First, it’s not realistic. It’s simply not possible to make all of our 35,000 decisions per day in a cold state. We’re hot-headed beings reacting to the outside world in an emotionally intelligent way.

Second, even if we make the decision in a cool, rational state, we don’t know how we will feel by the time the consequences of that decision come to pass. Cold emotional states fail to take into account how we may feel in a hot state and how this will affect our decision-making.

If we’re in a state of calm, we assume “future us” will be in a state of calm and we plan accordingly. The Decision Lab explains that this “causes us to make decisions that are short-sighted and based on current emotions, beliefs and values that will not necessarily hold up in the long run.”

We might decide to get a healthy salad for lunch, but one stressful morning of meetings and a delayed lunch break later, the only salad we’re eating is inside a burger.

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Biting off more than we can chew

Just as we overestimate our appetite for food, economics professor Mark Kauffman found our emotional state is liable to overestimate our appetite for work. When we kick off a new project we’re optimistic, feeling well-rested and energised. We subconsciously assume we will be able to maintain this well-rested, energised feeling for the whole project and plan accordingly. As our energy decreases, we struggle to keep up with ambitious timelines and lofty expectations.

Imagine writing a workshop itinerary based on your average office day. Perhaps you grabbed a twenty minute lunch break between calls and enjoyed a few water-cooler chats. You felt tired, but it was manageable.

It’s possible that in a cold, rational state, you assume people can hack the same schedule in next week’s workshop. You toss in a few bathroom breaks for good measure and lock in the schedule. On the day, you’re under pressure to deliver and overwhelmed by the large numbers of people, the new venue and the energy required to facilitate the day’s programming. You and the participants quickly grow hungry, tired and restless. Why? Taking people even slightly out of their comfort zone requires us to buffer for a hotter emotional state.

Rewriting the Recipe

Failure to account for the hot-cold empathy gap leads to overwork, tight deadlines and unreasonable expectations set for both ourselves and others. To make better decisions on behalf of our future selves, we need to have more empathy for how “future us” will feel.

Hot to Cold

When you’re in a hot emotional state because you’re hungry, tired or stressed:

Take stock: half the time, we don’t even realise we’re hot or cold before we make the decision.

Defer decisions: “I will get back to you.” Note: avoid the empathy gap trap by giving yourself flexibility on when to revert, rather than creating another deadline.

Seek a second opinion: use fresh perspectives as the cold shower to jolt you out of the hot state.

Cold to Hot

When you’re feeling calm and rational, account for hot states:

Imagine: how will you feel in the moment of truth? If you love your new smart shoes and they only pinch slightly when you walk around the house, they’ll hurt like hell on the way to the job interview.

Buffer: not sure? Add some more. There’s a reason housing renovations, weddings, holidays often end up over-budget. In our rational “project manager” state we fail to buffer for emotional stress, cognitive overload and our old friend, temptation.

Find patterns: in a cold state, we can rationalise why we should rarely splurge money on extravagant things, but years of purchases made in a hot state point to an ever-increasing trend. The data doesn’t lie, so don’t let the rational brain persuade you otherwise.

Whether hot to cold or cold to hot, the patterns psychologists have uncovered speak loud and clear: we’re often wrong about what we want, especially when we’re convinced we’re right. To place blind trust in our decision-making abilities is to forget how often a change of mood brings with it a change of mind.

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