Cause of misjudgment № 17
Stress-Influence Tendency
Stress speeds up and intensifies the other tendencies, and heavy stress can cause sudden, sometimes lasting, breakdowns in judgment.
A little stress sharpens performance — a looming deadline focuses the mind. But beyond a point, stress degrades thinking rather than improving it, and Munger’s key observation is that it acts as an accelerant on the rest of the list. Under pressure, doubt-avoidance gets stronger, social proof gets stronger, and people grab faster at whatever conclusion or crowd is nearest. This is precisely why manipulators manufacture stress and urgency: a stressed target is a more suggestible target.
Heavy, sudden stress can do something more dramatic — it can trigger an immediate and severe change in behavior, even a kind of depressive shutdown. Munger pointed to Pavlov’s late work, in which dogs subjected to extreme stress (his kennels flooded, the animals nearly drowned) had their conditioned behavior completely reversed, and some never recovered. The lesson he drew was that extreme stress can produce non-obvious, lasting psychological breakdowns, and that this corner of psychology is badly under-studied.
The practical upshot is twofold. First, do not make important decisions while under acute stress if you can possibly defer them, because your judgment is compromised in ways you won’t feel from the inside. Second, recognize when someone is deliberately stressing you — the time-limited offer, the high-pressure close, the engineered crisis — and treat that pressure itself as a reason to step back rather than to act.
