Managers unknowingly drain meaning from a job

thinking too much

Have you ever had to make a decision that seemed simple, but became much more difficult as time passed?

After going back and forth, weighing the positives and negatives of something, what seemed like an easy answer becomes considerably harder. In fact, the more time we devote to deciding something, often the more frustrating it becomes.

According to “Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions,” published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people who spend too much time thinking about advantages and disadvantages about a decision sometimes sabotage themselves.

In the article, authors Timothy D. Wilson and others examined how thinking can interfere with someone's original decision. Wilson tested subjects by having them sample five different jams previously reviewed in Consumer Reports by expert jam tasters. The tasters had rated the jams on scales of taste, tartness, consistency, and other areas.

Researchers split the subjects into a control group and a “reasons analysis” group. Each group tasted the five jams and rated them by preference. The control group simply rated the jam, but the reasons analysis group gave reasons for why they rated a jam a certain way.

Wilson's team found that the control group rated the jams consistently near the experts’ ratings, but the reasons analysis group had a much harder time.

In fact, when subjects in the reasons group began to list their reasons, many of them changed their minds about certain jams, conforming their attitudes to the reasons listed. And when this happened, the group actually moved further away from the experts' opinions.

Wilson suggests that when the reasons analysis group began analyzing why it liked certain jams better than others, it began to place more weight on aspects of the jam that didn't matter to group members initially, such as consistency.

Wilson's findings show that when people think too much about a decision, they sometimes over-analyze the decision, changing what's important to them. And sometimes, this analyzation even leads them to decisions that are worse in the long run.