Stuck in the Beta Zone? When to Revise Your Decisions

Many decisions are made time and again. Imagine you go out for drinks with your friends every Friday. How do you decide where to go? You do not want to waste your time thinking about alternative places every Friday, so you will probably soon pick a favorite and go there every time. Nothing wrong with that. It saves you time and effort in your decision-making. The same has probably happened with the route you follow from home to work, or which newspaper you read.

Think about any service you have contracted: your private insurance, your internet provider, your streaming media service, or your choice of pension plan (if you have any choice). For some of those decisions, you might have a yearly window where you could revise your decision, with automatic renewal if you do nothing. How often do you revise those decisions? Do you still have the service that is best for you, or are you simply repeating an old choice to avoid making a new decision?

You might be doing this for even more important aspects of your life. Staying with your current job or at your current apartment are decisions that you make every time that you do not consider possible alternatives. You might only be prompted to make an active decision when something goes really wrong and forces you to reconsider.

Failing to decide

Decision inertia is the human tendency to repeat a previous choice when faced with the same (or a similar) decision again and again. This is very natural. After all, one important function of your brain is to save decision costs, freeing cognitive capacity for other tasks. Doing the same thing you did in the past is a great time-saver, and saving time in your small decisions can be important.

In two experiments published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2016, my co-authors and I gave participants many similar, small decisions which could earn them money if they figured out the correct reaction to certain cues. They could never tell for sure what the right answer was, but the cues helped them make the choice that was more likely to be correct. This kind of experiments are designed to study human mistakes. For example, a typical mistake is reinforcement, which is to repeat whatever worked well in the past (and might be wrong).

We found out that there was always a bit of inertia in the choices: I just chose this, so I choose the same again, independently of the cues. In another article published in Management Science in 2023 (see this post), we studied decisions in a more complicated setting and found that, again, part of the decisions could only be explained by decision inertia.

This happened for decisions that people made in rapid succession, and which required little effort. Now imagine how often you will fall for decision inertia for decisions which take a lot of effort. Ready to check the alternative offers for your private insurance any time soon?

The beta zone

Suppose that you walk to any destination within a mile from home, but take the bike everywhere further away than a mile. Since the bike is faster, it will take longer to reach destinations which are almost but not quite a mile away than destinations which are slightly farther than a mile away. There are nearer destinations which takes longer to reached than more distant ones. This is the is a “beta zone,” discussed by Daniel Gilbert and co-authors (2004).

Similarly, suppose you are stuck in a mediocre but tolerable job. Pay is not good and you are not motivated, but there is nothing really bad. By decision inertia, you will probably keep at it. Now suppose your boss is replaced and the new one makes your life miserable. Now you will start looking for alternatives. If you do find a new job, you have just experienced a paradox: a horrible new boss jolted you out of your inertia, and you are now far better off. The mildly unsatisfactory job was in the beta zone.

It could be worse. Our brain slowly but surely adapts to our current situation. So if your job becomes slightly worse every year, you might never break free from your decision inertia, and you might spend way too much time in a bad situation before realizing that you can and should do something about it.

Decision-Making Essential Reads

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Set revision times

How do you avoid decision inertia? For small decisions (as choosing where to have a few drinks every week), decision inertia is not always bad. An acceptable choice which costs you no time might be better than a better option that you have to invest a lot of time to find (see last post). Still, it might be a good idea to revise even those decisions from time to time. Set aside a time of the year where you are on the lookout for routines and question them (“Are there any new places worth trying for drinks?”). This can be the first work week of January, the first week after holidays, or whatever works for you. Call it “revision week” and use it to question all your small, habitual decisions.

For more important decisions, set reminders in your calendar. When is the next window for revising your private insurance choices, or for canceling your internet provider or streaming service? If you can get out any time, put that in your revision week. After you revise a decision, write down some new reminders for next year: how much are you paying, what were the three other best options you looked at, their web addresses, etc

Avoiding decision inertia for the really important decisions is trickier. You don’t want to be looking out for other jobs or apartments every time you face an inconvenience, but you don’t want to be stuck in the beta zone. You could write a list of questions for yourself, to answer in your revision week. For the important categories in your life (job, apartment, etc.), write two questions: First, “I am satisfied?” Second, “If not, what are my options?” Sometimes, that is all that it takes to get you going.