Willpower

of the University of Chicago, and Dan Ariely of Duke—found that the online customers typically go out with fewer than 1 percent of the people whose profiles they check out. Romance seekers have much better luck at speed-dating events, which are generally limited to a dozen or two dozen people. Each person spends several minutes talking to each of the potential partners. Then all the participants turn in scorecards indicating which people they’d like to see again, and those with mutual interest are matched up. The average participant makes a match with at least one in ten of the people they meet, and some studies have found the ratio to be two or three in ten. Faced with fewer options in mates and an immediate deadline, the speed daters quickly pick out potential partners. But because the online seekers have so many choices, Ariely says, they just go on browsing.
    “When you have all these criteria to consider, and so many people to choose from, you start striving for perfection,” he says. “You don’t want to settle for someone who’s not ideal in height, age, religion, and forty-five other dimensions.” Ariely further studied this reluctance to give up options by watching people play a computer game in which they earned real cash by opening doors to find rewards inside rooms. The best strategy was to open each of the three doors on the computer screen, find the one with the most lucrative rewards, and then stay in that room. But even after players learned that strategy, they had a hard time following it when an additional feature was introduced: If they stayed out of any room for a while, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear, effectively closing the door permanently. That prospect so bothered players that they would jump back into a room to keep the door open even though the move reduced their overall earnings.
    “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Ariely says. Sometimes that makes sense, but too often we’re so eager to keep options open that we don’t see the long-term price that we’re paying—or that others are paying. When you won’t settle for less than a perfect mate, you end up with no one. When parents can never say no to projects at the office, their children suffer at home. When a judge can’t bring himself to make a hard decision about parole, he’s quite literally closing the door on the prisoner’s cell.

Lazy Choices
    To compromise is human. In the animal kingdom, you don’t see a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and their victims. The ability to compromise is a particularly advanced and difficult form of decision making—and therefore one of the first abilities to decline when our willpower is depleted, particularly when we take our depleted selves shopping.
    Shoppers face continual compromises between quality and price, which don’t always change in the same proportions at the same time. Often, price goes up much faster than quality. A wine selling for $100 a bottle is usually better than a $20 wine, but is it five times better? Is a $1,000-per-night hotel room five times nicer than a $200-per-night room? There’s no objectively correct answer—it all depends on your taste and your budget—but the relative paucity of $100 wines and $1,000 hotel rooms indicates that most people don’t find the extra quality worthwhile. Above a certain point, increases in price are not worth the gains in quality. Choosing that point is the optimal decision. But it requires the difficult task of figuring out just where that point is.
    When your willpower is low, you’re less able to make these trade-offs. You become what researchers call a “cognitive miser,” hoarding your energy by avoiding compromises. You’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: Just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying).
    Decision fatigue leaves us vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as was demonstrated by Jonathan Levav, the Columbia psychologist, in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars. The idea for these experiments, like Jean Twenge’s, also happened to come during the preparations for a wedding. At his fiancée’s suggestion, Levav visited a tailor to have a bespoke suit made and began going through the choices of fabric, type of