When presented with a set of options, people sometimes fail to act. This is especially prevalent when decisions are made in high-stake, high-risk contexts. This chapter argues that although it is important to understand why, how and when people do make decisions, it is also important to understand why, how and when they do not. This examination of ‘non behaviour’ is in contrast to the plethora of research that has widely focussed on the outcomes (and quality) of decision implementation. This chapter presents the results of a ‘critical interpretive synthesis’ of the literature, a specific type of literature review that seeks to incorporate both quantitative and qualitative research papers to help interpret new and novel theories (Dixon-woods et al., 2005; 2006a; 2006b; Flemming, 2009). It identifies three ways one may fail to act. ‘Decision avoidance’ is the active avoidance of choice, as individuals consciously opt to disengage with choice. This contrasts with ‘decision inertia’ - the passive avoidance of choice through redundant and persistent effortful deliberation between options. ‘Implementation failure’ is the behavioural manifestation of inaction by failure to execute action despite cognitive commitment (i.e. selecting an option). It incorporates antecedents that may contribute in explaining the causes of inaction. The taxonomic classification of ‘non decision making’ represented in this chapter is the first of its kind to describe different variations of failures to act and provides the foundation for which subsequent data chapters for this thesis were based.
3.2 Introduction
3.2.1 Defining decision inertia
A decision is a commitment to a course of action that is taken in order to achieve a desired goal (Yates, 2003). However, in uncertain and pressurised environments, decision makers often fail to commit to and implement action either in time or at all (van den Heuvel, Alison & Crego, 2012). This is especially the case when responding to emergency incidents and major disasters. For example, the emergency response to the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 was criticised due to delays in
57 providing the relatives of missing people with information about their loved ones (National Audit Office, 2006); following the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the response was criticised for being too slow due to weak humanitarian leadership (Grunewald, Binder & Georges, 2010) and poor prioritisation of relevant information (Patrick, 2011); and uncertainty concerning roles and responsibilities and a lack of leadership were blamed for causing delays in the response to widespread flooding in the UK in 2012 (PEDU, 2012). Indeed failures to act can arise, not only when incidents are constrained by temporal pressures, but further when the stakes or consequences are high and the situation is complex; for example, the widely reported and tragic death of the toddler ‘Baby P’ in 2007 in the UK was blamed on the failure of social care workers to properly consider and act upon the information they had regarding his abuse (Campbell, Jones & Brindle, 2008); and the government has been criticised for failing to take action and ignoring social moral issues when they are perceived to be low on the political agenda (McKee, 2011). Consider also the decision faced by President Obama and the United States Government with the eruption and escalation of violence in Syria:
“Do nothing, and a humanitarian disaster envelops the region. Intervene militarily, and risk opening Pandora’s box and wading into another quagmire like Iraq. Send aid to the rebels, and watch it end up in the hands of extremists. Continue with diplomacy, and run head first into a Russian veto. None of these approaches offered much hope of success”.
Clinton (2014, p.461)
Failures to act can arise due to antecedents associated with the situational characteristics of the decision environment, such as time pressure and complexity, or can further be a product of exogenous factors associated with the experience and traits of the decision maker and/or the decision making team (Alison, Power, van den Heuvel & Waring, 2014). People fail to act when faced with a range of decision contexts; from personal decisions about whether to buy a house; to organisationally relevant decisions across domains as diverse as emergency response (whether to commit a crew of fire fighters into an unstable, collapsed building) or retail (whether to invest money in opening another 40 supermarkets based on current income
58 expenditure models). Rather than commit to a choice, individuals delay their decision as they redundantly deliberate over their options (Eyre, Alison, McLean & Crego, 2008). This could involve deliberation on decision outcomes in the present, concerning which option is best or which is least worse (Parker & Schrift, 2011), or involve the anticipated potential negative consequences of future outcomes (Beeler & Hunton, 1997) such as being held to account for making a wrong decision (Mamhidir, Kihlgren & Sorlie, 2007) or experiencing salient aversive emotions such as regret (Ritov & Baron, 1995).
The research on failures to act is sparse; yet its conceptual importance and real world impact is not insignificant. It is distinct from the literature on cognitive biases and heuristics as it is not concerned with wrong or irrational judgements, but rather with the failure of individuals to reach choice conclusions. The paucity of research that has been conducted has primarily focussed on tight experimental settings in relatively low-stake decision making contexts, such as looking at why consumers may defer or avoid purchasing decisions in hypothetical decision scenarios (e.g. Novemsky, Dhar, Schwarz & Simonson, 2007; Parker & Schrift, 2011; White & Hoffrage. 2009); and is often methodologically questionable due to limited efforts to extrapolate the differences between, for example, avoiding choice and the decision to say ‘no’ (Huber, 1995). The application of these findings to the real world is questionable, as studies rarely account for the vast number of confounding variables that influence real-life decisions and are external to the decision problem (Anderson, 2005). For example, decision studies tend to assume that when a decision maker considers past negative experiences or anticipated consequences in their choice, then their decision making is ‘biased’; yet this may actually be a very rationalised process reflecting how an individual has ‘learned from past mistakes’ (Tykocinski & Ortmann, 2011). Scholars must extend the conceptual validity of research on decision making by asking why implementation failure occurs. It is not enough to only explore the reasons why and under what conditions individuals behave (decide) with regards to given stimuli, but we must also find out why people may respond to stimuli by not behaving (indecision).
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3.2.2 What is known about non-decision making?
Anderson (2003) was one of the first authors to discuss the importance of failures to act in his detailed review of decision avoidance. He defined decision avoidance as ‘a tendency to avoid making a choice by postponing it or by seeking an easy way out that involves no action or no change’ (p. 139) and described its antecedents as deriving from both emotional and rational roots. The concept of choice avoidance was furthered van den Heuvel et al (2012), who identified that, in team based settings, actions failed not only as teams sought to avoid making their choice, but also because they failed to translate cognitive choices into the behavioural implementation of action. Research on inaction in organisational management has also found that organisations may fail to act by choice deferral, or by simply failing to reach a choice conclusion (Brooks, 2011).
The taxonomy presented in this chapter extends previous works. Specifically, it aims to: (i) conceptually define and describe the different ways one may ‘fail to act’; and (ii) present theoretical antecedents, derived from the literature, that may help explain these failures in cognitive processing. Crucially, it considers why action may fail, even when people are motivated to make a choice, yet for reasons that will be discussed, fail to translate that motivation into action. This chapter presents three types of action failure: (i) ‘Decision avoidance’ - a maladaptive cognitive process whereby the decision maker actively avoids thinking about whether to commit to action (e.g. “I choose not decide for the time being”); (ii) ‘Decision inertia’ - a maladaptive cognitive process whereby the decision maker passively avoids choice as they are distracted by cognitive conflict (e.g. “I am still thinking about whether I will commit to, refuse or avoid this choice); (iii) ‘Implementation failure’ - the third type of avoidance, which reflects the maladaptive behavioural process whereby the decision maker fails to translate their choice into action (e.g. “I have made my choice but efforts to execute / implement this choice have failed”). All three describe behavioural inhibition, yet, crucially, the motivation behind each form of inaction differs. Some are avoiding their choice by deciding to ignore it, whilst others are still deliberating their choice; and others have made their choice but failed to execute it. The significant contribution of this chapter is to encourage psychological enquiry into the action failure phenomenon by helping to better define the concept of action failures.
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