That was really interesting and the title should've been different. I assumed it was the same story from a few months ago about the statistical likelihood of parole on the time of day but it's far more than that.

Three things sprung to mind:

The first is that I've often said I like the food we get at Google because food is, for me, a bunch of decisions I just don't care about. Where to go? What to order from the menu? How much to tip (if appropriate)?

Providing your employees with food seems to directly address decision fatigue.

Google rose to a prominence in an era of portal pages. Yahoo in particular had a home page without hundreds of links. Google presented you with a logo, a text box, two buttons and <50 words of text. What to do on such a page involves less decision making.

In the 90s there were lots of experiments with directories. Yahoo had one. Think about this: typing in a search involves one decision. Finding something in a directory involves one decision at each step.

The second thing that occurred to me was Apple. Apple is famous for making decisions for its customers. Many people rail against this lack of control. I personally appreciate it.

Consider: with Windows you need to make lots of decisions like whether or not you need to have security software, what antivirus solution to get, what program to use to play music, etc. With a Mac (and especially an iDevice) most of those choices are made for you.

Similarly the Apple Store is famous for its low number of choices (compare buying a Mac to buying any PC online).

Could it be that this making decisions for customers is part of the intense loyalty many have for Apple products?

The third was the sociological impacts of decision fatigue. Organized religion and government tell people what to do. They give people a set of morals and laws (respectively) to follow rather than forcing people to think through the consequences. Decision fatigue is a new angle to this (at least for me).

Lastly the impacts of poverty were a particularly refreshing angle. As a software engineer I don't really need to make day-to-day tradeoffs in groceries, what I can eat and the like so I just don't suffer from that kind of fatigue.

EDIT: two more interesting aspects to this occurred to me.

The education system in the last few decades has emphasized creativity and expression. This is part of the reason why many countries have abandoned school uniforms. While many laud the benefits of self-expression from, say, high school students being able to wear what they want, what about the consequences in terms of decision fatigue?

High school is stressful for most people. Add to that the stress of deciding what to wear, how to present oneself and so on and you can argue it's a contributing factor to poor decision-making by teens, no?

The second is on leadership. Leaders make decisions, obviating the need for followers to weigh up choices. Could this be part of why so many of us are so eager to follow? I remember a scene from an early Mad Men episode where Don was saying that what most people crave is to be told that whatever they're doing is OK. We crave that affirmation. I wonder at the decision fatigue implications of this.

Similarly, what about relationships? Couples often get to the point of what "we" decided to do. Could part of the advantage of a relationship be that you greatly reduce the number of decisions that you personally need to make?