Chapter 3: Commitment issues: A taxonomic classification of decision inertia and failures to act
3.5 A model of action failure
Decision avoidance is ‘the tendency to avoid making a choice by postponing it or seeking an easy way out that involves no action or no change’ (Anderson, 2003: p.139). It is a decision in itself, as the individual opts to disengage with decision processing rather than evaluate their choice. For example, in the context of emergency response to a multi-car road traffic collision, the commander of an ambulance team may decide to avoid (or postpone) their choice on which casualty to prioritise as they believe there is no point thinking about it until they receive further information from their crews. The commander has decided to avoid their choice for the time being. According to Anderson’s (2003) original definition, decision avoidance is operationalised in three ways: by maintaining the ‘status quo’ (i.e. “I will go along with the majority”); by ‘choice deferral’ (i.e. “I will postpone my
Types of inaction
Decision avoidance Decision inertia Implementation Failure
Causes of Inaction
Task ambiguity Social ambiguity Inexperience in decision domain Negative affect Indecisive personalities Avoidant goals and motivations65 choice for now and wait and see what happens”); or by ‘omission’ (i.e. “I will not think about this choice”). Decision avoidance is fundamentally driven by a motivation to avoid cognitive processing. It is the decision to avoid making a decision for the time being.
Individuals are motivated to avoid approaching a stimulus (i.e. decision) if they associate it with negative (anticipated) affect (Elliot, 2006). Motivation is central to emotional regulation (Elliot, Eder & Harmon-Jones, 2013) and acts as the driving force that energises and translates cognitions into directed action. This means that when faced with challenging decisions associated with (potential) negative affect, cognitive and affective processes interact to motivate the individual to either approach or avoid the difficult choice. The mere presence of salient (positive or negative) emotions can reduce the likelihood of action as decision makers refuse to accept trade-off between equally attractive (or unattractive) or highly valued (or devalued) options (Dhar, 1997; Tanner, 2009); thereby avoiding cognitive deliberation. Once an individual is motivated to avoid a stimulus (or choice), then additional stressors in the environment such as time pressure can further degrade decision making (Roskes, Alliot, Nijstad & De Dreu, 2013); when decisions are hard to avoid, negative emotions increase and choice is perceived as more complex (Mamhidir, et al., 2007). Thus the interaction between negative affect and complexity can stimulate avoidant motivations.
Avoidance motivation is caused by stressors in the decision environment that are linked to negative emotions. For example, regret has been associated with ‘inaction inertia’ in consumer choice contexts, whereby individuals are biased against taking action, due to negative emotional salience anchored to ‘missed opportunities’ (Sevdalis, Harvey & Yip, 2006). Avoidance arises due to the increased demands on the systematic processing of the decision maker, which can have especially large negative impacts when the decision task requires insight and creativity (Sligte, De Dreu & Nijstad, 2011). This is important for high-stakes decision making, as the context of such choices will be novel and require creative and dynamic thought. Not only can avoidance arise as a product of negative stimuli; but it can also occur as a stable trait-based characteristic (Harmon-Jones, Harmon-Jones & Price, 2013). This suggests that stressors act to both cause and exacerbate avoidance tendencies in decision making, and that certain individuals may be intrinsically avoidant. Thus,
66 decision avoidance occurs when individuals are motivated to avoid making a choice due to the experienced and/or anticipated negative affect that is associated with the choice. It fundamentally represents the desire to disengage and avoid a choice by deferring/postponing the choice or by completely omitting it from further cognitive deliberation.
3.5.2 Decision inertia
Decision inertiais the most psychologically interesting type of failure to act as it is associated with internal cognitive conflict. It is defined as the redundant cognitive deliberation of choice for no positive gain (for an example see Alison, Power, van den Heuvel, Humann, Palasinksi & Crego, 2015). What makes inertia distinct from avoidance is that the decision maker continues to think about the choice, rather than choosing to ignore it. It differs from the adaptive process of sensemaking as, paradoxically, cognitive processing will not help the decision maker in reaching a choice as there is little or no more information available. The decision maker is cognitively inert as they are fixated on a trajectory of continual revaluation and assessment of the situation in order to try and trade-off salient competing options, goals and anticipated potential consequences. As is the case with decision avoidance, inertia is likely when the decision environment is characterised by complexity (Kopylov, 2009), competing options and preferences (Roswarsky & Murray, 2006) and salient negative affect (Dhar, 1997). Yet rather deciding to avoid choice, individuals continue to deliberate over their options. They continue to try and resolve their decision, even when no more useful information is available.
Once again it is possible to turn to the literature on motivation to further develop this concept. As outlined, individuals are motivated to avoid stimuli when they are associated with negative affect and/or cognitions (Elliot, 2006). A unique feature of inertia is that individuals fail to act, not as they are motivated to disengage and avoid a choice, but because they are motivated to avoid loss (Corr & McNaughton, 2012). Inertia is not driven by adaptive approach motivations (i.e. energising behaviour towards positive stimuli), but instead reflects internal cognitive dissonance as individuals try to select the ‘least worst’ potentially negative outcome. Interestingly, ‘least worst’ avoidance motivations have been associated with increased action as individuals tend to over-react and take precautionary action as they would rather be
67 ‘better safe than sorry’; for example, Dekay, Patino-Echeverri and Fischbeck (2009) found individuals favoured action to close a hypothetical major airport due to weather risk rather than keep it open. Importantly however, these forced choice contexts are rare in the real-world, as decision makers are seldom bounded by ‘now or never’ forced choice contexts. Indeed the manager of a real airport may continually delay their choice as they seek and hope for further information to make their decision easier, and in doing so pass an unanticipated point of no return where action is no longer possible. Fundamentally, the likelihood of action results from the interaction between a desire to avoid potential anticipated negative consequences, the anticipated potential for further information and the practical characteristics of the choice context.
Avoidance motivation has been further unpacked by Corr, DeYoung and McNaughton (2013) who identified two avoidance systems: one relating to active avoidance whereby the decision maker takes action to escape a negative stimulus; and the other relating to passive avoidance whereby the decision maker shows behavioural inhibition due to goal conflict. This chapter suggests that decision avoidance reflects active avoidance motivation as decision makers seek to escape the choice context by deciding to avoid (or postpone) their choice for the time being; compared to decision inertia that can be linked to passive avoidance and behavioural inhibition due to goal conflict and cognitive deliberation (Corr et al., 2013). This creates potential for further research at the neurobiological level as passive and active avoidance have been associated with activation in different regions of the brain (Gray, 1990). Passive avoidance is associated with the Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS) and associated anxiety whereas active avoidance is associated with panic and activation of the Fight, Flight System (FFS) (Corr et al., 2013). Furthermore, activation of the BIS has been linked to the behavioural economics concept of ‘loss aversion’ (i.e. the disproportionate desire to avoid losses) (Corr & McNaughton, 2012). Loss aversion is associated with poor decision making as the overwhelming desire to avoid loss distracts decision makers from more rational processing of choice (Kahneman, 2003), by focussing on anticipated negative emotions (e.g. regret) and difficulties in objectively trading off options and/or values (Tyocinski, Pittman & Tuttle, 1995). Arguably, decision inertia may reflect a maladaptive cognitive processing strategy that is rooted in passive avoidance
68 motivations, which are associated with loss aversion and activation of the BIS. This offers an exciting possibility for research to see how observational evidence of inertia in, for example, multi-agency command meetings, interacts with physiological measures associated with motivational drives and neurobiological activity in the brain.
The difference between avoidance and inertia may further be explained by perceived distance (both physical and psychological) of negative stimuli or threats. It has been found that stimulation of the FFS and active avoidance tends to arise when individuals perceive threatening stimuli/consequences to be either physically or temporally imminent; whereas activation of the BIS and passive avoidance is more likely when threats are perceived to be more distant in space or time (Corr, 2013). This means that a key difference between inaction via decision avoidance compared to decision inertia may be linked to the perceived proximal or temporal distance of anticipated negative stimuli. Specifically, decision avoidance may be more likely when potential negative consequences are seen to be nearby or imminent, whereas decision inertia would be more likely when negative consequences are more distant.
Interestingly, people from individualist (i.e. Western) cultures, who tend to focus on short-term goals are more likely to avoid choice, whereas those from collectivist cultures look further into the future and are more likely to take action (Carmona, Iyer & Reckers, 2011). This links with findings on emergency response decision making, as those who were not guided by wider strategic goals (i.e. long- term thinking, bigger picture) were more likely to fail or coordinate action (Alison et al., 2015). It is worth noting the inconsistencies between behavioural and neurobiological data, as behaviourist studies suggest long-term goals facilitate action (Alison et al., 2015; Carmona et al., 2011); whereas neurobiological research suggests distant goals activate the BIS and thus induce cognitive goal conflict and deliberation (Corr, 2013). These differences may be moderated by the decision making context, for example; strategic decisions that require more deliberate and slow-time thinking may be facilitated by distant thinking; whereas more time pressured sub-tasks are distracted by distant focus. It is important to extrapolate these findings to help develop the conceptual validity of decision avoidance and inertia. It is suggested that that the limited previous decision making literature on failures to act has collapsed both inertia and avoidance into one general concept of
69 avoidance, whereas the motivational literature has made progress in distinguishing the different types of avoidance. This chapter combines these efforts to extend the understanding of general avoidance further.
3.5.3 Implementation failure
A final form of action failure is termed ‘implementation failure’. This type of ‘non decision’ is distinct from avoidance and inertia as it reflects the behavioural manifestation of action failure, as opposed to the cognitive processing associated with action failure. It describes the situation where a decision maker has cognitively committed to action and made a choice, but fails to execute / implement it at a behavioural level. For example an individual may decide to quit their job, but never find the right moment to tell their boss; or a police commander may decide to host an on-scene multi-agency meeting, but the message doesn’t get passed on to relevant others. Dhar (1997) found that a lack of time pressure can cause ‘action inertia’ whereby decision makers fail to execute plans. In multi-agency emergency response command teams it was found that lack of time pressure increased redundant information seeking and distracted from adaptive discussions on action (Alison, et al., 2015). As such, implementation failure is not so much a psychological cause of action failure, but describes a coordination breakdown between cognitive commitment to a choice and behavioural action at the individual or team level.
The main area of research that has thus far explored implementation failures is research within the domain of organisational psychology. Poor team structure, a lack of organisational cohesion and ineffective team management all derail plan execution (Decker, Durand, Mayfield, McCormack, Skinner & Perdue, 2012; Taleai & Mansourian, 2008). Research exploring high-stakes police team decision making found that action can fail despite cognitive commitment to a choice by the collective team due to poor coordination and communication (van den Heuvel et al., 2012). Although less attention will be paid to this third form of action failure, as it is a product of poor behavioural management rather than psychological processing, it is important to acknowledge it as a type of action failure, especially as it has been found to occur in high-stakes and strategic decision making teams (Decker et al., 2012; Taleai & Mansourian, 2008; van den Heuvel et al., 2012).
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