<p>A serious answer exists to a sort-of-related question though, you can track the "energy budget" of the brain and see how much glucose/oxygen it's burning. 'Number of decisions' might be a silly way to talk about it, but [metabolic] brain effort can be quantified and it does make sense to ask how high it is and how much it changes over the course of a day. There are lots of studies comparing the level of activity associated with some task with resting-state activity: you could take the size of the difference for some reference task (it's gonna be small) and work out a plausible range for the amount of time the brain spends working at least that hard over the course of a normal day.
There's a quick fact-collection on this stuff here (2002): <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/99/16/10237" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.pnas.org/content/99/16/10237</a></p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-18T14:33:51.607Z
2018-05-18T14:33:51.607Z
steveLangsford
<p>Apparently, Dr. Eva Krockow was the one to make that statement.</p>
<p><a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/21/health/decision-fatigue-solutions-wellness/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/21/health/decision-fatigue-solutions-wellness/index.html</a></p>
<p>based on these articles.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-12-05T17:41:08.773Z
Removed the spammy link; this article and the removed link mention an individual as a possible source, but no claim is made that this individual originated the claim, only that they repeated it to a journalist, so it doesn't really provide any information about the statement from a psychology/neuroscience perspective.
Bryan Krause
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-12-05T17:36:36.553Z
2023-12-05T17:39:19.663Z
2023-12-05T17:39:19.663Z
Gabriel Vieira
<p>Concurring with the comments on the Skeptics question, I am also not aware of a standardized operationalization of &quot;number of decisions&quot; that could be used to produce a meaningful measure for this, and to my knowledge no (serious) research has attempted to calculate a daily tally.</p>
<p>This clearly poses little challenge for the numerous references to this and other unsourced/uncited statistics.  While references on various blogs, social media, self-help books, and other questionable sources are not of much note, there are a few citations made on media outlets that readers might take more seriously, such as:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/are-women-better-decision-makers-than-men/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">The Telegraph UK (2016)</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They say the average person makes 35,000 decisions a day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/becky-walsh/awkward-business_b_4797862.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Huffington Post UK (2014)</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>According to newspaper ‘USA Today’ the average adult makes about
35,000 decisions each day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Phrasings such as &quot;they say...&quot;, &quot;it is thought that...&quot;, &quot;according to various online sources...&quot;, etc are not very committal about validity, and the above quotes do only appear in the &quot;Lifestyle&quot; sections of these newspapers, so there is not much impetus for journalistic integrity.</p>
<p>Articles often mention other corroborating research to make the &quot;35,000&quot; statistic sound more plausible.  An example from a different <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/11/14/how-to-be-a-better-decision-maker_n_1091959.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Huffington Post UK (2011)</a> article (found on <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/average-person-makes-773618-decisions-90742" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Mirror</a> magazine as well):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The average Brit makes 773,618 decisions in a lifetime but lives to
regret as many as 143,262 of them, a study has found. ... The study of
2,000 indecisive Brits, by Nintendo Puzzler Mind Gym 3D, found that
...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That's right, Nintendo - the game system company - purportedly conducted this apparently unpublished poll, giving a much lower number of decisions statistic (around 27 per day).</p>
<p>Another example on a <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/strategic-thinking/201208/what-is-your-momentum-factor" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Psychology Today (2012)</a> article:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>According to a survey by Columbia University decision researcher,
Sheena Iyengar, the average American makes approximately 70 conscious
decisions every day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia, also apparently did not publish her survey findings, but she does discuss it <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose/transcript?language=en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">on TED (2012)</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans, and the average
number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70
in a typical day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here is something from <a href="https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-decisions-humans-make-day-b50c6bcad5ce5872#" rel="nofollow noreferrer">reference.com</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Each individual is different, so it is impossible to pinpoint a
specific number of daily decisions that applies to every individual,
but Time magazine puts the number in the thousands.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The referenced <a href="http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/04/making-choices-how-your-brain-decides/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Time Magazine</a> article indeed says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every day, we face thousands of decisions both major and minor ...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How silly.  Here is another interesting item from <a href="https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-thoughts-per-minute-cb7fcf22ebbf8466#" rel="nofollow noreferrer">reference.com</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The average person has about 48.6 thoughts per minute, according to
the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at the University of Southern
California. That adds up to a total of 70,000 thoughts per day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The <a href="http://www.loni.usc.edu/about_loni/education/brain_trivia.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">source cited</a> for this amazing claim does not corroborate this ... any more, but <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170313053429/http://loni.usc.edu/about_loni/education/brain_trivia.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">it did</a>!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How many thoughts does the average person have per day?
*70,000</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So let's see, 70k thoughts per day, 35k decisions per day ... that's about 1 out of every 2 thoughts is a decision?  The other 1 in 2 thoughts must be <a href="http://www.gq.com/story/health-myth-does-the-average-man-really-think-about-sex-every-7-seconds" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the ones about sex</a>.  But wait, what's the asterisk (*) about?  Ah:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>*This is still an open question (how many thoughts does the average human brain processes in 1 day). LONI faculty have done some very
preliminary studies using undergraduate student volunteers and have
estimated that one may expect around 60-70K thoughts per day. These
results are not peer-reviewed/published. There is no generally
accepted definition of what &quot;thought&quot; is or how it is created. In our
study, we had assumed that a &quot;thought&quot; is a sporadic single-idea
cognitive concept resulting from the act of thinking, or produced by
spontaneous systems-level cognitive brain activations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The most credible corroborating research I've seen so far is the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0013916506295573" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Wansink &amp; Sobal (2007)</a> paper: &quot;Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook&quot;, published in the journal Environment and Behavior.  Keeping in mind that neither author is a cognitive scientist, and that this article concerns nutritional health, not psychological measurements, and that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wansink" rel="nofollow noreferrer">lead author</a> has faced dozens of retractions and corrections of his published papers, and was barred from research due to scientific misconduct, this is nonetheless a very <a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&amp;hl=en&amp;cites=12130922988295639061" rel="nofollow noreferrer">well cited</a> paper.  In the paper, the authors explain:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One hundred and fifty adults ... were initially asked to estimate how
many total decisions about foods and beverages they make in one day.
They were then asked six questions about snacks, six questions about
meals, and six questions about beverages. ... While the typical person
estimated they made around 15 food and beverage decisions in a day,
the average that was calculated from subsequent questioning was 219,
approximately 200 more.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I'm not sure if the authors truly believe that this method conclusively sets the total number of daily food-related decisions, or if they were just pointing out that we are often not aware of many of the decisions that we make, but it is not difficult to imagine that if the survey contained more or fewer detailed &quot;subsequent&quot; questioning, then the total number of decisions would increase or decrease accordingly.  Regardless, this paper is an important reference for the author's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindless_Eating#Psychology" rel="nofollow noreferrer">self-help book</a> - Mindless Eating (2006):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The phrase &quot;mindless eating&quot; refers to the empirical finding that
people make nearly 20 times more daily decisions about food than they
are aware of (an average of around 200 each day).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With a range of between 27 and 35,000 decisions per day, I think you can just pick any number you want for this statistic.  These types of claims are often associated with reference to research on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue" rel="nofollow noreferrer">decision fatigue</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_controversy_and_conflicting_meta_analyses" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ego-depletion</a> - a largely discredited idea about the limits of human capacity for decision making.</p>
<p>Anyways, I hope you had as much fun reading this answer as I had writing it.  Also, according to the Arnon Science Foundation, recent research proves that voting up this answer will make your day up to 32% better, so be sure to improve your average daily decision making by showing your support!</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-04-22T19:14:57.277Z
Had to give a +1 for "Arnon Science Foundation, recent research proves that voting up this answer will make your day up to 32% better" lol
Chris Rogers
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-04-27T11:14:19.820Z
@Chris Have an up-vote for your comment on up-voting, I hope it makes you day better!
Comte
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-03-15T01:11:10.513Z
Login with my account on this new computer to just upvote the answer because of   "Arnon Science Foundation, recent research proves that voting up this answer will make your day up to 32% better" Hahaha. Great.
Tim Hong
CC BY-SA 4.0
2017-04-21T23:19:13.393Z
2022-01-05T00:51:07.780Z
2022-01-05T00:51:07.780Z
Arnon Weinberg
<p>In an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k3_T84z5Ds" rel="noreferrer">advertisement by Microsoft for their To-Do product</a> they use a statistic that we "make over 35,000" decisions a day.  Unsurprisingly, they don't cite a source.  Is there any scholarly basis for such a figure?</p>

<p>Even though there are usually 86400 seconds in a day (that works out to one decision every ~2.5 seconds if you include time sleeping) you could reasonably make an argument for that number.  I say that, however, without a good operational definition for "decision".  Executive function researchers may outright say that figure is bunk.</p>

<p><strong>Q:</strong> Careless usage aside, is there a source for this statistic and/or a more scholarly correct number for the "number of decisions we make each day"?</p>

<p>Apparently the statistic is widely "cited" (without proper citation) online.  Here are a few instances (if any are left as comments I'll include them below):</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://go.roberts.edu/leadingedge/the-great-choices-of-strategic-leaders" rel="noreferrer">http://go.roberts.edu/leadingedge/the-great-choices-of-strategic-leaders</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.inc.com/kevin-daum/how-to-make-great-decisions-most-of-the-time.html" rel="noreferrer">https://www.inc.com/kevin-daum/how-to-make-great-decisions-most-of-the-time.html</a></li>
</ul>

<p>This question was asked on Skeptics SE, but closed without a response:<br>
<a href="https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32672/do-people-make-35000-decisions-a-day">Do people make 35000 decisions a day? [closed]</a></p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-04-21T21:46:23.223Z
I may have stumbled on a possible lead to the original source (Nobel Prize Winner [Daniel Kahneman](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/kahneman-bio.html)).  The site I found this out is at http://www.strategicnorth.com/blog/2016/07/12/how-do-humans-make-decisions-and-how-do-those-decisions-lead-to-actions/
Chris Rogers
<decision-making><executive-function>
Basis for "we make 35,000 decisions a day" statistic
ebpa
# Basis for "we make 35,000 decisions a day" statistic

(Asked by: username_0 on 2017-04-21)

In an [advertisement by Microsoft for their To-Do product](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k3_T84z5Ds) they use a statistic that we "make over 35,000" decisions a day. Unsurprisingly, they don't cite a source. Is there any scholarly basis for such a figure?

Even though there are usually 86400 seconds in a day (that works out to one decision every ~2.5 seconds if you include time sleeping) you could reasonably make an argument for that number. I say that, however, without a good operational definition for "decision". Executive function researchers may outright say that figure is bunk.

**Q:** Careless usage aside, is there a source for this statistic and/or a more scholarly correct number for the "number of decisions we make each day"?

Apparently the statistic is widely "cited" (without proper citation) online. Here are a few instances (if any are left as comments I'll include them below):

* <http://go.roberts.edu/leadingedge/the-great-choices-of-strategic-leaders>
* <https://www.inc.com/kevin-daum/how-to-make-great-decisions-most-of-the-time.html>

This question was asked on Skeptics SE, but closed without a response:  
[Do people make 35000 decisions a day? [closed]](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32672/do-people-make-35000-decisions-a-day)

**Tags:** decision-making, executive-function

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I may have stumbled on a possible lead to the original source (Nobel Prize Winner [Daniel Kahneman](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/kahneman-bio.html)).  The site I found this out is at http://www.strategicnorth.com/blog/2016/07/12/how-do-humans-make-decisions-and-how-do-those-decisions-lead-to-actions/  

---

## 3 answers

### Answer by username_5 on 2017-04-21. Score: 18 | Accepted answer

Concurring with the comments on the Skeptics question, I am also not aware of a standardized operationalization of "number of decisions" that could be used to produce a meaningful measure for this, and to my knowledge no (serious) research has attempted to calculate a daily tally.

This clearly poses little challenge for the numerous references to this and other unsourced/uncited statistics. While references on various blogs, social media, self-help books, and other questionable sources are not of much note, there are a few citations made on media outlets that readers might take more seriously, such as:

[The Telegraph UK (2016)](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/are-women-better-decision-makers-than-men/):

> They say the average person makes 35,000 decisions a day.

[Huffington Post UK (2014)](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/becky-walsh/awkward-business_b_4797862.html):

> According to newspaper ‘USA Today’ the average adult makes about
> 35,000 decisions each day.

Phrasings such as "they say...", "it is thought that...", "according to various online sources...", etc are not very committal about validity, and the above quotes do only appear in the "Lifestyle" sections of these newspapers, so there is not much impetus for journalistic integrity.

Articles often mention other corroborating research to make the "35,000" statistic sound more plausible. An example from a different [Huffington Post UK (2011)](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/11/14/how-to-be-a-better-decision-maker_n_1091959.html) article (found on [Mirror](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/average-person-makes-773618-decisions-90742) magazine as well):

> The average Brit makes 773,618 decisions in a lifetime but lives to
> regret as many as 143,262 of them, a study has found. ... The study of
> 2,000 indecisive Brits, by Nintendo Puzzler Mind Gym 3D, found that
> ...

That's right, Nintendo - the game system company - purportedly conducted this apparently unpublished poll, giving a much lower number of decisions statistic (around 27 per day).

Another example on a [Psychology Today (2012)](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/strategic-thinking/201208/what-is-your-momentum-factor) article:

> According to a survey by Columbia University decision researcher,
> Sheena Iyengar, the average American makes approximately 70 conscious
> decisions every day.

Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia, also apparently did not publish her survey findings, but she does discuss it [on TED (2012)](https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose/transcript?language=en):

> I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans, and the average
> number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70
> in a typical day.

Here is something from [reference.com](https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-decisions-humans-make-day-b50c6bcad5ce5872#):

> Each individual is different, so it is impossible to pinpoint a
> specific number of daily decisions that applies to every individual,
> but Time magazine puts the number in the thousands.

The referenced [Time Magazine](http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/04/making-choices-how-your-brain-decides/) article indeed says:

> Every day, we face thousands of decisions both major and minor ...

How silly. Here is another interesting item from [reference.com](https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-thoughts-per-minute-cb7fcf22ebbf8466#):

> The average person has about 48.6 thoughts per minute, according to
> the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at the University of Southern
> California. That adds up to a total of 70,000 thoughts per day.

The [source cited](http://www.loni.usc.edu/about_loni/education/brain_trivia.php) for this amazing claim does not corroborate this ... any more, but [it did](https://web.archive.org/web/20170313053429/http://loni.usc.edu/about_loni/education/brain_trivia.php)!

> How many thoughts does the average person have per day?
> \*70,000

So let's see, 70k thoughts per day, 35k decisions per day ... that's about 1 out of every 2 thoughts is a decision? The other 1 in 2 thoughts must be [the ones about sex](http://www.gq.com/story/health-myth-does-the-average-man-really-think-about-sex-every-7-seconds). But wait, what's the asterisk (\*) about? Ah:

> \*This is still an open question (how many thoughts does the average human brain processes in 1 day). LONI faculty have done some very
> preliminary studies using undergraduate student volunteers and have
> estimated that one may expect around 60-70K thoughts per day. These
> results are not peer-reviewed/published. There is no generally
> accepted definition of what "thought" is or how it is created. In our
> study, we had assumed that a "thought" is a sporadic single-idea
> cognitive concept resulting from the act of thinking, or produced by
> spontaneous systems-level cognitive brain activations.

The most credible corroborating research I've seen so far is the [Wansink & Sobal (2007)](https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0013916506295573) paper: "Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook", published in the journal Environment and Behavior. Keeping in mind that neither author is a cognitive scientist, and that this article concerns nutritional health, not psychological measurements, and that the [lead author](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wansink) has faced dozens of retractions and corrections of his published papers, and was barred from research due to scientific misconduct, this is nonetheless a very [well cited](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cites=12130922988295639061) paper. In the paper, the authors explain:

> One hundred and fifty adults ... were initially asked to estimate how
> many total decisions about foods and beverages they make in one day.
> They were then asked six questions about snacks, six questions about
> meals, and six questions about beverages. ... While the typical person
> estimated they made around 15 food and beverage decisions in a day,
> the average that was calculated from subsequent questioning was 219,
> approximately 200 more.

I'm not sure if the authors truly believe that this method conclusively sets the total number of daily food-related decisions, or if they were just pointing out that we are often not aware of many of the decisions that we make, but it is not difficult to imagine that if the survey contained more or fewer detailed "subsequent" questioning, then the total number of decisions would increase or decrease accordingly. Regardless, this paper is an important reference for the author's [self-help book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindless_Eating#Psychology) - Mindless Eating (2006):

> The phrase "mindless eating" refers to the empirical finding that
> people make nearly 20 times more daily decisions about food than they
> are aware of (an average of around 200 each day).

With a range of between 27 and 35,000 decisions per day, I think you can just pick any number you want for this statistic. These types of claims are often associated with reference to research on [decision fatigue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue) and [ego-depletion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_controversy_and_conflicting_meta_analyses) - a largely discredited idea about the limits of human capacity for decision making.

Anyways, I hope you had as much fun reading this answer as I had writing it. Also, according to the Arnon Science Foundation, recent research proves that voting up this answer will make your day up to 32% better, so be sure to improve your average daily decision making by showing your support!

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Had to give a +1 for "Arnon Science Foundation, recent research proves that voting up this answer will make your day up to 32% better" lol  
> **username_6**: @Chris Have an up-vote for your comment on up-voting, I hope it makes you day better!  
> **username_7**: Login with my account on this new computer to just upvote the answer because of   "Arnon Science Foundation, recent research proves that voting up this answer will make your day up to 32% better" Hahaha. Great.  

---

### Answer by username_2 on 2018-05-18. Score: 3

A serious answer exists to a sort-of-related question though, you can track the "energy budget" of the brain and see how much glucose/oxygen it's burning. 'Number of decisions' might be a silly way to talk about it, but [metabolic] brain effort can be quantified and it does make sense to ask how high it is and how much it changes over the course of a day. There are lots of studies comparing the level of activity associated with some task with resting-state activity: you could take the size of the difference for some reference task (it's gonna be small) and work out a plausible range for the amount of time the brain spends working at least that hard over the course of a normal day.
There's a quick fact-collection on this stuff here (2002): <http://www.pnas.org/content/99/16/10237>


---

### Answer by username_3 on 2023-12-05. Score: -1

Apparently, Dr. Eva Krockow was the one to make that statement.

<https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/21/health/decision-fatigue-solutions-wellness/index.html>

based on these articles.

> **Comments:**
> **username_4**: Removed the spammy link; this article and the removed link mention an individual as a possible source, but no claim is made that this individual originated the claim, only that they repeated it to a journalist, so it doesn't really provide any information about the statement from a psychology/neuroscience perspective.  

---

