Decision fatigue is an amazing concept that was well illustrated in this New York Times article from 2011.
The belief is that we have a limited amount of willpower every day that can be replenished to a point by eating. Otherwise, we need to sleep for it to reset. Read the fascinating article to get all of the details though I will break down some of them here.
I’ll cover two of the most interesting points, first the Israeli parole board and then how BMW used it to sell their cars for a higher price. Then I will explain how it pertains to real estate and you!
Researchers studied an Israeli parole board and the board’s decisions of whether to grant parole to eligible prisoners. What they found was that if you saw the parole board in the morning, regardless of the crime, 70% of the time, you got parole. If it was late in the afternoon it was only 10%. No other factor seemed to play into this except for the time of day.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Right before a 10:30 am break, prisoners had a 20% chance of being paroled! After the break and some food, the chance of parole shot up to 60%!
We’ll come back to that in a moment. A German car dealership participated in an experiment where buyers had to choose “among 4 styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colors for the interior.” On average, buyer’s spent $2,500 more than people who didn’t go through this process.
Here’s what they believe happened in both cases. Weighing decisions wear on our brains and uses up some of our will power. In the case of the parole board, they had trouble making a decision and would default to the safe option, which is “no.” I see this in real estate all of the time. An agent will push someone to make a decision or pressure them with some kind of urgency and the answer is “no.” It’s safe. The buyer’s life is the same as it was a moment ago.
In the case of the car buyers, they likely wanted to buy a car and the lost the will power to say “no” and just went with what they wanted. This is why people give in to their kids at the end of the day or give in to their diet at 10 pm. They want to say no but ah, what the hell.
One of my agents, when I mentioned these stories to him, he told me that he likes to grab a meal with clients after showings for this exact reason, we are more reasonable after we eat. Hangry anyone?
Think about it. A lot of client meetings happen in the evening, after work. They have been making decisions all day. This may work in your favor if they really want to sign a contract or it might go against you if they are nervous. You might want to assess this when you are setting the appointment. For that parole board, their “yes’s” dropped from 70% to 20% in just two hours!
What can you do to avoid decision fatigue yourself? Here are things to do to reduce the number of decisions you are making on a daily basis:
- Have your checklist planned out for the next day on the night before.
- Follow a schedule on your calendar. Don’t invent your day every day.
- Set out your clothes for the next day. (Some of you are eating a whole morning’s worth of effort figuring it out.)
- Plan/pack your lunch. They found that even trying to decide what to eat for lunch with a group was fatiguing.
You might recall Steve Jobs, and then Mark Zuckerberg were famous for wearing the same thing all of the time. Maybe it doesn’t sound so silly under the idea of decision fatigue. I will tell you when I told another agent about this, he said, “I remember I used to feel so good when I laid out my clothes every night for the next day.” He went back to that and it helped.
With your clients, make sure you are managing their fatigue. Keep that in mind when you are dealing with sensitive issues. Put off the heavy decisions until after their next meal, and especially not while they are dealing with a lot of chaos at work.
Every little edge helps us.
Exercise: Write down three ways you can reduce decision fatigue for you or your clients.
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