Informally, indecision implies internal waffling on one's position, whereas with hesitation one may be confident in one's position, but (for reasons other than indecisiveness) may be reluctant to voice or otherwise publicly commit to that position.

Hi Wissal

Interesting issue! The difference I think if there is something very thin....

Interesting issue! The difference I think if there is something very thin.

I've been looking for specialized sites especially psychological. In fact some give as synonyms. I tell you what I found:

Hesitation. It comes from lat. Haesitatio, -ōnis.  Doubt.  

Doubt arises basically in fear, in believing that we are essentially weak, incapable. 

Indecision. Of the lat. "incertus".  There is a loss in basic trust that leads to the permanent questioning of the soundness and foundation of our decisions. It occurs when you have a habit of looking at the negative side of every circumstance. 

I ended up thinking that doubt, in general exists in all people and feels in all aspects of life. Of course the grade differs for each. There are different types of doubt, for example I doubt if the train that takes me is "X" or is "Y", if I like a girl "Z" and, also: when I do not decide if I should turn left Or to the right. In contrast, indecision is more concerned with situations in which what matters is the future outcome of a decisive attitude. Without believing that I speak the truth, I would say that indecision is one of the forms of doubt / hesitation.

For psychologists the extreme case of either is a symptom of a disease. It's not what I ask, I think.

Indecision is a state of inability to decide, hesitation can be an outcome of personality, situation, career stage, position etc...but not an inability or incompetency in anyway...

I think that it is not an easy task to distinguish between hesitation and indecision. Suffice it to say that these terms are often used interchangeably. May the best way of distinguishing them is to give a hesitation example, and an indecision example. Let us suppose that you are facing a situation of moral conflict and choice: to steal or not steal to save a human life. Given the importance of issue at hand you can take a while and hesitate before taking a final decision (e.g., to steal to save the human life at hand ). This also means that hesitation is greatly dependent upon the situation at hand. If you are very thirty you generally do not hesitate between drinking or not drinking water, for example. Let us suppose that you enter a library to buy a book on mathematics. As there are a great amount of books on mathematics you are unable to take a decision and thus you don't buy any mathematics book. This means that indecision, but not hesitation, has to do with the quantity of information on offer. Globally speaking, there is much more information when indecision is the case than when hesitation is the case. In this vein, one might say that indecision is the upper limit of hesitation. Of course, there are also people who think that indecision has less to do with situation variables (e.g. the quantity of information at issue) than personality traits. There also theorists who think than one's inability to take decisions has to do with what psychologist Martin Seligman called learned helplessness. If, for example, however much a student studies for math exams,  s/he always gets poor marks in those exams, then s/he gives up studying for math tests.

As the previous considerations show, the distinction between hesitation and indecision is a delicate and thin distinction, and that such a distinction is a minor problem. 

I hope I have got your question and that this helps.

Best regards, Orlando

Indecision is more of epistemological and head activity than hesitation, which is more of psychological and gut activity. It means that the earlier counts on knowledge, where we doubt if we are sufficiently informed of what we think we know about a thing in order to act; while the later, hesitation, on the other hand, measures our promptness to action in response to prop-ups in our system. Our level of indecision or hesitation is dependent on our enneagramic type. My recent book may further enlighten  you: Oguejiofo C.P. Ezeanya (2015). ENNEAGRAM (Revealing the Nine Human Types). Enugu, Nigeria. Christus Doorways Ltd.

Hi Laura Mills.I understand that you make an informal definition. But I want to know a little more to understand you. For you, what can those be "(for reasons other than indecisiveness)"? I ask you why I think the reasons for understanding the differences can be important  to see the differences.

Indecision concerns the rational dialectic whereas hesitation concerns the social dialectic.