"There's a well-known study by Shiv and Fedorikhin showing that if you tax people's working memory by making them remember a 7-digit string of numbers, people are more likely to make a less-optimal decision (they chose to eat chocolate cake versus the more healthy fruit salad option)."
I'm not sure how the Shiv experiment proves anything. I personally would always choose the chocolate cake, no matter how much time I had to spend on the decision - I just don't like fruit salads, at least not as much as cakes. And one doesn't eat desserts all the time, so it's not much of a problem anyway. 'Optimal' != 'healthy', and I bet (pun intended) that when choosing dessert many people optimize for feeling, not for health.
(Maybe this effect was documented using some other experiments, but sometimes when I read psychology stuff, I start do doubt both my and researchers' sanity, because I can't figure out how little shifts of behavior over e.g. a chocolate cake, tested on a small (< 1k) sample are really giving us any valuable insight, and are not just random noise)
I'd love to, but in case of psychology, many of them (or, conclusions drawn from them) just sound plain nonsense.
EDIT: I'm searching for original paper on Shiv experiment. It might be that cognitive load makes our decision less rational, but I'm not buying choosing salad over cake as a rationality test.
It seems that they also asked people to rate the rationality of their choice - whether they believe the cake/salad is good for health, a wise choice, etc. Given this data the result and conclusions sound a bit more reasonable.
I try to trust peer reviewed papers (if we can't trust them, what can we trust?), but I also try to keep my bullshit meter well calibrated. There's enough of pseudo-scientific "knowledge" circulating around. Just look at 7-38-55 (spoken-voice-body language) "rule of communication" and 'cone of learning' ("we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, ...") - it gets repeated around all the time, but if you think of it, it makes no sense. And, in fact, it's totally not true. It's just a result of a big misinterpretation of some scientific studies.
I'm not sure how the Shiv experiment proves anything. I personally would always choose the chocolate cake, no matter how much time I had to spend on the decision - I just don't like fruit salads, at least not as much as cakes. And one doesn't eat desserts all the time, so it's not much of a problem anyway. 'Optimal' != 'healthy', and I bet (pun intended) that when choosing dessert many people optimize for feeling, not for health.
(Maybe this effect was documented using some other experiments, but sometimes when I read psychology stuff, I start do doubt both my and researchers' sanity, because I can't figure out how little shifts of behavior over e.g. a chocolate cake, tested on a small (< 1k) sample are really giving us any valuable insight, and are not just random noise)