178 - Julia Nolte: Why We Avoid Difficult Decisions

0:00Welcome to the Stanford Psychology Podcast, where leading psychologists come to share their most recent work. My name is Enna. This week, I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with Dr. Julia Nolte, Assistant Professor of Economic Psychology at Tilburg University. Julia's research examines what keeps people, especially older adults, from making well-informed and high-quality decisions, and how we can help people make better choices. In our conversation, Julia discusses how her early interest in theater sparked her interest in psychology, how she came to study aging and decision-making, and what her work can teach us about information avoidance, decision -making, and the very human challenge of choosing between imperfect options.

1:16Hi, Julia. Thank you so much for joining us at the Stanford Psychology Podcast. I'm very excited to chat with you. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here and to have a chance to talk about my research program. So I always love to start by asking our guests, what experience first sparked your interest in the field of psychology? So as a student in high school, I really loved literature and theater. It was a theater kid, maybe not the most talented actress myself, but I really loved to be involved in theater productions. and what I really liked about or still like about theater is how people interpret right like these different characters and how they play them and I think a lot of that is psychology and to this day I love seeing the same piece produced by different people or maybe if they do a remake of a movie I'm always so interested in how they differ and how they think of a person how might they be reacting to different situations.

2:21And I think that that is very much in line with what drew me to psychology, just like real interest in understanding how people feel and think and behave. And so I always, not always, but pretty early, I knew that I was interested in pursuing psychology as a student. But when I began my undergraduate degree, which I did at Heidelberg University in Germany. I did not know what I was going to do with that degree. A lot of my friends wanted to be therapists. I think that's still a very common career trajectory for psychology majors in Germany, but I wasn't sure where I was going to go with that. So I'm happy that I ended up in research, but I didn't initially know that I was going to have a research career.

3:09yeah I also wanted to do therapy when I first majored in psychology um so during your undergrad experience as a psychology major what are some things you did that gradually led to the past to psychology research later on so when I did my undergraduate degree I was required to do several internships and in some of my internship experiences I did work in the fields that are you know clinical psychology and maybe therapy adjacent but I didn't really feel like that was it for me the same way that my friends wanted to be therapists and when I was in my second year I ended up doing a research internship in London and that was with Alzheimer's Society and I will fully admit that I was mostly interested in living in London and I applied to a lot of and I wasn't particularly interested in research but that was the position I got and so I will admit that my thought was I will have a great time enjoying London and sightseeing and going to lots of museums and traveling the country and then the internship will probably be a little boring to me and that was my expectation because I think I'm a very extroverted person and part of psychology is also interacting with you know other humans other people and so I thought that research meant sitting at your desk all day and not talking to other people so I didn't think I would love it very much and then I was very surprised to find that I absolutely adored doing the research internship and that it's that doing research actually means working with a lot of people and also presenting your research talking to people who are affected so it's Alzheimer's Society, they often have panels where people with Alzheimer's and their family members come and give feedback on grant proposals, what research seems really relevant to be funded.

4:59And that was such a great experience. And I loved seeing the different components, such as there was a whole interview room where people were trained just to translate research about Alzheimer's to the public, for example, by giving interviews to the likes of the BBC. And it was so interesting to see the entire process from from conceiving of an idea or evaluating grant proposals to doing research to translating it and helping actual people looking for answers when they're confronted with Alzheimer's, then I completely fell in love with research. And I started a research assistant position in Heidelberg right away afterwards.

5:35And I've been in research ever since. So you started out in aging research, and now your work focuses on the intersection of aging and decision making. how did your interest evolve from those early experiences to the questions you study now? I love that question because I often reflect on how I'm very lucky that I ended up doing both because I didn't know you could do that. My parents did not go to university so I didn't come from an academic family background. I don't have any older siblings either and so I think a lot about the process of becoming you know a career academic if you will someone who stays in academia who does research.

6:17A lot of that I found out by trial and error. And I didn't know initially that you could do both. So I always thought you would have to decide, do I want to study development and aging or do I want to be a decision researcher? Because at Heidelberg University, where I also completed my first master's degree in psychology, we had different labs and every lab was a different type of psychology. So we had one professor who did social psychology. And we had another professor who did aging, and we had another professor who did child development. And so we didn't really have the kind of department where you have multiple people doing the same thing or similar things.

6:57It shows us just that every thing that you could study in that program, like the lectures you could go to were represented by one professor and then the postdocs and graduate students they worked with. And so I always thought, oh you have to be one of these things you have to be an aging researcher or you can be a social psychologist who does decision research and my first or ongoing research assistant uh position that i did at heidelberg university following my aging internship was actually by someone who does problem solving research and so that is adjacent to decision making um that's essentially like serial decision making over and over like connected decisions.

7:40And so he recruited me into his lab and I did my bachelor's thesis on decision making and people living with schizophrenia. And so at first I didn't have this aging component because I thought, oh, now I'm in a lab where all I will do is something related to decision making. And it wasn't until I decided to do a study abroad experience in the US that I realized I could be in a lab or working with someone who does both. So as part of my first master's degree in Germany, I actually spent a year abroad at Cornell University as an exchange student. And there I was in a lab where someone was interested in decision making, but some of that research also applied to different components.

8:25So some of that was on, say, the law context, and some of that I thought would lend itself really well to an aging context. So it wasn't until that experience that I realized it is possible to combine the two and I'm glad that I figured that out early enough for me to know these opportunities both. It sounds so cool that you have the experience studying and working in many different countries across the world. Can you share with us what it's like to study different populations and just work in very diverse environments? Yeah that is I'd love to. So I in Germany I really only had experience doing research at Heidelberg University and then through internships that were connected to it, such as through the Heidelberg University Hospital, whereas I had more varied experiences in other countries.

9:14So in England, I just told you that my first internship that I did was at Alzheimer's Society, which was in London, but was also very fortunate to spend summers or parts of summers at a lab at Oxford University and at the Center for Risk and Evidence Communication in Cambridge. And in the US, I've been fortunate to spend most of my time. So first, a study abroad experience and then my PhD at Cornell University, where I worked with two labs. But I also, again, I was very, very lucky. I completed part of a summer at Harvard University and yet another lab. And then finally, I landed in the Netherlands, where I am now.

9:53And it's really interesting to see how different they go about, you know, the whole idea of training someone to be a scientist. because if you look at the different countries, what are the requirements to pursue a PhD? How long does a PhD take? Are you likely or able to go directly to like a junior faculty position? Or is the PhD so short that you may not have published a lot of your PhD research? So a lot of people end up doing one or two postdocs so that their publication record can kind of catch up with them. That's done very differently. And also how independent you are. Are you very dependent on what your advisor does?

10:36Are you hired with program funds? That's what I'm seeing in analysis that typically PhD students are paid through a project grant. And so when they start, it's already pre-decided that they will work on something within this project. Whereas in the US, I was very free. I applied to a general program. And from that program, I could choose the advisor I was most interested in. And while, of course, you will do something that is likely related to what your advisor does, I was very fortunate that my advisor, Corinna Lockenhoff at Cornell, gave me a lot of freedom. So I love that everyone in Corinna's lab studies something different related to aging.

11:11We're not all studying aging and decision making. So I have a colleague there who studies self-continuity, which means the sense that you're the same person as time changes, right? As time goes, are you still very close to who you were before or are you quite different? and then someone else is studying you know more care related decisions are we asking other people for help when we're making health care decisions so i like that we all had the freedom there to do something different within this general area of interest that our advisor has so it's really interesting to see what the different countries do and my hope is that i can kind of pick the best bits of everything i was exposed to i've not yet been able to have my own phd uh student but in the future when I have one, then I really want to apply everything that I love from the different systems to give them the best possible experience that I can.

12:05That sounds like a very fun and free informative environment. I'm curious how your research interest evolved during your PhD, from the questions you came in with to the dissertation topic that eventually became your own. Yeah, so I guess when I think about how I started, when I was applying to PhD programs in the US, I was coming in with the master's thesis research that I had been doing back in Germany. And I wanted to be very strategic because I then at that point knew I really want to go somewhere where I can do decision research and aging research at the same time if I can. So my first master's thesis, I looked at age differences in information seeking.

12:48It's a very well-researched area. There's already been a meta-analysis 20 years ago, but I thought I had a very unique new idea and that worked out well. And I think the thesis worked out well. And I thought that that was a great foundation to apply to the different types of people I saw who are also interested in the intersection. And so that's what I came in with. But when I came in with that, I also knew it was very similar to what my own advisor had done. So in her own dissertation, Corinna had worked on aging and information seeking. And as I just told you, it's such a well-researched field that it can also be quite hard to do something new with that.

13:27And part of being a researcher and becoming a researcher is to try and kind of forge your own path, which is, of course, a lot of pressure. How can you come up with new ideas when every day that passes, more research has been generated? So this is out there that would be novel. And something that I often did, and I think that still serves me today, is to think about what has been done and then do the opposite. And that's how I ended up with what I did in my dissertation. so part of my PhD years I spent on studying information avoidance so surprisingly while information seeking is very well researched when it comes to aging information avoidance is still a fairly new field at the time that we were starting to publish our first research on this it was only like I feel like one other lab or like one other group that started to publish at the same time so there's a shout out to the Max Planck Institute in Berlin because at the time that we were trying to put out a paper on age differences and information avoidance, they were putting out a paper on, I think they call it deliberate ignorance, but it's essentially the same thing, which is there is information that is available.

14:35It might be very important information to make decisions on, but you might, for whatever reason, not want to look at it. For example, it might make you feel bad to know something happened. And so you choose not to use the information. And then of course, you might not make the most informed decisions. And then for For my dissertation, again, so many people have studied aging and decision making. So I thought, what hasn't been done? And my dissertation then focused on aging and decision avoidance. So decision avoidance itself, it's not new to say that we know that older adults avoid decisions more, but that is mostly been documented in applied fields such as healthcare.

15:12But there has not been a lot of psychological research on what is happening, when is this happening, what can we do about it? And so to this day, if I really run out of ideas, I try to think of what is the opposite of what has been done? Can I do something new in this area? And that's advice I like to give other people too, is that if you feel really stuck or like what you're doing is oversaturated, can you pivot? Can you look in the other direction? And maybe you find something there that has been less well known. yeah i love the idea of looking for what has been overlooked and then ask the question you wish you had an answer to and that brings me to your recent work on information avoidance so what makes information avoidance so compelling to you as a behavior yes um so first of all i should probably say that there is a relationship possibly or you know i I mean, quite obviously between information avoidance and decision avoidance.

16:13While I tend to look at them separately in experiments that I do, I do think there is a connection in that when someone avoids to make a decision, it's hard. We can observe that they're not making a decision and we can ask them about this in different ways, such as, do you want to postpone the decision to a future time or search for more options or information? Do you want to have someone else make the decision for you? Do you want to go with what is pre-decided? So there's lots of different variations of avoiding to make a decision yourself. And so when we look at information avoidance, it could be that someone who wants to avoid a decision does that because they don't want to engage with the information that they will encounter when they look at their options, right?

16:57Maybe if you have like a medical procedure coming up or you're ill and there's different treatment options, maybe you don't want to engage with hearing what are the risks, what's my chance of survival and so by avoiding the decision you're automatically also not engaging with the information so it could be that information avoidance motivates decision avoidance right so that's that's a possibility so it's so we haven't really spent that much time looking at what's the relationship there but i do think that both of them both concepts are related um now in our recent paper um this is a paper that i published together with corinna lochenhoff at cornell and recently came out in experimental aging research and in that paper we looked at decision avoidance but again as part of that information avoidance is possibly assumed um so in this paper we were trying to find out what is it that makes older dolls avoid decisions more so So as I said previously, we know that older dolls avoid choices more, and we are able to, again, confirm that in the experiment that we designed.

18:10But it's hard to really pinpoint what is it that drives them to avoid decisions more. Typically, it's in the interest of people to make decisions when they have the option, right, when they have the resources to make the decision. And for older adults, there's such an interesting demographic to study for decision making because they tend to have more resources. They tend to have more time than younger middle-aged adults. They tend to have accrued more wealth. They have more experience. So they have a lot of important resources. And they also face very important decisions such as what am I going to do in case of health care issues?

18:49What do I want to do with my financial assets at the end of the life? Do I face out of the workforce or what do I do about my housing situation? Do I want to move into some kind of assisted living? There's so many different really high stakes decisions that older adults face that it is interesting to see how does this age group approach decision making. And so in this study that I'd like to talk about, we were interested in looking at a lot of possible mechanisms that motivate this, you know, kind of counterintuitive preference of older adults to disengage from the decision process. So older adults often have both the resources and also greater need to make this kind of major life decisions, which really makes it especially interesting that they tend to avoid this process more.

19:41Can you tell us more about how you designed your studies in this paper and what are the findings that you're the most excited about? yes so the paper consists of two studies and they're quite similar the first one is a smaller proof of concept study and then the second one has a larger sample around three times as large and then what's also special about the second study that i will talk about a little bit later is that we looked at an intervention here so in both studies we asked people to make you know to look at four different decision scenarios one of the two of them look at consumer questions such as choosing an apartment or car.

20:21And two of them look at health related questions, choosing a physician and choosing a health insurance plan. And in my research, I really like to look at multiple domains at once, because we know that age difference tend to be greater in the consumer domain than in the health domain. And so it's important to check, you know, if I don't see an effect, maybe it's because in this domain, the age groups are more similar, whereas they diverge more in other domains. So it's really good to see are the findings we have very domain specific or do they generalize. And in each of these four scenarios, we gave people four options to choose from.

20:56And I will be honest, we made those options really unattractive. So none of the options were great. We systematically varied the good choice attributes and the negative choice attributes. And what that means is that each option had attributes that were great. So this was better than the other options they had. And then they also had attributes that weren't so great. So there were things such as say the price of an apartment or its size, where other options actually looked better. And that makes it really hard to find a best option because all the options are perfect. And we did that on purpose, because we know from past research, that if we create a decision environment like that, some people will say, no, I don't like these options, so I'm struggling to compare them.

21:40So I would rather not make a decision. And we were very successful with that because in each of the scenarios and across the two studies we found that between 40 to 50 percent of the participants didn't want to make a decision based on the four options we gave them and of course there's also a concern that people just say i don't want to make a decision because it's faster and they could speed through the survey so in both experiments we made sure that we enforced a minimum amount of time that they had to look at the options before they could make a decision or avoid a decision. And so we hope that the decision avoidance we observed, but people told us I don't want to make a decision, is really reflective of this being a tough decision to make rather than a desire to just skip the process and not consider the options at all.

22:28I really like how these studies capture what decision making actually feels like in daily life, because there's rarely a perfect choice. And usually we're just weighing a few imperfect options with pros and cons. So what did you find in the study? Yes. So study one told us what we already assumed or wanted to again prove, which is that older adults avoided more decisions. So on average, across all age groups, people avoided between 1.7, 1.8 of the four decisions. So again, almost half of them. But we find that older dolls on average avoided more of the decision. So we observed this expected difference.

23:09And what I really like is that with the design that we chose, we're able to quantify these individual differences. Typically, in my research, I'm not just interested in saying there is an effect, which is, I think, the kind of common approach you see in decision research is documenting effects that apply to decision making. But to really understand individual differences, I can better quantify, does something change with age? And that's what we found. We also found that people avoided decisions more if they experienced the decision process as more cognitively demanding. But we didn't find that people avoided decisions more because they found the process more emotionally stressful or that they anticipated more regret.

23:51So we had thought that maybe people who experienced the process as more emotionally uncomfortable would also avoid decisions more, but we didn't find that. In addition, we tested a lot of possible mechanisms. So I just told you we looked at cognition and affect as they apply to the choice process. But we also looked at social demographic background, personality, goals, just baseline cognitive differences, right? We expect that with age, older adults maybe experience decrements in their memory and learning ability. And none of these differences or covariates could explain why older adults avoid decision making more.

24:29There's really only one thing that we found. And again, it is in line with the few past studies that exist on this topic. And so in past research, and this is the research mostly of Chen and Patel, they had already demonstrated that when they avoid decisions, older adults feel better afterwards, whereas this is not true for younger adults. And so we wanted to look also what happens before or during the choice process. We didn't find that this could explain the age difference. But we again found that sometimes or often when people avoid choices, this seems to end in an emotional benefit and that the benefit is more consistently happening for older adults.

25:11So in study one, we found that older adults and also middle aged adults in some of the domains experienced an emotional benefit. it. They said they felt better afterwards than people who made decisions, but that was not true for younger adults. So it seems like this emotion regulation strategy that's being applied here, that that seems to develop or come out more over age and that we couldn't see it with the small sample that we had in younger age groups. So that kind of affirmed a lot of our expectations, but it still told us that there isn't necessarily a clear mechanism beyond that decision avoidance seems to maybe serve some emotional purpose.

25:48And so we wanted to design a second study that took what we learned there, had a better powered sample, and then see what can we learn from the first study findings to maybe create an intervention and see if that can help people find a different way to feel good about the decision process that isn't, you know, by avoiding decisions. Yeah, I love that idea of giving people another way to feel better during the decision making process instead of without avoiding the decision altogether. So what was the intervention like in the second study and what did you guys find? Yes so in the second study we asked how for the participants in each age group so we really wanted to make sure that both the intervention and the control condition are also very diverse and comparable in terms of age.

26:38We asked them to a completer writing intervention where before we allowed them to make a decision or avoid making a decision they were expected to write about the pros and cons of the choice options that they were seeing for all of the four scenarios and we know from past research by other researchers that writing seems to be helpful for encouraging more active decision making and there was also a study by Kim et al. 2008, where they had found that writing about one's choice options seems to increase satisfaction with the decision, particularly for older adults. And so we were hoping that older adults who avoid decisions more would particularly benefit from this intervention where they first write down what they like and dislike.

27:27And we found that writing about your options does make the decision process more comfortable. So across the different age groups, we found that they found it less cognitively demanding to make a decision when they first wrote about their options, and that they also felt emotionally better. So they were less stressed and or expected, anticipated, less regret after making a choice. So that in itself is a great finding that if you struggle with decision making, if you find it very cumbersome to compare your options or to decide one, especially if none of the options are ideal, then you could try just first sitting down and writing about the options to bring out what is it that you care about.

28:09Or maybe if it is hard to look at so many things at once, if you write down one-on-one how do two options compare, maybe that will already help you. So we were very pleased that indeed this is a very easy and cost-efficient intervention to make the choice process better on people. But to our of surprise, we didn't find that completing dividing intervention decreased decision avoidance. So there wasn't a significant difference. And actually, if we look at just the descriptives, people in the intervention condition were somewhat more likely to say they wanted to avoid choice. So that was the opposite of what we wanted to find.

28:46And as you can imagine, we were very perplexed. Why would this intervention make people want to avoid decisions more? And I think that's my fault, because I told you that we made these decisions really hard and the options were quite attractive. We made the decisions harder than past research that used the same approach for studying decision avoidance. Because in past research, I think I went back even when we were writing the discussion and only I think something like 13 to 38 percent of people avoided choices in these past studies. But in ours, it was almost half, right? It was around 50 percent almost.

29:23And so I know that from these past studies, it was easier to find a better option, maybe not a perfect option, but a better option among these options. So the options were less balanced in how good or bad they are. It was a bit easier to find an option that, you know, trumps the other options. And so I think by the virtue of really wanting to make sure that we observe a lot of decision avoidance so we can study it better, we made the choices very hard. And so my inkling is that by writing about the options, people realize really just how bad the options were and that they were perfect options.

29:57I think by putting it down, they realized, well, none of these options comes without downsides. And I think that may have made it clearer to them that those options were not great. And so my hope would be that the writing intervention we attempted would work better in a context where the options are less similar or it's easier to find that an option is better than others. We haven't tested this. So this is a possible extension for future research. But yeah, in the setup that we had where we balanced out the options and made all of the options quite poor, it didn't make people more willing to choose one after they spend time reflecting on it.

30:34So I'm afraid that that's an artifact of just how hard we made the choices. Yeah, that's very interesting. It makes me think about, it sounds like writing may have made people more aware of how difficult these choices were. So what do you think was happening during this writing process that might make people more or less likely to avoid a decision? so i think to really answer that question what we would have needed to do is include questions or even questionnaires where people reflect on the experience where we really have information from everyone in the intervention condition saying this made it easier for me or this made me reflect this or that or even an open response box saying hey what that what did this exercise teach you about yourself.