Barratt Impulsiveness

Throughout the process of completing the questionnaires to determine my decision making profile, several pieces of information confirmed my suspicions about how I decide and one survey revealed a statistic that surprised me. Knowing I rely heavily on intuition and seek to gather a great deal of information early in the process, I find that relying on tuition is my preferred means of deciding. Unfortunately at the same time my grade on impulse decision making scored higher than normal.
This survey, adapted from the Factor Structure of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, indicated I possessed a “high tendency to impulse”. Scoring an 81, the authors of Decide and Conquer said my score was akin to that of a prisoner. Sobering thought. While I attribute some of this score to having just performed four surveys and was wanting to conclude my exercise in self-examination, there is some truth to my desiring to rely on impulse. My limited life experience has revealed that some of my best decisions have come by relying on my intuition and avoiding decision paralysis because of information overload. Intuition in theory is the ability to understand without conscious reasoning. This ability to understand comes from your mind’s ability

to quickly compute life experiences and make a decision that internally feels comfortable. While feeling comfortable doesn’t guarantee success, it does allow for peace of mind should the decision not garner the results you desired.
This propensity to impulsivity made me question the times in which I have been most impulsive in my decision making.

It occurred to me that these instances typically have come in the course of repeated decisions regarding the same topic or theory, or a similarly phrased question. This same phenomenon was explored in the research study, Inverted U Shape Model: How Frequent Repetition Affects Perceived Risk by Xi Lui, featured in the Journal of Judgement & Decision-Making. In the presented research, “higher frequency of repetition increases the accessibility of risk in the event”, In doing so risk is valued throughout the process and in experience risk aversion decreases in the decision-maker despite no actual change to the level of risk

actualized.
What becomes problematic in this logic is my personal application of this principle to decisions that are not as similar as I perceive and I neglect actualization of the effects of my previous decisions success because due to the factor of ease. What must be done to counter this propensity is simple, slow down and process, even when the decision feels like an open-shut case. Shane Frederick’s research on Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making helps to remind me of my need to pause as the MIT researcher demonstrated that those with the greatest IQ seemingly are more patient in the decision process and are far less immediate reward motivated. Through use of a Cognitive Reflection Test, Frederick illustrated that from the earliest ages to those in their waning years, persons that are more deliberate in decision making make better long-term decisions because of the natural delay and suppressed need for gratification.
In trying to understand this research I gathered that much of my impulsivity comes from a need to accomplish a task or in this case decision, and receive a reward. The reward for me is not having to think about a specific issue for an extended period of time. What I need to do to counteract this learned behavior is practice being more deliberate in all things I do and purposefully delay gratification of any kind, be it a dessert, a monetary reward, or a much needed vacation. For me the impulsivity I exhibit in my decision-making, while not overly burdensome and apt to producing horrific decisions, could be vastly improved by simply slowing down the cognitive process and weighing options.