3

I saw this advertisement posted on the way to work today, and it made the claim that people make "about 35000 decisions a day".

enter image description here

A quick Google search shows that this claim is widely parroted but never sourced.

Is there any evidence for or against this claim?

March Ho
  • 18,688
  • 12
  • 81
  • 109
  • 5
    There are 86400 seconds in a day. If we subtract 8 hours sleep, that leaves 57600 seconds. So you would be making a decision roughly every 1.5 seconds. That does not leave much time to think about them, or to actually execute them! – hdhondt Apr 28 '16 at 01:22
  • 7
    @hdhondt - you're thinking about large scale decisions, like buying a car or deciding what you're gonna eat; each time you intentionally take a step, you have to realize that you could've stopped instead. Each step is some sort of decision (probably plural, as it's a complex activity), as is each intentional movement of your arms, fingers, eyes, etc. That quote is super misleading, and very much taken out of context, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were true. – Dungarth Apr 28 '16 at 02:10
  • 2
    @hdhondt: Well, consider that as I'm typing this, each word choice is a decision. And if I notice that I mistyped 'work' for word, going back to correct it involves a series of decisions - do I backspace, use the cursor keys to move there, the mouse, or should I even bother to fix it?) So there's more than one decision per second - some of them in parallel, like spelling, word choice, sentence structure... – jamesqf Apr 28 '16 at 06:03
  • @jamesqf And one could argue that correcting "work" to "word" is only 1 or 2 decisions, with the rest being muscle memory. – yo' Apr 28 '16 at 06:43
  • 8
    I don't think this question is answerable without a coherent definition of *decision*. – gerrit Apr 28 '16 at 10:18
  • @gerrit That's the problem: what exactly is meant by "a decision"? Sure, every muscle twitch can be called a decision, but I would expect it's only a decision if you actually have to decide something: will I do A or B? Correcting a word is a decision. All the other actions involved in that action, taking several seconds, are not. – hdhondt Apr 28 '16 at 10:50
  • 1
    Researchers at Cornell found that people make an average of 226.7 decisions a day about food alone. Wansink, Brian and Jeffrey Sobal (2007), “Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook,” Environment and Behavior 39:1, 106-123. And this site does come out and say the 35,000 number is still unsourced: http://go.roberts.edu/leadingedge/the-great-choices-of-strategic-leaders – JasonR Apr 28 '16 at 12:18
  • A British survey differs from the claimed count of the OP since it finds that a typical adult makes 27 judgments a day-http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/average-person-makes-773618-decisions-90742. – pericles316 Apr 28 '16 at 12:45
  • If decision-making requires free will, then there's an argument to be made that we make no decisions at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_determinism. If we talk about decisions in the sense that we talk about in computing, then there's no reason to discount unconscious decisions, like muscle memory. – called2voyage Apr 28 '16 at 18:25
  • 1
    @called2voyage: Why should decision making require free will? I doubt anyone would argue that say a dumb (that is, not programmable or internet connected) theromstat has free will, yet it decides whether to turn your heating on or off depending on the temperature. – jamesqf Apr 29 '16 at 04:18
  • @jamesqf exactly, so why not include muscle memory? – called2voyage Apr 29 '16 at 04:35
  • @called2voyage: I don't know that there's a hard & fast answer. I think it comes down to the difference between a decision and a reflex (as when the doctor taps your knee with a rubber hammer). I'd say choosing to type 'aardvark' is definitely a decision, maybe each letter is one (especially if you're not that good at spelling), but for a practiced typist the finger movements are more like reflexes. But that's just my opinion :-) – jamesqf Apr 30 '16 at 04:51
  • @jamesqf: I feel like decision making requires a choice. The thermostat has no choice about whether to turn the heating on or off, it just does what it's programmed to do based on the input. There's no option to do otherwise, and hence, no decision. It's like saying the ball I pushed off the table "decided" to fall to the floor - was there anything else it could have done? – Nuclear Hoagie Sep 15 '16 at 14:33

0 Answers0