But then, right now I’m looking at two edit windows, one with this posting and comment, the other with paid work I’m behind on. Let’s not spend too much time dwelling on Which I am thinking about and typing in to.

So, is making this blog comment another example of what they have measured? If so, then perhaps what they have identified and measured is the human tendency to not optimally use all moments of time. Now, looking at it like that, it appears that they have discovered the sky is blue and the pope’s Catholic. But, because their discovery has been translated to one word interpretations and/or because their discovery has a lot of confusing detail, their study appears “important”.

Let’s all get back to work.

Anyway, the abstract spells out their point more clearly:

People often get unnecessarily mired in trivial decisions. Four studies support a metacognitive account for this painful phenomenon. Our central premise is that people use subjective experiences of difficulty while making a decision as a cue to how much further time and effort to spend. People generally associate important decisions with difficulty. Consequently, if a decision feels unexpectedly difficult, due to even incidental reasons, people may draw the reverse inference that it is also important and consequently increase the amount of time and effort they expend. Ironically, this process is particularly likely for decisions that initially seemed unimportant because people expect them to be easier (whereas important decisions are expected to be difficult to begin with). Our studies demonstrate that unexpected difficulty not only causes people to get caught up in unimportant decisions but also to voluntarily seek more options, which can increase decision difficulty even further.

“Important” decisions? Ah. Maybe. But why not stick with what they actually measured, and not just assert, out of the blue, that these decisions were “important” or “unimportant”?