So, we said we have self-control problems, and we need self-control solutions.
And the first type of solution we identify, we call reward substitution.
The second type of solution I want to talk about it what we call self control
contracts, or Ulysses contracts. And you probably remember the story of
Ulysses and the sirens. And the story is that Ulysses knew that if
the sirens will sing, he will follow them. So what did he do?
He asked the sailors to tie him to the mast, and not to let him go, and he asked
the sailors to put donag in their ears. And if you think about it, those are two
different solutions that are very different from reward substitution.
Ulysses himself wanted to hear the sirens, but not to be tempted.
And the sailors, you want them not to be tempted at all.
If you think about it in modern times, it's as if Ulysses himself put his cell
phone in the trunk so he could hear his phone ringing but he couldn't approach it
while driving. And for the sailors, he basically turned
the phone off so they were not even tempted.
And you can think to yourself which one is the right one for you.
But what's important here is that it is very different from reward substitution
because you know up-front that you're going to be tempted.
You know that something will get you to turn you from the rightful path and you're
willing to do something now that would bind your future self to not be able to
behave badly. So think to yourself for a minute, can you
think about cases in which you have done something that basically made your future
self unable to behave badly? Here are some examples that I, I hear from
people. So, for example, often people, when they
make an appointment with a personal trainer i the gym, they prepay them and
the condition is that you can't cancel it and many people said that if they could
cancel their appointment with the gym trainer, they would call 10 minutes before
and say, you know what, I don't want to show up today give me my money back, but
the fact that they have paid for it, forces them to go.
Similar, people sometimes buy these 100 calorie cookie packs.
Why? They're really expensive.
Why not buy the big bag? Well, we think that if we buy the big bag,
we'll eat many cookies. But if they'll buy small packs, maybe
we'll eat just a few. And similarly, my undergrads.
They often tell me that when they get to exam week, and they want to make sure that
they study and not play on Facebook, they give their computers to a friend and they
ask them to log in to their Facebook account and to change their password and
not to tell them what the new password is until after exam week is over.
This way they basically prevent themselves.
From misbehaving. Undergrads also tell me that instead of
working in their dorm room, where they have quiet and flexibility, they sometimes
go to the library or to a public space to work.
Why? Because they think that if other people
watch them, they will not feel as free either to sleep or to do things that are
not work-related or study-related. On the computers.
In a very domain, different domain by the way, eh, my MBA students, the females, eh,
told me a couple of times that if they go on a date and they don't want things to go
too far out of hands, they wear very ugly underwear which also inhibits the
probability that something bad or something unplanned.
Would happen down the road. So think about all of those self control
contracts. Those are all kinds of things that we do
naturally. Now,[cough] before we go and think further
about this, I want to go back and I want to tell you a little bit about some old
experiments about pigeons and rats. So imagine you're either a pigeon or a rat
and imagine that I teach you two things. I teach you that if you see a green and
you press on it, you get one pellet of food immediately.
But if you see a purple button, you have to wait ten seconds and then you get ten
pellets of food and you study this for a very, very, very long period and you know
it very, very well. And now all of a sudden I show you both of
them together, which one do you chose, one immediate or you chose to wait ten seconds
and get ten pellets of food? And before you make your prediction, I
should just tell you that ten seconds for a pigeon and a rat is like a week for us,
well maybe not a week but its a long, long time for us.
So its a really tough decision, so what do you think they chose?
They choose the green. They choose the immediate reward and they
forgot the larger delayed reward. It gets likely worse.
You start a trial, the problem button comes up and they press on it.
A little bit of time passes and then the green button tap, comes up.
If they can only hold off, if they can only you know, sit on their paws, resist
temptation, do something. They would get the ten pellets of food,
but can they? No.
They pressed the green button and they forego the ten pieces of food for the
benefit of getting one immediate now. But here's the most interesting thing.
The trial starts, the purple button appears and it's a little time after that
a red button appears and the red button is not connected to food but the red button
could turn off the green button. Now it takes a while to learn that that's
what it does. But the red button turns off the green
button. That's theorisist's contract.
That's the question of when the rats and pigeons will put effort into something
that they don't like In order to prevent their future self from being tempted.
So what do you think? Would rats and pigeons do it?
Would they invest energy in something they don't like to prevent their future self
from misbehaving? The answer is yes.
They don't do it all the time, but they do it quite frequently, and I think this is
incredibly optimistic. First of all, if rats and pigeons can do
it, maybe we can do it too. That's the first good news.
The second good news is it is all about thinking about the world in terms of red
button. If you take a pigeon and you tempt it,
it's going to be temped. You get a rat, you tempt it, it's going to
fail. And I saw the same thing, we are just not
good in temptation. But, sometimes we are going to think
up-front and we are giving the right tools, we might behave well.
By the way, when we think about temptation, we sometimes divide people
into two types. What we call naive and sophisticate.
The naive people are people who don't think they are going to be tempted.
They are people who say oh, I have no problems with procrastination and self
control and overeating when they get to that situation and the way to ask me if I
want the chocolate souffle dessert, I can easily say no to them.
The sophisticated people are the ones who say, I know that when the time will come,
I will be tempted and because of that, I am willing to take steps now to prevent my
future self from being tempted. And if you think about it maybe if we
educated people to a higher extent, about our self control problem, and created more
red buttons, created more ways for us to bypass our temptations.
Maybe people would behave much, much better.
So let me give you some examples for this. The first example is this alarm clock
called Clocky. And Clocky is an alarm clock designed by
one of the students in the media lab. The one on the left was, the original
version. And the one on the right is a commercial
version. A little less cuddly, but still useful.
And you see the red. The, the big, the big wheels.
And what happens with clock is, has two big wheels that run in slightly different
speeds. Now what happened?
When you go to sleep you set up your alarm clock for 6 o'clock in the morning and in
your mind you're the kind of person who gets up at 6 o'clock in the morning and go
for a run before you go to school or before you go to work.
But what happens when 6 o'clock in the morning actually comes around?
The reality is that you're probably no longer that person.
Now you're a person who kind of looks for the snooze button, but if you have Clocky,
Clocky also starts running around. The moment the alarm starts up it runs
around the room and you have to go and chase it and run after it.
It's unpredictable because there's a random component to it and not only that.
But the snooze button is really, really, really below the clock and you, you have
to find it and flip it over and find where the snooze button is.
And by the time you find clock and you hunt it down, you know what?
You are awake. And therefore you might actually go for a
run. The design flaw, what I think is a fatal
design flaw of clock, by the way, is that by the time you're Up, and you found clock
and you hunted it down, you're also pissed off.
So if you do an image search online, you'll find lots of pictures of clocks
with the wheels torn off which of course, don't represent very well this benefit for
self-control. And now I think that they're going to an
earlier design by another friend of mine which basically made more of an egg shape
version which could basically not be broken.
No parts to break when you're angry with the clock.
There's another version I like even more. This is a version that never became
commercial, but the idea is great. It's an alarm clock called snooze and
lose. And it's an alarm clock that is connected
to your bank account. And not only to a bank account, but it's
connected to a charity you hate. Now here it is, you get this alarm clock
and you set it up. Now what would happen if you connected it
to a charity you liked? Now if the alarm clock goes off, you could
say to yourself, ooh, I get to snooze, plus I get to give money to trees, let's
say. But if you're sophisticated, you
understand how self control works, then you might sell it to give to, to a charity
you really hate, and now there's no way you can snooze.
There's no way you can sleep, and think to yourself that every second you're
sleeping, some money, even very, very small amount, is going to somebody you
really, really hate. There's other examples for this.
One of those is a website that I really like called Stickk.
And I highly recommend that you try and visit it and try experimenting with it.
Now, we did a couple of experiments on this.
One of them included a Chinese restaurant called Panda Express, in which we tried to
see whether people are willing, in advance, to limit their ordering in order
to force their future self to eat less. And the answer was that yes, that people
were doing it quite successfully. We looked at whether people would be
willing to pay in advance For medical procedures, in a way that they would get
the money back if they showed up for the medical procedure, but not if they got
late, and so on and people are willing to do it.
So I think there's a lot of opportunities to think about how this would work out,
and introducing such mechanisms into the market.