The dangers of decision fatigue

“HAVE A BREAK” is a slogan associated with the popular chocolate snack, KitKat. But it may be pretty good advice for any manager or worker, minus the calories. The longer the shift, the less effective the employee may become.In a new paper for , “Quantifying the cost of decision fatigue: suboptimal risk decisions in finance”, Tobias Baer and Simone Schnall examine the credit decisions of loan officers at a leading bank over the course of their working day. The academics write that decision fatigue “typically involves a tendency to revert to the ‘default’ option, namely whatever choice involves relatively little mental effort”. In other words, as you become tired, you get mentally lazy.