Fear of Making Decisions

It is a philosopher's term and not a clinical one, and no diagnostic category, prevalence figure, instrument or study exists under it.

Which sentence the concept comes from

Kaufmann had already identified the mechanism in Kierkegaard, and his summary is the clearest statement of it anywhere in his work: "Nobody before Kierkegaard had seen so clearly that the freedom to make a fateful decision that may change our character and future breeds anxiety".

That is decidophobia in one sentence, written about somebody else. The anxiety is not produced by the difficulty of the choice or by the stakes attached to it. It is produced by the freedom, and specifically by the fact that the decision may change the person making it.

A choice that leaves the chooser unchanged can be got wrong. A choice that alters character and future cannot be evaluated in advance by the person it will alter.

Who wrote it

Kaufmann was born in Freiburg im Breisgau on 1 July 1921 and died on 4 September 1980. He was raised Lutheran, and at eleven, finding that he believed in neither the Trinity nor the divinity of Jesus, converted to Judaism, subsequently discovering that all four of his grandparents were Jewish.

Being both descended from Jews and a convert placed him in real danger in Nazi Germany. He emigrated to the United States in 1939, graduated from Williams College in 1941 and took a master's degree at Harvard in 1942 before the war interrupted. He enlisted with the United States Army Air Force, was placed at Camp Ritchie, and was one of the Ritchie Boys who served as interrogators for the Military Intelligence Service in Europe, conducting interrogations in Germany.

He completed his doctorate at Harvard in 1947 on Nietzsche's theory of values, written in under a year, joined Princeton the same year and stayed for more than three decades.

That biography is not decoration. A man who converted at eleven on doctrinal grounds, left a country because of what he was and what he had chosen, and returned to it as an interrogator, is the man who wrote a book about the fear of deciding and named autonomy as the alternative.

What he proposed instead

Kaufmann set out his own ethic in The Faith of a Heretic in 1961 and in the decidophobia book of 1973, advocating four cardinal virtues:

• humbition, his own fusion of humility and ambition
• love
• courage
• honesty

Humbition is the one that bears on this entry. A fear of deciding can be produced by too much confidence in one's judgement or by too little, and a virtue combining humility with ambition is aimed at the person paralysed by the gap between them.

Where the fear appears without the word

FOBO, fear of a better option, was coined in 2004 in the same article that produced FOMO, and it names the same difficulty in the language of a business school: the fear that committing to a choice forecloses a better one not yet found.

Two coinages, thirty-one years apart, one from a Princeton philosopher and one from a Harvard Business School student, describing a fear the clinical literature has never picked up. What the psychology of it holds instead is the general finding, from the fear of failure literature, that self-handicapping preserves an explanation at the cost of the result.

What the record contains

Kaufmann's term, Kaufmann's book, and Kaufmann's reading of Kierkegaard. Nothing else. Decidophobia is one of the few words in this catalogue whose entire history is a single author's argument, and the argument is better than most of the clinical material this catalogue reports.