Willpower

lining, style of buttons, and so forth.
    “By the time I got through the third pile of fabric swatches, I wanted to kill myself,” Levav recalls. “I couldn’t tell the choices apart anymore. After a while my only response to the tailor became: ‘What do you recommend?’ I just couldn’t take it.”
    Levav ended up not buying any kind of bespoke suit (the twothousand-dollar price tag eventually made that decision easy), but he put the experience to use in a couple of experiments conducted with Mark Heitmann of Christian-Albrechts University in Germany, Andreas Hermann at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, and Sheena Iyengar of Columbia. One involved asking MBA students in Switzerland to choose a bespoke suit; the other was conducted at German car dealerships by discreetly observing customers ordering options for their new sedans. The car buyers—and these were real customers spending their own money—had to choose, for instance, among four styles of gearshift knobs, thirteen kinds of tires and rims, twenty-five configurations of the engine and gearbox, and a palette of fifty-six different colors for the interior of the sedan.
    As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in they’d start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process—like going through those fifty-six colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown for the sedan’s interior— the quicker people got fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than fifteen hundred euros per car (about two thousand dollars at the time). Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy tire rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered (early or late) and how much willpower was left in the customer. Similar results were found in the experiment with custom-made suits: Once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions—the ones with the most options, like the one hundred fabrics for the suit—they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less than if they started off with easier decisions before moving on to the tough ones.
    Sometimes shoppers get so tired of making choices that they simply stop buying, but clever marketers can often find ways to exploit decision fatigue, and you don’t have to go any farther than your supermarket to see their strategy. After you navigate the aisles and deplete your willpower by choosing among thousands of nutritious foods and practical products, what greets you as you wait in line at the cash register? Gossipy tabloids and chocolate bars. Not for nothing are they called impulse purchases. It’s no accident that the candy is presented just at the moment when your impulse control is weakest—and just when your decision-fatigued brain is desperate for a quick hit of glucose.

Choose Your Prize
    Suppose, as a reward for finishing this chapter, we offered you a choice of two checks that have been filled out and dated. One is for $100 and can be cashed tomorrow. The other is for $150 and cannot be cashed until a month from tomorrow. Which would you choose?
    To an economist, the now-or-later money question is a classic test of self-control. There are generally no reliable investments (at least not legal ones) that will increase your money by 50 percent in a single month. Unless you have a rare opportunity to double your money in a month, or an immediate financial emergency and no other source of funds, you’d be better off turning down the $100 in quick cash and waiting a month to receive $150. Hence, in general, the right answer to the payment question is to take the larger, later reward. Being able to resist short-term temptations in favor of long-term payoffs is the secret not just to wealth but to civilization itself. It took singular willpower for the first farmers to go out and plant seeds instead of treating themselves to an immediate meal.
    So why do their better-fed descendants grab the $100 now instead of waiting for the $150 in a month, as many people do in experiments? One