In this section we're going to talk about self control.
There's an older gentleman whose about to undergo surgery, and as it happened his
son is the physician whose about to go and perform the surgery.
And just before he goes under he says to his son.
Remember son, if I don't make it out of this surgery, your mother is moving in
with you[SOUND]. What is self control?
Self control is all about the problem between now and later.
There are many problems of this nature and they're all around us.
In the world and in this section we'er going to learn both about what causes
these problems and also about how to fight them.
And if you start to understand what role self control, both the self control
problems and solution whave to play with our lives, all of a sudden you would
realize how much better you could get. And what kind of things you could do to
overcome some of the challenges in our environment.
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So today, I want us to talk a little bit about self-control, what is the problem
of self-control and what can we do about it.
So to get us thinking about self control I want to tell you a personal story about
one of my biggest struggles with self control.
So when I was in hosptial I got some blood transfusion.
And one of those blood transfusion had liver disease within in and I got this
liver disease. And as you can imagine it was bad enough
to be a burn patient, getting a liver disease on top of that was not eh,
something to look forward to. And at that point in time they didn't
know really what was the liver disease, they just saw my liver function eh, shot
up eh, and they had to slow down treatment, rejected some transplants, all
kinds of bad things had happened. But they couldn't identify what it was
and there was no treatment. A long, long time after that, so I was in
grad school already, I had another flare up of my liver.
I checked myself into hospital and they told me that I had Hepatitis C.
By that time, they could identify the particular virus I had, so this was
Hepatitis C. And there's also a trial done by the FA
or under the FDA rules to see whether a medication called Interferon was going to
be effective for hepatitis c. Interferon was a medication that was
originally approved for[UNKNOWN] leukemia, a really awful disease that
nothing works for, but they approved Interferon for that.
And now the question was would interferon also work for hepatitis C?
And I asked him what happens if I don't take the medication?
What happen if I don't go on the trial, and they described to me what it might
look like to die from liver cirrhosis, which is an awful way to go.
So I opted for this trial. The problem was that this trial involved
three times a week a very unpleasant medication.
Now think to yourself, imagine that you had a medication in your hand, and you
asked yourself whether you want to inject yourself.
And theoretically if you inject yourself three times a week for a year and a half,
you might not get liver cirrhosis in 30 years from now.
But for sure you would spend the next 14 hours with side effects.
Headache, vomiting, shaking, stuff like that.
Not as bad as liver cirrhosis, but certainly bad in now.
Ask yourself whether you would be able to give yourself This, this medication.
Now, for me, this was a real decision that I faced many, many times.
But, for you, it's hypothetical. So let's think about less hypothetical
decisions. Let's think about things like, how many
of you, for example, and try to be honest, have eaten in the last week, more
than you think you should? Raise your hand.
I mean even though you're just watching this, raise your hand and tell yourself
whether you've done that. What about under exercising?
How many of you have exercised not as much as you hoped you would in the last
month? How many of you procrasitinated?
With class material, for example. How many you have, have you have em,
texted while driving? Eh, another example that you can think
about is how many you, of you have ever eh, had unplanned, unprotected sex?
Right? Now, the interesting things with all of
these examples is that not only do we recognize that we have done many of
thems, but we also recognize that we'll keep on doing them.
Procrastination, for example, many people start the semester or start the new year
by saying, this time everything will be great.
We take clean notebooks and we say we're going to do all the reading and all the
homework but then other things come and eventually we fall, we fall off the path,
and then again next year it's a new time and we don't learn from the past and we
hope that we will do better this time. So me, by the way, one of my current
struggles is with sleep. I work until usually very late at night.
And then I ask myself what do I need to do.
Should I think about the current, my current needs, the things I really need
to do right now, or the fact that I need to go to sleep?
And I delay my sleep, and delay my sleep, and delay my sleep until eventually I, I
don't get a good night sleep, if you see black shadows under my eyes you know
where it Where it's coming from. So self control is a genearl problem when
it's about what's exactly now and what's in the future.
And the future does not have to be very far from now.
It could be quite close like tomorrow morning, but the current future is
incredibly powerful. And we call these sometimes the present
focus bias, that we focus on what is the. Present.
And this, by the way is the Adam and Eve problem.
You can ask yourself how many of us would sacrifice eternity of, in Garden of Eden
for an apple? Well it turns out we do it, we do it all
the time. Now to take all of these examples, and
think about them together as a general class of problems between what's good now
and what's good in the future, I want you to ask yourself the following question.
Imagine I gave you a choice, and I said, what would you rather have?
A half a box of chocolate right now or a full box of chocolate in a week?
And imagine the chocolate was just in front of you, and you asked, what would
you rather have? Half a box now or a full in the week?
I suspecting that most of you would say give me the half of box of chocolate
right now. It's not worthwhile for me to wait
another week for another half a box of chocolate.
But imagine I pushed the choices to the future.
And I said what would you rather have a half a box in a year or a full box in a
year and a week. Now, of course, you realize it's the same
decision. It's the decision of whether you're
willing to wait another week for another half a box of chocolate.
Not only that, but you recognize that in a year from now, the second decision
would look just like the first one, where you could say, I could have the half a
box of chocolate now, or I could wait another week.
But phrase this way and looking at it far in advance, as if it's a year from now,
I'm willing to bet that all of you are willing to wait a year for the,a year and
a week for the full box of chocolate. You're willing to wait now another week
for another half a box of chocolate. Why is that?
It's because in the future, we are wonderful people.
We will exercise, we will diet, we will not procrastinate, we will not text and
drive, all of those things would be fantastic in the future.
The problem, of course, is that we never get to live in the future.
We get to live in the present, and in the present we make mistakes.
So now that we understand the problem of self control.
I want to go back to my story with interferon and hepatitis C.
I want to tell you what, what I did in this particular case.
As I took the medication for a year and a half.
An a year and a half later I had another biopsy.
My doctor, Dr Kilberg told me that I cleared, the disease which was fantastic
news. A little while later the FDA approved the
interferon for hepatitis C, which was also good news.
And finally he told me that I was the only patient in this protocol that took
their medication regularly. Now you might ask yourself how could I
take it? How could I be the only patient in this
very large protocol who took their medication regularly?
Is it because I care more about my future?
I care more about my liver? I've less problems with immediate
temptation. The answer is no to all of those.
The answer is that I invented a little trick for myself.
And my trick was based on the idea that I love movies.
If I had time, I would watch lots and lots of movies.
Sadly, I don't much time so I don't watch that many movies.
But on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, which were injection days for me, on the
way to school I would first stop in a video store.
I would rent some videos I really wanted to watch, and I would carry them in my
backpack the whole day. I would get home in the evening, I would
look at the videos, I would put one in, I would inject myself and I would press
play. I did not wait for the side effects to
start, instead what I did is I connected the movies that I wanted to see with the
injection. Which was something that I didn't want to
see. I would press play, I would take a bucket
and a blanket for the side effect. And I would start a night of watching
movies. And then of course the side effect would
start and the evening did not end up being so good.
Now if you think about it, there's a couple of strange things about this
story. The first thing is that if we made a list
of what's important in life livers would be up there.
Really really important we have only one. Side effects and injections much much
less important. And if you thought about it in this way,
you should think that me and all the other patients should have the medication
all the time. But of course this is not how we think
about it, the effect of the liver is dramatically discounted because we also
have the time component. The liver is not, we're not going to get
sick now. It might happen in 30 years from now.
And because of this the effect of the liver is largely discounted and the
effect of the injection looks much much larger because it is in the present.
That's the first part. The second part is that if you think
about my solution, the movie solution, it's kind of a strange idea.
That solution did not involve anything with the word livers, or did not involve
anything about caring more about the liver.
It had a little equation that says movies for injection, or injection for movies.
And we call this reward substitution. And the idea with reward substitution is
that there are some things in life that are too much in the future, and we're
very unlikely to care about them for the right reasons.
But we don't have to give up. Instead, what we could do is we could say
let us take other things, other rewards that are going to be present in our
immediate environment. And by acting towards these rewards, we
can behave as if we care about our liver. So think about it: What are things in
life, in which we're just not designed to care about the final goal for the right
reason? And are there shortcuts, are there ways
to care about something else that would get us to behave as if we care about the
final goal. So, let me let us think together about a
couple of examples like this. The first example I want you to think
about is global warming. Global warming is very far in the future
and you can ask yourself whether people can wake up in the morning, and feel
energized to care about global warming. Now, I don't know what you personally
think about global warming. Let's not worry about it for now.
Let's just assume that global warming is a real problem, and let's think about
whether under those conditions people can either care.
The answer is probably not. It's probably going to be incredibly
tough. In fact, if you took this problem and
looked at it from the other way. And you said, let's create the problem
that would maximize human apathy. You would probably come up with global
warming. Why?
Because global warming is far in the future, would happen to other people
first. We don't see it progressing.
We don't see any particular person suffering.
And anything we would do as individual is a drop in the bucket.
Under those five forces of empathy, can we care?
Very, very unlikely. It's almost like a perfect storm of
apathy. So, what can we do?
If people are not going to care for the right reason, can we create other things
that would get people to behave as if they care?
So now the challenge for us to think about all the things that could motivate
human beings, and which one of them we could tie in a rewared substitution way
to global warming. So you could say what if we pay people,
right? We can either pay people or tax them to
behave well. That's one approach.
Another approach could be let's make it more easy, more convenient.
That's another way. You can also think about something like
reputation or prestige, or making something look cool.
You can think about giving people points. or making them feel that they are making
some progress something. gamers by the way Really understand
reward substitions. Gamers want you to work for them for a
long time playing their games with no money whatsoever.
So they had to think about all kinds of ways to get people to motivate without
paying them. And they come up with lots of ways.
For example, having a leaderboard that tells you how you are compared to other
people. Here is one example to think about in
this case. In the US, when the Toyota Prius came,
which is a hybrid car, there was another car by Honda that was also a hybrid.
And the Toyota Prius did very well and the Honda didn't do that well.
And there could be all kinds of reasons, but I think that one of them was the
Toyota Prius looked so different from the other cars.
Now think about it. If you're driving your Toyota Prius, you
could tell yourself look at me, I'm a wonderful, kind human being.
I'm driving a hybrid car. If you're driving the Honda, you could do
the same thing. But if you're driving the Prius, you can
also tell yourself that other people, the people around you, are noticing how
different your car look like. They realize what a wonderful kind human
being you are, and you get to bask in the reflected glory of the people who drive
around you. Could it be that the fact that the other
Prius created an external signal to communicate to other people what
wonderful people we are, the Prius driving people.
Created an extra benefit for those people, and therefore got them to behave.
Now, this is not a great scientific study.
It's actually not even a good scientific study.
But I went to my friends. And I have some Toyota Prius driving
friends. And some non Toyota Prius driving
friends. And I asked them all, what else have they
done for energy conservation? Changing light bulbs.
High efficiency appliances. Change the insulation in the attic.
Changing what, what therm, temperature they keep the house in.
And you know what? These two group of my friends, maybe it's
just about my friends, are no different. They are different on a Toyota Prius.
They are no different on anything else. Now, you can make fun of course of the
people who drive Toyota Prius. But I think the real issue is that Toyota
Prius gave people another benefit, and that benefit made people be willing to
invest money in that particular approach of energy conservation.
What would happen if we had the same ability to convey to other people who we
are, for example, but getting people to know what temperature we set our
thermostat to or how much insulation we have in our attic.
Imagine that your Facebook profile included those elements.
Could you all of a sudden care in a public signaling way about those elements
as well? I think there is a potential.
So this was the first example, of how we can think about reward substitution in
the domain of caring about the world.
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