Sugar
It was my first winter as a backcountry avalanche forecaster when the venerable Utah Dept of Transportation avalanche master Greg Dollhausen offered the following advice: Don’t ski in the backcountry in the afternoon. This was almost 25 years ago and I am still trying to unravel the mystery.
(pc: Toby Weed)Those of you ex-cons reading this (and you know who you are) may have come across an interesting study looking into experienced judge’s rulings on parole over the course of a day. Extraneous factors in Judicial Decisions, authored by Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso and edited by Daniel Kahneman, and published in 2011 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found the following: "the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break." And"our findings suggest that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions."The extraneous variable? Sugar.
Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso’s study captures a phenomenon now referred to as “decision fatigue”. They describe it as distinct from physical fatigue in that one may hardly become aware of the fatigue, only that you become low on mental energy and possibly default to one or two shortcuts: become “reckless” or do nothing. Legal philosophy, however, holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner (1)And yet.
What about those poor wanna-be parolees relegated to the end of the day?
The psychologist Roy Baumeister found similar results with studies on discipline - there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. That impulse-buy Hermes bag that was shunned in the morning might be a bit less shunnable by the afternoon. We have a daily capacity of 3-4 hours resisting “desire”, as it was labelled. Both Baumeister and the Israeli team conducted experiments that involved not decision-making processes per se, but the power source: Sugar (glucose). A few years ago, the ultra-runner Mike Foote interviewed the alpinist Will Gadd and me to try to understand a recent pattern of accidents and fatalities in mountain running. We had what we thought were contributing factors for sure, but we blew it. Neither of us mentioned sugar. And, I should note, Gadd is a Red Bull athlete!
Was Dollhausen talking about decision making fatigue way back then?
Was it, while lacking sugar in the afternoon, and exhausted from making decisions all day, that we might default to the “F*ck it” mindset (for the record, this mindset is not noted in Roger Atkins’s Strategic Mindset approach from 2014) and just dive in and/or take the easy way out?
I'm not sure. Maybe.
But later he offered another tip: if you see an eagle while backcountry skiing, that’s a bad omen.
