Do We Really Make 35,000 Decisions a Day?
When it comes to the number of decisions we make in a day, 35,000 feels more or less accurate. So, when I heard this ‘fact’ earlier this month, I wanted to know how you could actually determine that number.
What I found was a spaghetti plate of “researchers say” inside a helping of “Now That’s What I Call Maintenance Phase.”
In April 2022, CNN publishes an article on decision fatigue, citing a researcher named Eva Krockow. CNN’s citation (although they don’t link to it) refers to a 2018 Psychology Today article written by Krockow. The author bio for the PT article calls her a “researcher in decision making,” but Krockow’s Google Scholar page primarily contains research on antibiotics and anti-microbial resistance with a little bit on game theory.
Krockow does provide a citation, linking to a blog post from Roberts Wesleyan University by Dr. Joel Hooman, who developed the school’s Strategic Leadership program.
Various internet sources estimate that an adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day [in contrast a child makes about 3,000] (Sahakian & Labuzetta, 2013). This number may sound absurd, but in fact, we make 226.7 decisions each day on just food alone according to researchers at Cornell University (Wansink and Sobal, 2007).
Starting with the food decisions, Maintenance Phase fans will recognize Brian Wansink’s name as the researcher who was extremely influential in nutrition research, only to have a number of his papers retracted. The good news is that his numbers do actually seem to add up on this specific paper, although at least one part of the study relies on data from just three people.
If we assume that Wansink’s numbers are correct, then we might be able to extrapolate how many decisions we make in a day by determining the number of decision-making categories (food, clothing, media consumption), and then multiplying that by the average number of food decisions.
With 35,000 decisions, this would mean that there are 154 separate categories in which we make 226 decisions. Although this is a possible answer, it doesn’t seem very likely, especially since 226 is for food in general, not for a specific meal.
The only Google Scholar citation I can find for Sahakian & Labuzetta for 2013 is for the book Bad Moves: How decision making goes wrong, and the ethics of smart drugs. I finally got a copy from the library this week, and as I suspected, there’s no original research, so at very least they would have been citing someone else’s research. But, after having looked through the entire book, I can’t find a single reference to a specific number of decisions. That was a dead end.
In August of 2022, the Metro published an article discussing a study commissioned by Noom—the “it’s not a diet” dieting app—on decision making. The “35,000 decisions” statistic was already being frequently used by this point, but I at least wanted to find some research on decision making. The Metro is not the only website discussing this study, but across all of the various press releases by different publications, I wasn’t able to find an actual source for the research. Noom does have a list of publications on their website, but I couldn’t locate one on decision making. I’ve reached out to Noom, but I haven’t heard anything back yet.
Basically, unless there’s an actual link to an actual study, maybe take “researchers say” with a grain of salt.
I was looking for the source of this number and impossible to find! I'm finding a bit confused that websites like harvardbusinessreview just throw away "researchers say" and it just gives links to other blog articles that link to each other, but no official scientific source. Thanks for this article!