Via Medium’s Coach Tony, a link to a New York Times article on decision fatigue:
Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.
This topic isn’t new, but I find the notion of mental energy and the finite store of it for people who must make decisions to be an evergreen topic. The case study mentioned at the beginning, whereby people were granted or denied probation purely due to time of day, is fascinating–and cautionary.