Decision Fatigue as Choice-Capacity Wrong Attractor: The Ego-Depletion Architecture, Willpower-Erosion Basin, and the Return to Structured Agency

Decision fatigue — the progressive collapse of decision quality under repeated choice demands — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_DF in the landscape of structured agency. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as structured agency: effective decision-making across life domains, maintained through deliberate management of cognitive and volitional resources and supported by routines, defaults, and delegation that prevent depletion.

W_DF arises when the cumulative cost of prior decisions impairs subsequent decision-making, leading to impulsive choices, decision avoidance, or status quo defaults regardless of their appropriateness. The classic demonstration (Danziger et al. 2011) shows Israeli judges granting parole at 65% session-start falling to near 0% pre-break, returning to 65% post-break — decision quality as a function of biological state.

Baumeister's ego depletion model is analyzed alongside the replication controversy (Carter, Hagger): the glucose-resource model is contested but the phenomenological reality of decision quality collapse is well-established. Modern life amplification is characterized: an unprecedented volume of micro-decisions (digital, consumer, scheduling) may produce chronic low-level depletion.

Nine formal propositions characterize the depletion mechanism, the judges' effect, the replication-phenomenology split, modern decision load, chronic vs. acute depletion, status quo bias as depletion product, impulsivity as escape mode, high-stakes costs, and return paths through decision budgeting and routine-as-decision-elimination.