The psychology of doing nothing: forms of decision avoidance result from reason and emotion.
By Christopher J. Anderson. Psychological bulletin, 2003
1,063 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/069f8e0c981d32244ebe480a17019bc9360e725c
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Adam L. Alter
- David A Pizarro
- Daniel M. Oppenheimer
- Ayelet Fishbach
- Martin Hanselmann
- Andrew L. Molinsky
- Jill G. Griffin
- S. Murphy
In General Decision Sciences
- Adam L. Alter
- Peter M. Todd
- Benjamin Scheibehenne
- Rainer Greifeneder
- Ayelet Fishbach
- N. Roese
- Ying Zhang
- Daniel M. Oppenheimer
In Safety Research
- Laura Brandimarte
- Martin Hanselmann
- Andrew L. Molinsky
- Jill G. Griffin
- S. Murphy
- Daniel Pichert
- Peter M. Todd
- Shane Connelly
Citations in the corpus
- Decision Difficulty in the Age of Consumer Empowerment (2014, background): “tradeoff difficulty, and preference uncertainty (for additional discussion see Anderson (2003) and”
- Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload (2010, background): “In a related vein, Anderson (2003) pointed out that making no choice is not a homogeneous concept either but rather embraces different phenomena, including procrastination, an explicit preference for the status quo, or a trade-off between the effort to make a choice and its possible benefits.”
- Arousal, avoidant and decisional procrastinators: Do they exist? (2010, background): “Similarly, Anderson (2003) in his Psychological Bulletin article on doing nothing declares that ‘‘decision avoidance is not the same as procrastination” (p. 140).”
- Passing the buck: Delegating choices to others to avoid responsibility and blame (2016, background): “…over their own decisions, they are also well-known to avoid choices when they become too difficult by deferring a decision or by choosing by default or omission (see Anderson, 2003, for a review), and even at times by delegating their choices to others (Steffel & Williams, in preparation-a).”
- Adaptation and performance in foreign markets: evidence of systematic under-adaptation (2006, methodology): “This proposition is based on evidence and arguments emerging from a diverse range of sources (March and Simon, 1958; Cyert and March, 1963; Hannan and Freeman, 1977; Puxty, 1979; Hannan and Freeman, 1984; Romanelli and Tushman, 1986; Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988; Anderson, 2003).”
- Insecure attachment predicts ambivalent social threat and reward perceptions in romantic relationships (2013, background): “Ambivalence is also associated with decision-making avoidance (Anderson, 2003); when an individual is faced with a difficult choice, that person often attempts to postpone making their decision for as long as possible.”
- The nature of procrastination: a meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. (2007, background): “Anderson, 2001; Briody, 1980; Froehlich, 1987; Haycock, 1993). Using an openended format, Ferrari (1993a) elicited a similar reason why people shopped late for Christmas: They disliked shopping.”
- Green defaults : Information presentation and pro-environmental behaviour (2008, background): “Anderson, 2003; Sunstein & Thaler, 2003). Johnson and Goldstein (2003) provided a striking illustration of the power of defaults.”
- Bias in Favor of the Status Quo (2012, background): “As we have seen, effort conservation is one mechanism through which status quo maintenance persists (Anderson, 2003; Kempf & Ruenzi, 2006; Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988).”
- What Moderates the Too-Much-Choice Effect? (2009, background): “According to Anderson (2003), making no choice (which is the main dependent variable within the too-much-choice literature) is not a well-defined dependent variable in itself, but rather an umbrella term that embraces different phenomena requiring different explanations.”
- Regret aversion and decision process quality: Effects of regret salience on decision process carefulness (2008, background): “Indeed, there is evidence that decision makers sometimes avoid making decisions as a consequence of their regret aversion (e.g., Tykocinski & Pittman, 1998; for a review see Anderson, 2003).”
- Whatever the customer wants, the customer gets? Exploring the gap between consumer preferences and default electricity products in Germany (2013, background): “Anderson (2003) and Sunstein and Thaler (2003) have shown that consumers tend to be reluctant to selecting an alternative to the default option.”
- Deciding versus Reacting: Conceptions of Moral Judgment and the Reason-Affect Debate (2007, background): “Sometimes strong emotions arise from the experience of being torn between the options (Luce, Bettman, & Payne, 1997; Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, & Green, 2000), leading some to avoid the decision altogether in order to avoid this aversive state (Anderson, 2003).”
- Choice Goal Attainment and Decision and Consumption Satisfaction (2007, background): “People who are uncertain believe that there are more advantages in extensive choice processing (Anderson 2003; Urbany, Dickson, and Wilkie 1989).”