HOW ONE INTEREST BINDS ANOTHER

For long-range interests, this usually means committing the person not to give in to short-range interests that might become dominant in the future. Long-range interests don’t usually conflict with each other, except in the trivial sense of being close choices, because the effect of distant rewards tends to be proportional to their “objective” size; the less well rewarded of two equally long-range interests tends not to survive, but there is no time when this interest includes an incentive to resist this fate, that is, no time when such resistance would increase

your prospective discounted reward. I won’t be examining this kind of choice-making.

For short-range interests, survival usually means evading commit- ments. However, short-range interests are also served by committing you not to act on other, incompatible short-range interests; and sometimes they can even commit you to disobey long-range interests. While on an eating binge, you avoid information about calories that might remind you of a diet, for instance, and you’re incidentally forestalled from giv- ing in to temptations that aren’t compatible with absorption in eating, like having a sexual adventure.

There seem to be four kinds of tactics an interest can employ to commit future choice.

5.1.1 Extrapsychic Commitment

You can make it physically impossible to choose a future alternative or arrange for additional outside incentives that will influence a future self. Most examples involve a long-range interest controlling a shorter- range one.

Both the problem and the solution are basic. They’re not the results of sophisticated human cognition. They can be shown to exist in birds: As I described earlier, pigeons can learn to peck a key, the only effect of which is to commit them to wait for a later, larger food reward.1

Examples of this elementary tactic persist in modern times. Many authors return to Ulysses’ problem. The economist Robert Strotz, for instance, pointed out that apparently rational consumers pay to have their future range of choice narrowed. Movie stars pay financial man- agers to keep them from spending their own money, and many people used to put money in Christmas Club accounts that didn’t pay interest in order to give themselves an extra incentive to save money. Jon Elster named a book after Ulysses’ problem.2

Addiction therapists have been especially interested in disulfiram, a drug that changes the metabolism of alcohol so that drinking leads to nausea or even violent sickness. Disulfiram seemed to be a perfect so- lution to the temporary preference problem, but its results have been disappointing, probably because addictions can have some strategic value for long-range interests; we’ll discuss these in Chapter 9.3

Some self-control devices make sense even in a world of purely ex- ponential discounting – for instance, diet pills that act by reducing a

person’s appetite. If a rational planner decides that she ought to eat less, it’s certainly easier if she can arrange not to be hungry. But devices that tie you to the figurative mast don’t act by spoiling your appetite – for drinking or spending money, for instance. They keep you from acting when your appetite is strong. Such a plan makes no sense for conven- tional utility theory, which has people maximizing their prospects con- sistently over time. Hyperbolic discounting predicts a market for exactly this kind of commitment; and, as we saw, even pigeons will sometimes work to get it.

The availability and usefulness of physical committing devices are obviously limited. Even if you can get someone to hold your money un- til a certain time arrives, you may find that you really need it in the meantime. For that reason – or just because of the change of preference you originally foresaw – you may find yourself spending a lot of energy undoing the same plan you set up – for instance, by finding a way to borrow against your expectations of getting your money when your com- mitment has expired.

More often people find other people to influence them. We join groups that seem to be doing what we want to do – Weight Watchers or Alco- holics Anonymous, or a fitness club or even a discussion group. We may just let a friend know that changing a certain behavior is important for us, so that the friend will be disappointed if we don’t actually change it. The tactic is to put your reputation in a community at stake. It was described by the sociologist Howard Becker as cultivating other people’s respect or love so that this forms a “side bet,” an additional incentive to avoid the impulses that these people would disapprove of.4

Social side bets are much more flexible than physical commitments, but they, too, are limited. For instance, they’re useless against con- cealable impulses and against any impulse of which other people don’t happen to disapprove; they would actually be counterproductive against an impulse to buy popularity. Furthermore, vulnerability to social influence has costs, especially in a cosmopolitan society, which multiplies a person’s chances of meeting predators who would exploit this vulnerability. Despite these problems, it’s a major strategy for people with strong social motivations. Carol Gilligan suggests that it may be more important in women than in men, a possibility I’ll talk more about later.5

Short-range interests may use extrapsychic committing tactics against longer-range interests, too, but most examples are trivial. Getting drunk

means that you can’t be sober for a while, but there isn’t much to say about this kind of commitment.

5.1.2 Manipulation of Attention

You can try to avoid information that would change your mind. If you already know that a seductive reward is available, you can try to avoid thinking about it: “If you speak of the Devil, he’ll appear.” This is the advice that was most respected in our culture before Freud pointed out the bad side effects of repression. A typical example appears in an early- twentieth-century book called Right and Wrong Thinking and Their Results, which advised the reader to “avoid discordant thoughts,” by distraction if possible and if necessary by “the rule at Donnybrook Fair: ‘whenever you see a head, hit it.’ The least is not too small to be terminated if it is wrong.” Behavioral writers even today advocate “stimulus control” as a useful way of avoiding impulses. It’s a large part of what psychologists Janet Metcalfe and Walter Mischel suggests that people use to control passion. Even economists have begun to consider the “value of igno- rance (in the form of not acquiring [even] free information)” for this purpose.6

Attentional tactics seem to be especially effective against very-short- range urges that require only a moment of attention to become domi- nant. In the previous chapter, I mentioned examples of structuring people’s attention as a way of controlling dental or obstetrical pain. Similarly, I’ve known patients who have told of “fighting off” panic at- tacks, dissociative episodes, and even epileptic seizures by vigorously directing their minds away from the feeling that these events were about to occur.

There are obviously occasions when a blind eye at the right time keeps you from giving in to an urge. The trouble is that short-range interests may actually make more effective use of attention control than long- range interests can. When it’s in your long-range interest not to realize that a temptation is available, it’s also in your short-range interest not to get information on the long-range consequences of giving in. In the competition between long- and short-range interests, attention control is a two-edged sword. In fact, much of the psychotherapy developed by Freud and his followers involved teaching patients to catch themselves using suppression (deliberate avoidance of a thought), repression (un- conscious but still goal-directed avoidance of a thought), and denial

(avoidance of the implications of a thought). If a person could just avoid fooling herself, Freud thought, she would be simply rational.

Many writers besides the psychoanalysts have described how wish- ful thinking undermines people’s long-range plans. Examples date back to Aristotle, who said that desire had the same effect on belief as being drunk, an observation often reported by people who have suffered lapses while trying to give up bad habits.7_{Motivated changes of perception} are yet another phenomenon that makes no sense in a scheme where people discount the future exponentially.

Given temporary preference for present comfort, it isn’t hard to pic- ture a mechanism for repression. Many ways have been described whereby selective attention can systematically distort the information you collect. Experiments have shown that we tend to label our memo- ries with their emotional meanings and retrieve them by these labels. What comes to mind first when I see someone walking toward me isn’t her name or where I saw her last, but a sense of whether I’d like to see more of her or avoid her. The same is true of a book on the shelf or a place I have a chance to visit. If that first sense spells trouble, it’s easy enough to steer in another direction without ever going into why I want to or whether I have an obligation not to do so. Economist Matthew Rabin has described how self-serving moral reasoning can occur in just such an unconscious way.8

5.1.3 Preparation of Emotion

You can cultivate or inhibit the motivational processes that have in- trinsic momentum – generally the emotions. These processes can change how the expectation of reward influences your choice, at least in the near future. Once your appetite for a particular satisfaction is aroused, it has a committing effect that lasts for a while. It increases the reward- ing power of its objects and may arouse distaste for things that interfere with it. The dessert cart comes, and suddenly the appeal of desserts is greater than it was. Or your anger is provoked, and suddenly it looms larger than the motives that had been present, possibly even including personal safety. Or you start to caress on a date, and sexuality looms in the same way, just as dating manuals for teenagers have always warned.9 In the previous chapter, I described examples where people learned not to have appetites when the rewards on which they were based were certain not to occur or when punishment for them would occur (Sec-

tion 4.3.1). If this behavior were based on a fear of temptation, it would be an example of preparation of emotion. In fact, when someone is wor- ried that her emotionality makes her vulnerable to other people’s influ- ence, she may learn to almost never entertain emotion, thus developing the alexithymia that I mentioned earlier. In a laboratory setting, children as young as five who are given the choice between a better, later food and a less preferred, earlier one can learn to guide their thoughts so as to avoid appetite and thus wait for the better, later food.10

These are forms of the impulse-controlling technique that the psycho- analysts call “isolation of affect.” It requires single-minded consistency to work. Emotionality and other appetites have a relentless tendency to arise when there’s even the slightest chance that they’ll be rewarded, though some more so than others – remember Galen’s observation that anger could be tamed like a horse, but that the “concupiscible” power (sexual desire) was like a wild boar or goat that had to be controlled by starvation (Section 1.1).

The psychoanalysts also describe cultivation of an emotion to fore- stall the development of a contrary one – “reaction formation” or “re- versal of affect.” If I were afraid I’d hate my mother, I might look for things to love about her; or if I thought my soft heart got me into trouble, I might look for ways to see people as my enemies. Again, the analysts only publicized what earlier writers had noticed. I’ve already quoted Francis Bacon, who wrote with approval about setting “affection against affec- tion and to master one by another: even as we use to hunt beast with beast” (Section 1.1). In the eighteenth century this tactic was sometimes held out as the only practical committing device: The philosopher David Hume said, “Nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion but a contrary impulse.”11

The short-range committing effect of emotion can serve both short- and long-range interests, just as external commitments and attention controls can. A long-range interest may cultivate emotions in order to achieve bravery or virtue, but it’s at least as common that someone seeks refuge in a passion so as not to listen to reason.

5.1.4 Personal Rules

You can make a resolution. This may be the most common way that people deal with temporary preferences but also the most mysterious. What is there about “making a resolution” that adds anything to your

power to resist changing motivation? This is just the will, the concept that Gilbert Ryle analyzed and found superfluous, and that conventional utility theorists like Gary Becker leave no place for.

Conventional utility theory doesn’t suggest any role for a will – but of course, it doesn’t recognize a temporary preference problem to be- gin with. Because of its assumption that people discount the future exponentially, it confounds two distinct meanings of will: a hypothetical element needed in dualistic philosophies to connect mind and body, as in “I willed my arm to move,” and the faculty for resisting temptation that’s commonly called willpower. If discounting is exponential, resist- ing temptation is a function just as superfluous as connecting mind and body; we’d be right to dispense with both.

By contrast, hyperbolic discounting can be expected to produce tem- porary preferences, which will in turn motivate the three committing tactics I’ve just talked about. The question now is whether these three tactics can account for the experience of willing things.

Most people I’ve talked with don’t report using any of these devices while resisting temptation. When they’ve given up smoking or climbed out of debt, they mostly say they “just did it.” Words like “willpower,” “character,” “intention,” and “resolve” are often applied, but they don’t suggest how people actually resist a temporary preference.12 _Some writers have described specific properties, however.

The most robust idea is that will comes from turning individual choices into a matter of principle. As early as the fourth century B.C., Aristotle

proposed this idea (referring to dispositions to choose as “opinions”): “We may also look to the cause of incontinence [akrasia] scientifically in this way: One opinion is universal, the other concerns particulars. . . .” Galen said that passion was best controlled not by looking at individual opportunities but by following the general principles of reason; he no- ticed that impulse control was a skill that suffered disproportionately from failure to use it, and that habitual disuse made it especially hard for a person “to remove the defilement of the passions from his soul.”

By Victorian times, the list of the properties of willpower had grown. The will was said to:

• come into play as “a new force distinct from the impulses primarily engaged”;

• “throw in its strength on the weaker side . . . to neutralize the pre- ponderance of certain agreeable sensations”;

• “unite . . . particular actions . . . under a common rule,” so that “they are viewed as members of a class of actions subserving one comprehensive end”;

• be strengthened by repetition;

• be exquisitely vulnerable to nonrepetition, so that “every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right”; and

• involve no repression or diversion of attention, so that “both alter- natives are steadily held in view.”13

The property that stands out in this list is still Aristotle’s universality: to unite particular actions under a common rule. Similarly, two re- searchers from the behavioral school have explored the idea that self- control requires a subject to think in terms of broad categories of choice rather than just seeing the particular choices at hand. Gene Heyman has found that pigeons can learn to make choices in an “overall” con- text instead of a “local” one if they are rewarded for following a cue telling them when they are doing this; they do not learn without this extra reward, however.14 _{Howard Rachlin has said that self-control} comes from choosing “patterns” of behavior over time rather than in- dividual “acts.” The former is “molecular” and myopic, the latter “mo- lar”, that is, global, an overview, based on a series of elements taken as a whole. In an experiment he did with Eric Siegel, pigeons made an im- pulsive choice significantly less often when 30 previous nonimpulsive choices were required than when the choice stood by itself.15_These experiments don’t model will specifically, but they do suggest that choos- ing categorically can partially undo the effects of hyperbolic discount- ing, even where the complexities of human culture aren’t a factor.

Even cognitively oriented writers have noted the value of choosing in categories. Baumeister and Heatherton, for instance, speak of the need for “transcendence,” which is “a matter of focusing awareness beyond the immediate stimuli,” so that these stimuli are seen “in the context of more distal concerns.” Similarly, some philosophers of mind have rec- ognized the importance of making “a present choice in favor of a valued sequence of future actions or a valued policy to act in certain ways on certain occasions” in order to achieve “intention stability.”16

There remains the question of how these categories of choice arise and what makes them recruit extra motivation. Baumeister and Heatherton imagine an ability characterized only as “one’s strength to override the

unwanted thought, feeling, or impulse.” The philosopher Edward Mc- Clennen attributes “resolute choice” to “a sense of commitment to a plan initiated by [a prior] self.” Using a more complex model, philosopher Michael Bratman argues that it is “rational to follow through with [a prior] plan in those circumstances for which one specifically planned” despite a current change of preference, not because of a commitment, but because of “a planning agent’s concern with how she will see her present decision at plan’s end.” Both philosophers are describing a con- flict of impulse and plan, but neither addresses the motivational dimen- sion of the conflict.

Even Rachlin, a “radical” behaviorist, assumes that the necessary cat- egories are intrinsically stable – that patterns of choice naturally hold together like the notes of a symphony, so that, once you’re aware of the pattern, you’ll be motivated not to break it up. For instance, if you see the pattern of “a healthy breakfast” as consisting of juice, cereal, a bran muffin, and skim milk, the reason you don’t substitute apple pie for the bran muffin is that it would break up the pattern, just as not hearing the last notes of a symphony would spoil the experience of hearing the symphony. Likewise, a controlled drinker doesn’t drink too much be- cause it would spoil a pattern of temperance.17

There’s something appealing about this viewpoint, and yet it doesn’t