THE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF INTERTEMPORAL BARGAINING
7.3 DOES ALL YOUR EXPECTATION OF SELF-CONTROL HAVE TO BE STAKED ON EVERY CHOICE?
As I’ve said before, intertemporal bargaining recruits the most long- range incentive if a whole category of reward is at stake whenever the person makes any choice within the category. The greatest committing effect comes from staking all rewards that are ever threatened by smaller, earlier alternatives against each of those alternatives – that is, by max- imizing the size of the category of choices that serve as precedents in
one vast intertemporal prisoner’s dilemma. In practice, however, it seems to be only in extreme cases that a person stakes her very ability to intend actions at every choice-point. Recovered addicts facing their cravings may do this, as may countries facing the temptation to use a nuclear weapon; but usually there’s room for interpretation – for arbitrage – and often the importance of choices as precedents is small compared with their value in themselves.
Of course, many choices are consistent over time because they have a steady incentive and aren’t recursive at all – they don’t depend on bargaining. Some people go to bed early just because fatigue makes stay- ing up unpleasant. Likewise, consistent choice by members of a popu- lation may have nothing to do with a recursive process among them. A group may frequent a particular restaurant because they all like the food; they don’t even notice the effect their choice may have on others in the group.
Again, many psychological processes are recursive for reasons other than a need for commitment. You may make it a point to notice where you spontaneously put your umbrella, and deliberately put it in the same place thereafter, just to avoid forgetting where it is. Similarly, you may try to meet other members of a group you’re in by going where you’ve often seen them, knowing that others who are trying to meet you may rely on your doing just that.
However, many choices involve elements of personal or social im- pulse control mixed in with these nonconflictual motives – perhaps most choices do. A personal rule to put things “in their proper place” may involve self-prediction with regard to your laziness getting out of hand in addition to simply making it easier to find things; and group meeting places may evolve not just to make it easier for members to find each other, but so as to combat the lure of bad places – ones that are morally dubious or that threaten the group’s identity.
Wall Street provides a good illustration of how the degree of recur- siveness varies with people’s strategies. Investors in the stock market are said to be “value-based” insofar as they buy stock according to the in- trinsic worth of the company and “portfolio insurers” insofar as they buy on the basis of how they think its price will be affected by the crowd psychology of the market.8The motives of most investors are a mixture. A large component of trading based on market prediction per se will make the market volatile because it will “decide” purchases recursively, leading to sudden rises and even sharper crashes, just as the personal
decisions that are important mostly as precedents will be subject to sudden “losses of control.” By contrast, value-based decisions have little importance as test cases and aren’t affected by them either.
For an addicted gambler, a resolution not to go to casinos again may stake her whole expectation of future happiness on never once seeing herself cross the fatal threshold; but the same person’s intention to keep her room neat is apt to be highly negotiable from one day to the next. It may retain some influence beyond her momentary, spontaneous wish to neaten the room even if she has had frequent episodes of rationali- zation, procrastination, and downright failure. Not much is riding on such an intention, but if there’s not much resistance to it, it may still play a modest role in her life. Even where the outcomes are very important, for instance where an addicted overeater wants to cut down, the un- availability of a bright line to divide good and bad choices may prevent a large, credible stake from ever forming. As we saw earlier, there’s no obvious boundary for eating as there is for drinking some alcohol ver- sus none or using any atomic weapon versus not using it. Without both strong incentives and a believable rationale for testing what precedent is being set, people don’t develop the kind of atomic brinksmanship with themselves that gets called an “iron” will.
The greatest incentives to develop iron wills are surely the social norms that elite groups in a society hold. The social codes that these groups teach their children contain specific criteria for good and bad; they teach that not only group acceptance but also personal self-esteem will be lost by any breach. Illustrations are the Calvinist businessmen who saw their expectations of salvation at stake, the various monastic ascetics who saw any physical pleasure as the start of depravity, and the noble Junkers or samurai who were prepared to kill themselves over small losses of honor. These are examples of making all of your impor- tant expectations ride on every choice you make. When individuals carry will strategies this far without social support, they’re apt to be called pathological, as with compulsive personalities and anorectics; but when social support is added to personal motives, the combination is just esprit de corps.
In more forgiving environments – where there’s less social rigidity and no fear of a major addiction – people are more apt to tolerate lapses. We become more like “value-based investors” in that predicting and in- fluencing our intertemporal bargaining climate is a smaller portion of our motive for choice.
An atmosphere of brinksmanship can be dangerous to a personal rule. High stakes can decrease the chances of a personal rule’s eventually succeeding. Decades ago, psychologist Alan Marlatt and his coworkers pointed out that failed resolutions get in the way of many alcoholics’ recoveries – the “abstinence violation effect.”9Thus addiction therapists try to tread a middle path, both encouraging resolve and arguing that failure is not disastrous; they recommend guidelines like “one day at a time.” But they are confined by the inescapable equation that putting less at stake means having less resolve.
7.4 SUMMARY
Analyzing an activity that’s usually second nature does what most ob- servation processes do – distorts it by enlarging some features and fac- toring out others, so that the resulting picture seems foreign to familiar experience. The way I’ve presented the intertemporal bargaining model of the will may make it sound more deliberate, more effortful, and more momentous than casual introspection tells us it is: (1) Bargaining is usu- ally thought of as requiring explicit consciousness of its contingencies; but the tacit bargaining that I’ve hypothesized to engender the will may take place under a number of rubrics – from appeals to the supernatural to the process of belief itself – rubrics that by chance or design disguise the nature of your participation. (2) Bargaining might be thought to require continual alertness; but bargaining may have its most important effect by establishing and only occasionally testing a dominance hier- archy of interests, which then governs choice without much further thought and which may feel just like habit. (3) The most conspicuous examples of bargaining (which I’ve called “atomic”) stake huge incen- tives on all-or-none choices, as when an addict faces an urge to lapse; but many transactions can be small and largely focused on intrinsic in- centives while still having a recursive component. The only faculty you need to recruit the extra motivation that forms willpower is a practical awareness that current decisions predict the pattern of future decisions.