slowmovintarget 4 hours ago

The real reason to sleep on it is that the hippocampus plays back the day's events into your long-term memory and omits the emotional context so that when you recall it, any emotion you have is fresh reaction, and recollection that you felt a certain way, but not a replay of the sharp emotions at the time the events occurred.

So sleeping on it is a way to wash the crud off the occurrence before reexamining it with a little more objectivity.

I read about this in Models of the Mind by Grace Lindsay. Great book.

ishtanbul 7 hours ago

I think the study is worthless. People aren’t able to consistently value arbitrary objects like teddy bears or lamps.

  • itsdrewmiller 4 hours ago

    How do you explain their ability to consistently identify the same boxes (with valuable items near the top) for the non-sleepers then? I agree it's a weird description but it seems like in practice the actually valuable objects must have been clear enough.

snapcaster 11 hours ago

I always sleep on big decisions, but I also can't think of any instance in which I changed my mind after sleeping on it

  • stvltvs 10 hours ago

    I bought solar panels from a door-to-door sales guy and signed some papers cuz he knew a friend of mine and seemed honest. I woke up the next morning with a pit in my stomach realizing, like any chump, I hadn't done basic due diligence. I found out they had horrible reviews and were too expensive, called them up, and backed out of the deal immediately.

    Always sleep on big decisions.

  • hinkley 2 hours ago

    I do it at work fairly regularly. I’m going to do this this way. Nope, I’m gonna do it this other ways.

aeternum 11 hours ago

The fact that humans are averse to change is a strong reason not to sleep on it.

Choosing status-quo has a gravity to it, and often the longer you wait the stronger the pull.

antimemetics 12 hours ago

In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. If discrimination is long, it will spoil.

bequanna 11 hours ago

The saying “time kills all deals” seems to apply here.

Increasing the amount of time you dwell on a decision seems to decrease the amount of risk you’re willing to take.

bena 11 hours ago

But they were all the same, so the box they chose didn't matter. The first is just as good as the last.

So the people who made the snap judgements were no better or worse off than those who slept on it. I would say this study says close to nothing.

  • manwe150 11 hours ago

    The article says they also valued them 10% higher, meaning they would have been willing to pay 10% more for something which gave them no actual additional value. (although I don't know if the conclusion that sleeping on it made them better at evaluation, or simply more forgetful of what made them different causing a regression to the mean, which also just happened to align with the study design)

    • bena 9 hours ago

      10% in this case is $2. Hardly anything worth noting.

      Like, it matters that all the boxes were of equal value. There should have been boxes of multiple values, where the apparent value was on top, in middle, on bottom, and mixed.

      Then if the snap judges valued all the boxes on the tops, while the sleepers had better estimates, that would say something. But that's not what they did. They made all the boxes of equal value, had them choose. But you can't win or lose.

      They could have also had people rank the boxes from most to least valuable. Which would be funny since all the boxes are equal. But they didn't do that either.

      This is the sort of "soft science" study in which the results will never get repeated, but the conclusions will get repeated ad nauseum as some sort of universal truth. Like the marshmallow test, the samaritan test, the Milgram experiment, etc.

      • rightbyte an hour ago

        > the marshmallow test

        That study was flawed? It seems really repeatable.

  • MattPalmer1086 11 hours ago

    The whole point is that they had the same value, but the perception of value changed over time.