John Tierney

Who they are

Tierney is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor of City Journal. At The New York Times he wrote a column on urban politics, economics and culture and, later, columns on national politics and on science. Earlier in his career he was a contributing editor to Discover and Health, a staff writer at Science 81-85, and a reporter for the Washington Star and the Bergen Record.

Key papers

Tierney is a journalist rather than a researcher, so his work on this site is journalism and two co-authored books.

Tierney, J. (2011, August 17). Do you suffer from decision fatigue? The New York Times.

Baumeister, R. F., & Tierney, J. (2011). Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Penguin.

Baumeister, R. F., & Tierney, J. (2019). The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. Penguin.

Key ideas

The 2011 Times article presented decision fatigue as a recent development in research on ego depletion, the idea that self-control draws on a limited resource. It brought together Roy Baumeister's experiments on that idea, the Israeli parole study by Shai Danziger and colleagues, Kathleen Vohs's experiments on how choosing affects later effort, and work on car buyers and suit customers who accepted more default options as a run of choices went on.

This site treats the article as the route by which the phrase decision fatigue reached general readers. The research it summarised is assessed separately, on the pages for ego depletion and decision fatigue and in the articles Willpower Is Not a Fuel Tank and What is decision fatigue?.

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