Factors Impacting Decision Making

Don’t shop when you are hungry

I had jury duty the other week and it got me thinking about the challenges within our judicial system. I recalled that researchers had determined that the time of day that judicial decisions were made affected the outcomes. This is colloquially known as the hungry judge effect, where judges were more inclined to be lenient after a meal but more severe before the break. This is based on the study of eight Jewish-Israeli judges over a 10 month period and the resulting paper, Extraneous factors in judicial decisions, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. It turns out that factors affecting judicial decisions are an interesting topic of study. Researchers Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan from Louisiana State University, found that judges whose college football teams lost doled out harsher sentences in the week following. In their paper Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles, they stated, “We find that unexpected losses increase disposition (sentence) lengths assigned by judges during the week following the game. Unexpected wins, or losses that were expected to be close contests ex-ante, have no impact.”

While research is attracted to judicial decisions because the ramifications are so severe, we are all impacted by these exogenous factors. Researchers have long targeted the impact of insufficient sleep, with findings such as these reported in the Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research by psychologist Kenneth Nowack, “leaders who reported poor quality and quantity of sleep were rated significantly lower on interpersonal effectiveness after controlling for gender and perceived work/life stress by their direct reports and peers.” Of course sleep isn’t the only factor, researcher George Loewenstein from Carnegie Mellon University reported in his paper, Out of Control: Visceral Influences on Behavior, “...visceral factors [hunger, thirst] have a disproportionate effect on behavior and tend to ‘crowd out’ virtually all goals other than that of mitigating the visceral factor.” Not surprising that stress and performance pressure have significant impacts on our decision making. Research has reported that, “High performance pressure encourages people to fall back on simple black-and-white decision-making processing, without taking the time, energy, and resources, to consider other situational factors that might be relevant.”

We are humans and most of us work with other humans; therefore, we are all affected by these physical and emotional factors. How many of us have said either to ourselves or a close confidant, “the boss must be having a bad day” after they reacted poorly in a meeting? It is the rare boss who will admit that they are stressed, tired, hungry, or otherwise impacted by something. I’ve been fortunate enough to know a few. Most of us have heard the advice to not go shopping when we are hungry, since it leads to poor decisions but how many of us heed that advice in our daily work? Many of us were taught to go out of our way to check on our team members. We know to make sure our team members eat first, and the importance of getting to know about folks' personal lives. How many of us were taught to monitor ourselves, or even less likely, to talk about how these external factors are impacting us, our decisions, and our reactions to situations?

As leaders of our organizations, families, communities, etc. we aren’t expected to be robots. In fact being human and admitting mistakes makes us more approachable, but changing how we make decisions based on factors that aren’t readily apparent to our teams or people impacted by the decisions, can be very frustrating for them. One of the most prized leadership traits is consistency. The reason is that it lowers stress levels since folks aren’t worried about “what mood the boss is in” and it allows them to make decisions knowing where you will come down on a particular topic. Thus, giving them much more autonomy. We can increase our level of leadership consistency by being aware of how these external factors might be impacting our decision making.