Some people are naturally more decisive. These charge-ahead types make choices assuredly, from the trivial to the life-changing, stick to them and don’t look back. But do they make better decisions?
It turns out that indecisive people don’t make worse decisions. In fact, the art of making good choices is as much about how we make them, and whether we actually put our decisions into action, as it is the choices themselves.
Wojciech Zajkowski, a postgraduate researcher from Cardiff University, and two coauthors came to that conclusion after studying the way people make decisions. Their peer-reviewed paper was published online earlier this month.
From an initial survey of 723 people, they formed two groups of 60 respondents based on answers to questions that measured “action control,” one of the main factors believed to determine decision-making effectiveness and execution skills.
According to this classification, “action-oriented” people—those who find it easier to initiate and follow through on decisions—more easily adjust to time pressure or stress and are more likely to follow through on their decisions. “State-oriented” people, on the other hand, find decisions more difficult, are less flexible, more likely to question the choices they’ve made and more prone to abandoning efforts later.
In case you’re wondering, only a small portion of one’s action control is accounted for by personality factors such as extroversion or openness.
The participants were put through a series of simple cognitive tasks and compared across a series of factors, such as how quickly they could acquire new information, how much information they needed to commit to a choice and how confident they were about their decision.
To Zajkowski’s surprise, there was no material difference when it came to the quality or accuracy of the decisions they produced. State-oriented people proved as able to respond quickly and accurately to changing tasks and to incorporate additional information.
However, there was an important difference between the groups: State-oriented people lacked the same confidence in their decisions. A second experiment, adding subjective tasks, confirmed the initial finding.
The problem for the more deliberative, state-oriented among us is that low decision-confidence can easily translate into discouragement, despair, or simply low levels of commitment to one’s choices. And for those pursuing long courses of study toward a career path, writing books, building businesses or repairing relationships, that steady dedication can be the key determining factor of success.