There are some other questions you might ask about self control and particularly
about individual differences. So, we're talking about a few of those
things. First there is a very, very interesting
set of experiments and results done mostly by Walter Mischel and his colleagues.
And this has to do with how self control behaves as a trait over time.
And what they did was what's commonly known as a marshmallow test.
They took a kid at age 3, 4, 5, 6, and so on and they put them in a room.
And they said hey kid, you can have this little marshmallow right now, or little
cookie, but if you wait for 10 minutes a nice lady will come with 2 of those
things. And they basically looked at the, at the
kids. And what was interesting is that the kids
who were able to resist temptation did better in college.
Why? Because resisting temptation is this
general ability. It's something that if we can do with
cookies, we might be able to do with friends going to a party, drinking too
much, procrastination, all kinds of other things.
There's some other similar research done at Duke recently, showing that this also
connects to healthcare outcome and criminal records, and also to the ability
to maintain good standing in terms of financial health.
So, self control, even at the young age, seems to be highly predictive of the
ability to have self control, in later ages.
Now, what's also interesting is that, if you look at the videos from Walter
Mischel's experiments, it's not as if the kids were able to just look at the cookie,
and not care about it. They played all kinds of tricks for
themselves. They sat on their hands.
They looked up. They sang songs to themselves.
They basically found ways to distract themselves.
Now, think about those two paths. Where is this self control coming from?
Is it about a skill, some trait, or is it about the ability to play tricks on
ourselves? Maybe it's a combination of the two.
In, in religious terms you can think about is it will or is it grace.
Is it something that we're just born with? We just don't care about cookies.
Or is it something that we could force ourselves to do by actually distracting
ourselves? I think that right now the results point
more into the distracting part, which means that even if we don't think we have
self control, we might still have a future because we might be able to create tricks
that allow us to bypass those temptations that lie in front of us.
So that's eh, the first thing about these skill and, and about, where is it coming
from, this ability to resist temptation? The other thing is that there's a really
interesting set of results by Baumeister, Roy Baumeister and, and his, and his
colleague about what's called ego depletion.
And what they're saying is that as you go ahead and resist temptation throughout the
day, its becoming harder and harder to resist temptation.
So, you see something you want to buy and you don't buy it and you resist
temptation. And you see a muffin and you want it but
you resist temptation. And you go ahead and you do more and more
this. Youtube and there's email and saying
something nasty for your boss. And as you resist the temptation all the
time, your willpower dwindles. And, and Roy is thinking about it like a,
like a weight. You resist temptation, you resist
temptation you resist away. And slowly, slowly you weigh at your, your
wear it, at your ability to resist temptation and eventually eh, we fail.
So this, by the way, suggests that if you have tasks that require self control,
maybe it's good to do them early in the morning, rather than do them late in the
afternoon, when you would be perhaps more, more depleted.
There's one more really interesting result, and it's about the fact that
religious Jews who are smokers don't, don't seem to be tempted by smoking on the
Sabbath. And this is kind of very strange because
if you think to yourself that smoking is a physiological reaction, how can it be that
on the Sabbath they're not tempted? And the idea is that there are some things
that we know are outside of our considerations.
There's this theory in religious thought that its about the decision point.
It says that if you get people from the non-religious to their religious what
changes is what people consider as an option or not.
If you're an Orthodox Jew, you're not going to think about smoking on the
Sabbath is it all possible. In the same way that you would not think
about eating a cheesecake after you ate a steak.
It's just not possible. And once those things are not possible,
they don't seem to tempt us in the same way.
And now, the question for us, of course, in society is where do we want to have
this decision point. The more freedom we have, the more
ability, to be tempted. We have in the more potential for failing.
And the less freedom we have, the more restricted our choices are but the less
chances there are that we would fail. So anyway, think about those, those issues
in terms of personality. What is our inherent ability for self
control? And how much of it comes from pure ability
versus ways in which we taught ourselves to have tricks, to trick ourselves?
Think about what happened to self-control, our ability to resist temptation
throughout the day and as we fight temptation.
And think about what is the role of the rules around us?
And what we find is acceptable and not acceptable.
It's both tempting us and also weighing at our ability for self control.
So, what does all of this tell us about self control?
First of all, we need to recognize that we have lots of Adam and Eve problems.
And not only we have them, but they're going to get more and more over time.
Think about it. The world around us, the commercial world
around us, wants our time, attention, and money, right now.
Who wants us to do something that is good for us in the long term?
Maybe long term financial savings and maybe preventative health.
But of course, in most cases, we don't have preventative health.
The other thing to realize is the environment in which we're being placed
has a lot to do with our decisions. And what is the commercial environment
around us? It's all about tempting us to behave in a
way that is good for them right now, and not necessarily for us.
So this means that not only do we have lots of Adam and Eve problems, we're
probably going to have more of them. As the commercial world around us become
more sophisticated, we're probably going to be tempted to a higher degree.
The next version of the Doughnut, Doughnut 2.0.
Is it going to be more tempting or less tempting than the Doughnut we have right
now? Most likely, more tempting.
The next version of Facebook. Is it going to tempt us more or less to go
into Facebook all the time and check our profile and messages and so on?
Probably more likely, because Facebook wants us to come back and back and back
all the time and they control the environment in which we make decisions.
Is the next version of the smart phone going to tempt us more or less to text
while driving or to check our messages while driving?
Probably more. So, not only do we have self control
problems, they're likely to get larger and larger over time.
And because of this, things like Ulysses contracts are incredibly important.
It would be nice if all of us could design our own rewards substitution and our own
Ulysses contracts, but the reality is that it is incredibly hard.
It's incredibly hard to imagine that we could design those mechanisms for every
one of the many, many temptations than we face in our daily lives.
But instead, I think the hope is in the red button.
The hope is that people will design software and hardware and reward
substitutions that would help us deal with the world as it is.
Now, this is again tremendously important. There was a very sad analysis that looked
about, that looked at why people die. And specifically at, how many deaths can
be attributed to bad decision making. And when you look at the statistics and
you try to estimate many, many years ago, like 100 years ago.
What was the percentage of human mortality that was caused by bad decision making?
And it's about ten. You can think about the hundred years ago,
what mistakes could you make in decision making that would lead to some death,
after all? Not that bad.
The percentage more recently, when you try to estimate it, is over 40%.
Why? Because as we invent new technologies, we
also invent ways to kill ourselves. Think about it.
Obesity, diabetes, smoking, texting and driving.
As we invent these new technology the challenge of decision making to be at a
much higher level we have much opportunity to fail.
If you text and walk what can happen? Not much.
You text and drive at 70 miles per hour with other cars doing the same thing.
Now you're in real danger. So as we advance in technology, and as we
don't take our cognitive limitations into account, we create more and more
opportunities for us to fail. And because of that, we need to understand
self control problem and think very carefully about how to solve it.
The final thing I want to talk about is the challenges of self control mechanisms,
particularly for Ulysses contracts, in terms of ideology.
And there's a story that talks about the Denver Drug Program.
And the data is very sketchy, but here's how the story goes in general.
This was a drug program that took heroin addicts and asked them, heroin addicts, do
you want to be heroin addicts? And the heroin addict said no, not a good
life, not really interested in living my life this way.
And they said to them, why don't you, the heroin addict, write a self-incriminating
letter about your drug habit and address it to the person you feel most will find
out about your drug addiction? People wrote this letter.
If it was me, I would write, dear mom. Really, really sorry to tell you I have a
drug habit. Love, Dan.
And then, this non for profit would take the letter.
They would fold it. They would put it in an envelope.
The would put a stamp. They would address it.
But they would hold it in trust. And they would come from time to time and
they would do blood tests and searches in the person's apartment and if they ever,
ever, ever found traces of drugs they will mail the letter away.
This is the Ulysses contract. This is saying that when I'm in a cold
state, not interested in being a drug addict, I am doing something so big and so
powerful that would hopefully influence my future self from taking drugs.
I'm basically trying to bind my ability in the future to behave badly and not pay
dramatic, painful, cost for that. What happened?
Lots of people signed up. These were people who were not craving
drugs at the moment, but then people started craving drugs.
So what happened? They came to this not-for-profit and say,
we want out. And what is this not-for-profit said?
Fine, in three weeks. But for now, we're going to test you every
day. We know you're in a craving state so we're
going to test you every day. And three weeks are a substantial amount
of time to get over initial stages of drug addiction.
And they said that after that immediate time, very few of those people wanted to
get up. Now, eventually, this program had to be
cancelled mostly because of reasons of violation of human rights.
And that's kind of the issue with Ulysses contracts.
Think about it. I can probably get you to sign a contract
that would create tremendous damage to yourself if you misbehave.
But the only way this contract is going to be effective is if you can't get out of
it, because if you can get out of it, how is it ever going to be effective?
Right? And because of that we really have to ask
ourselves. How do we deal with this complexity of
human freedom on one hand and human ability to get into trouble on the other
hand? Where do we stand on those cases?
There is no question that Ulysses contracts, particularly big one, can get
people to promise and actually commit for their future self to behave well.
But these incredible punishments can also be incredibly damaging if people fail and
how do we, how do we think about. And this is also, by the way, why we as
researchers have a very hard time studying eh, Ulysses contracts.
Because the way we do experiments, basically require us to allow people to
get out of the experiment at each point in time.
So, the issue is that we really have to think about what do we care about in terms
of human freedom, and how much are we willing to impose on that?
What kind of mistakes are we willing to and take as so important we can override
human freedom? And what mistakes are we willing to let
people continue with in the name of freedom?
So that's it for today, and as you go throughout the rest of your the next hour,
day, maybe week. Think about all the cases in which you're
tempted to misbehave and try to think about how you're going to overcome those
right now. And what kind of tools would help you to
overcome those temptations in the future? [music].