The Way Pressure Affects Decision Making

Making decisions under pressure can blur people’s judgment in at least three ways:

• Under stress, we tend to behave as if we are under time pressure even when we’re not. We often have more time than we think.
• Pressure leads people to adopt a narrow vision of the situation at hand. In highly stressful situations, we tend to focus all our attention on the decision and ignore peripheral information, which may be vital. This is known as ‘cognitive tunnelling’.
• Others will suffer from the opposite problem and experience ‘decision inertia’.