What Fear Is Doing to Your Decisions

I’ve been speaking to people lately who describe “working from fear.” It might be driven by a general dread of AI, concerns about layoffs, a lack of clarity about the future, or even not knowing how someone will react to bad news or a disagreement.

Fear at work rarely looks like panic. It looks like a decision deferred, a message softened, a safer option chosen. From the inside, it usually feels like being prudent.

That’s what makes it worth a closer look. The research on fear and decision-making is unusually consistent, and it says fear does four things to leaders.

1. Fear makes risk look bigger than it is

Psychologists Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner ran a series of studies comparing fearful and angry people. The fearful ones consistently judged risks as more likely and chose the safer option. The angry ones did the opposite.

The part leaders should notice is that the fear didn’t have to be about the decision in front of them. Fear from one part of life followed people into unrelated judgments. The dread you pick up from a headline about AI comes with you into the hiring conversation an hour later.

2. Fear narrows what you can see

Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten has spent decades studying what stress does to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain we rely on for judgment, flexibility, and long-range thinking. It turns out to be the region most sensitive to stress. Even mild stress can knock it back quickly, as long as that stress feels uncontrollable.

Organizations behave the same way. In a classic 1981 paper, Barry Staw and his colleagues described what they called threat rigidity. Under threat, teams and companies restrict information, pull decisions toward the top, and fall back on what worked before.

That response is fine when the world is stable. It hurts most when the rules are changing, which is exactly when leaders tend to feel afraid.

3. Fear changes who the decision is for

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute asked 950 managers about their most important decisions of the past year. They were looking for defensive decisions: cases where a manager knew which option was best for the organization and deliberately chose a second-best one to protect themselves.

About 80% of managers reported at least one. On average, roughly a quarter of their most important decisions were defensive. Managers who described their team’s attitude toward mistakes as negative made far more of them.

This is fear at its most expensive. The decision still gets made, and it still looks reasonable. It just isn’t the one the leader believed was best.

4. Fear travels downward

A leader’s fear rarely stays with the leader. Research by Jennifer Kish-Gephart, Jim Detert, Linda Treviño, and Amy Edmondson describes how fear of challenging people with more power leads employees to stay quiet, and how that silence hardens into habit over time.

So the fearful leader ends up deciding with less information at the moment they need more. The people who could correct the picture have learned not to.

What to do with this

None of this means fear is the enemy. Fear is information, and sometimes caution is the right call. The trouble starts when fear is making the decision and you haven’t noticed.

Four practices follow from the research.

1. Name it. Ask yourself what you are afraid of, and whether it has anything to do with this decision. Lerner and Keltner’s work suggests that noticing how you’re judging a risk loosens the emotion’s grip on it.
2. Decide what criteria you want to use in making the decision. When we examine the attributes we’re looking for in making a choice, it often clarifies the process and may even open up new options you hadn’t considered.
3. Find what you control. Arnsten’s research points to uncontrollable stress as the kind that does the damage. Identifying even one thing you can act on is a way to take some of that control back. Find one small step and act on it.
4. Ask the defensive question. If you weren’t worried about being blamed, what would you choose? If the answer is different from your plan, that gap deserves attention.
5. Make bad news safe to deliver. How you react the next time someone disagrees with you or brings you a problem decides whether you hear about the one after that. So, choose to be open and curious during stressful times; people will learn they can rely on you for great ideas and thoughtful decisions.

The people I’ve been talking with aren’t wrong to feel what they feel. There is plenty of uncertainty to go around. The question worth asking is a simple one: is this decision coming from what I think is right, or from what I’m afraid of?

Where is fear showing up in your decisions right now?