Rebecca Barry: Tentative welcome to perks of indecision

It's a woman's prerogative to change her mind. Photo / Getty Images

Marmite or honey? Facebook or phone? Spend or save? It's exhausting making decisions as weighty as these, let alone whether to vote left, right, strategically, not at all or with thoughts of a train taking you out to the airport in a few years' time.

Paul Henry's decision to resign from Breakfast would have had little to do with what he would have liked to decide; the circumstances decided for him. Why wait for the snowball to bury you in an avalanche?

But when the external world isn't giving you signs, how best to make a decision? Trust your gut or mull it over? Toss a coin or ask the Tarot? It took 17 hours to decide what to write here and, even now, I'm undeciding it. Not ideal when a deadline is looming.

The good news is that the encroaching summer isn't entirely to blame for this bout of should-I-shouldn't-I. Care of a study on ambivalence, there's a new way to put people in a box. So I'm off the hook. They just haven't decided what to call the box yet.

Psychology has largely ignored ambivalence - the condition whereby you see both sides of an argument simultaneously - because they didn't think it was meaningful to study. But lucky for us indecisive schmucks, the tables have turned. They've actually decided to treat the topic seriously.

Shirley S. Wang of the Wall Street Journal writes an interesting article about the topic. And, her research shows, it's not all bad to be indecisive. She cites a University of Amsterdam study in which a social psychologist asked college students to write an essay coming down on one side of a contentious issue.

Another group of students were asked to write about both sides of the issue. The students forced to choose a side reported feeling more uncomfortable and actually perspired more. It seems obvious why. Those expressing a one-sided point of view might have compromised the complexity of their real feelings about the subject.

Or perhaps they had to get over the fear of saying one thing over another. Maybe they just weren't convinced of their own persuasive powers.

But the interesting thing about it is, before now, it was largely assumed only the indecisive suffered the agony of conflicting emotions.

Wang later writes: "Because of their strongly positive or strongly negative views, black-and-white thinkers tend to be quicker at making decisions than highly ambivalent people. But if they get mired in one point of view and can't see others, black-and-white thinking may prompt conflict with others or unhealthy thoughts or behaviours."

Even as a dilly-dallier, weigher-upperer and someone who probably expends too much mental energy wading through grey areas, I can attest that being indecisive has its uses.

It might have taken two hours to vote (eventually coming back to the original candidate picked), and I'm annoying to go out for dinner with sometimes, but it is now, say psychologists, a sign of maturity.

So the indecisive may feel the debilitating sensation of a yes-no tug of war but we have the ability to be more empathetic because we are able to see both sides of an argument and all possibilities.

It's easier to get along with people because you can appreciate their point of view more clearly. Of course, you can just as easily sweat the small stuff so, whatever your decision-making ability, you're going to need a good deodorant.

At a dinner once we went through 47 baskets of bread and 18 bottles of wine as a dining companion ummed and aahed over whether to order the quesadilla or the enchiladas. I'm still not convinced he knew what the difference was. Afterwards, he regretted his decision.

Is indecision a particularly New Zealand trait? I can't decide. In the work sphere, we tend to be good at lots of things rather than focusing on just the one. That gives us greater breadth and understanding of how life works on the shop floor and in the boardroom.

But we're also a nation of salt-of-the-earth characters who appreciate direct communication. Whichever we are, being indecisive is annoying, time-consuming, frustrating, torturous and self-defeating - in the wider scheme of things, it can mean a lack of conviction, poor leadership or a pre-cursor to neurosis. It's also a woman's prerogative to change her mind. And I intend to.