Avoidant Decision-Maker: postponing as a way of deciding

Postponing the decision is, in practice, your way of deciding: committing to one option is hard while you can still keep others open.

Keeping the doors open feels safer than closing one, even though that also carries a cost that sometimes goes unnoticed.

Postponing as a strategy, according to Scott and Bruce

In Susanne Scott and Reginald Bruce’s decision-making style questionnaire (1995), the avoidant style is characterized by a tendency to postpone or dodge decisions whenever possible.

It isn’t necessarily a lack of judgment: often the person knows which option they prefer, but the very act of closing a door, ruling out the other alternatives for good, generates a resistance that other profiles don’t experience with the same intensity.

That nuance has empirical support. Peter Thunholm (2004) gave the questionnaire to 206 Swedish army officers and found that the rational, dependent and avoidant styles could be partly predicted from self-esteem and action control, the ability to initiate and sustain an intention. His conclusion is that decision-making style isn’t only a habit of thought: it also reflects how people value themselves and how they regulate what they set out to do.

How this pattern shows up

• Decisions get postponed even when there’s already enough information to make them with confidence.
• Keeping several options open feels more comfortable than picking one, even if that means more uncertainty in the long run.
• External deadlines (an imposed due date) are usually what finally forces the decision.
• The relief of postponing is immediate, which reinforces the pattern even though the accumulated cost is greater.

An example: for months, Nuria has had two apartment listings saved in her favorites. She has visited both, knows which one she likes more and has a pre-approved mortgage. Every week she finds a reasonable reason to wait a little longer: a new listing, an interest rate rise that might come back down. When she finally calls, her preferred apartment is already reserved.

Four ways of not deciding

Psychologist Christopher Anderson (2003) reviewed several lines of research from different disciplines on why people avoid deciding and grouped them into four effects:

• Choice deferral: putting the decision off until later, often when choosing between similar options is difficult.
• Status quo bias: preferring what you already have, or the default option, over a change.
• Omission bias: preferring not to act over acting when either could go wrong, because a mistake made by acting feels more like your own.
• Inaction inertia: after letting a great opportunity pass, turning down another that is somewhat worse but still good.

According to his model, these effects have common roots: the weighing of costs and benefits, anticipated regret and the difficulty of choosing between options. That’s why avoiding isn’t simply irrational. Part of avoidance rests on reasons, and part on anticipating how we’ll feel if we get it wrong.

The invisible cost of not deciding

The real cost of this style isn’t always visible: not deciding is also a decision, and it usually means sticking with the default option, which is exactly what status quo bias describes.

Data from Jozef Bavoľár and Oľga Orosová (2015), with 427 Slovak students, put numbers on that relationship. The avoidant style was one of the two (along with the spontaneous style) that predicted lower scores on decision-making competence tasks (β = -0.26), and the only one associated at the same time with lower wellbeing, more perceived stress and more depressive symptoms. It’s a correlational study: it doesn’t show that postponing decisions causes distress, and it’s just as plausible that stress makes it harder to commit.

What you gain by closing a door

Daniel Gilbert and Jane Ebert (2002) offered photography students the chance to keep one of their prints. Some were told the choice was final; others, that they could swap it during the following days. Those who could change their minds ended up liking their photograph less, something the students themselves didn’t expect. And in another of the studies, most participants preferred to have the option of changing.

The authors’ explanation is that a closed decision sets in motion processes that, after choosing, help us appreciate what we chose, and the open door interrupts them. For this profile, the finding is revealing: the sense of safety that comes from keeping options alive doesn’t always translate into more satisfaction with what is finally chosen.

That’s why setting your own concrete deadline, instead of waiting for an external circumstance to impose one, is a way of regaining some control over the process. It also helps to distinguish which decisions are truly irreversible: the fear of closing the door doesn’t always reflect the real cost of getting it wrong.

If the postponing shows up mostly when choosing where to start a task, the decisional procrastinator profile describes that variant. If what you need in order to decide is other people’s backing, more than avoiding the decision itself, check out the dependent decision-maker profile. You can go back to your full result in the What’s My Decision-Making Style? test.

Sources

• Anderson, C. J. (2003). The psychology of doing nothing: Forms of decision avoidance result from reason and emotion. Psychological Bulletin, 129(1), 139-167. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.1.139
• Bavoľár, J. and Orosová, O. (2015). Decision-making styles and their associations with decision-making competencies and mental health. Judgment and Decision Making, 10(1), 115-122. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1930297500003223
• Gilbert, D. T. and Ebert, J. E. J. (2002). Decisions and revisions: The affective forecasting of changeable outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(4), 503-514. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.4.503
• Scott, S. G. and Bruce, R. A. (1995). Decision-making style: The development and assessment of a new measure. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 55(5), 818-831. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164495055005017
• Thunholm, P. (2004). Decision-making style: Habit, style or both? Personality and Individual Differences, 36(4), 931-944. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(03)00162-4