Tomorrow night is the opening of my lab’s art show on self-control, and we interviewed a few of our artists to get their take on the project and self-control in general.

Restraining Order: The Art of Self-Control from Advanced Hindsight on Vimeo.

See more on the Artistically Irrational project here.

Artists from around the world are invited to attend a discussion on self-control entitled “Restraining Order: The Art of Self-Control” as the next part of the “Artistically Irrational” exhibition series on Wednesday, September 26th at 7 PM EST. (Artists who do not live within driving distance of Durham, NC will be able to watch online.)

Interested artists should RSVP to the curator, Catherine Howard, at artisticallyirrational@gmail.com by Monday, September 24th by 9 PM.

After the forum, artists interested in creating artwork in response to the research will submit a 1-page proposal and 2-3 digital images of past work. To be considered, applications must be submitted by Friday, October 5th at 9 PM.

Artists will be notified if they are selected to participate by Monday, October 8th and will receive a $100 stipend to complete their piece. There is no limitation to the style or media of pieces created for “Restraining Order,” but the exhibit includes an exercise in self-control embedded in the artistic process. All selected artists will be required to work on their pieces for the entire period leading up to the due date and will send weekly photos to document the progression of the piece. All completed art works must be received by Friday, December 7th.

Artwork created for “Restraining Order” will be on display at the Center for Advanced Hindsight from December 14th, 2012 to February 22nd, 2013 with a reception on Saturday, January 26th, 2013 from 6-9 pm.

Artists will retain all rights to their piece. Works will be returned to artists after the exhibit by March 15th, 2013. If the piece is purchased, the $100 stipend will be deducted from the purchase price.

Important Deadlines

September 26, 7pm — Forum at the Center for Advanced Hindsight

October 5, 9pm — Deadline to submit artwork proposal

December 7, 9pm — Drop-off deadline

January 26, 6–9pm — Opening reception at the CAH

Artists from around the world are invited to attend a discussion on self-control entitled “Restraining Order: The Art of Self-Control” as the next part of the “Artistically Irrational” exhibition series on Wednesday, September 26th at 7 PM EST. (Artists who do not live within driving distance of Durham, NC will be able to watch the forum streaming online.)

Interested artists should RSVP to the curator, Catherine Howard, at artisticallyirrational@gmail.com by Monday, September 24th by 9 PM.

After the forum, artists interested in creating artwork in response to the research will submit a 1-page proposal and 2-3 digital images of past work. To be considered, applications must be submitted by Friday, October 5th at 9 PM.

Artists will be notified if they are selected to participate by Monday, October 8th and will receive a $100 stipend to complete their piece. There is no limitation to the style or media of pieces created for “Restraining Order,” but the exhibit includes an exercise in self-control embedded in the artistic process. All selected artists will be required to work on their pieces for the entire period leading up to the due date and will send weekly photos to document the progression of the piece. All completed art works must be received by Friday, December 7th.

Artwork created for “Restraining Order” will be on display at the Center for Advanced Hindsight from December 14th, 2012 to February 22nd, 2013 with a reception on Saturday, January 26th, 2013 from 6-9 pm.

Artists will retain all rights to their piece. Works will be returned to artists after the exhibit by March 15th, 2013. If the piece is purchased, the $100 stipend will be deducted from the purchase price.

Important Deadlines

September 26, 7pm — Forum at the Center for Advanced Hindsight

October 5, 9pm — Deadline to submit artwork proposal

December 7, 9pm — Drop-off deadline

January 26, 6–9pm — Opening reception at the CAH

The Irrationality of Organizational Escalation: The Danger of Spider-man & Overcommitment 

By Henry Han-yu Shen

Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark is an upcoming rock musical featuring music and lyrics from U2’s Bono and The Edge and originally directed by Julie Taymor, best known for the hit musical The Lion King.

This musical is also the most expensive Broadway production in history, with a record-setting initial project budget of $52 million. The show’s opening has been repeatedly delayed while the production cost continues to accrue, currently totaling a whopping 70 million dollars. The final estimated budget approaches 100 million dollars, with no guarantee of profit return and below-average reviews.

Spider-man’s situation exemplifies a classic case of organizational failure.  Marked by producers’ continuously irrational contributions of monetary support to a seemingly hopeless project. In many ways this case is similar to the failed Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant program as analyzed by Ross and Staw (1993). The Shoreham project also experienced an escalation of project cost – from an initial $75 million to the final cost of $5 billion – and it a classical example of how organizations become increasingly committed to losing courses of action over time.

We can draw several parallels by comparing the Spider-man Broadway production to organizational escalation. We can see that economic data alone cannot easily deter organizational leaders from withdrawing from a full-scale course of action, especially in cases involving something that is highly subjective in its value (such as a Broadway production). When we consider that the cost of production for Spider-man continues to rise, the initial psychological over-commitment of the producers can become even stronger. Such forces appear to have come into play, trapping the producers into a losing situation while they continue to throw money into the project.  It is important for future producers, or any organizational leaders, to keep in mind the existence and properties of these different types of escalating determinants in order to avoid clouded judgment and behavior when making decisions.

The scientific community is increasingly coming to realize how central self-control is to many important life outcomes. We have always known about the impact of socioeconomic status and IQ, but these are factors that are highly resistant to interventions. In contrast, self-control may be something that we can tap into to make sweeping improvements life outcomes.

If you think about the environment we live in, you will notice how it is essentially designed to challenge every grain of our self-control. Businesses have the means and motivation to get us to do things NOW, not later. Krispy Kreme wants us to buy a dozen doughnuts while they are hot; Best Buy wants us to buy a television before we leave the store today; even our physicians want us to hurry up and schedule our annual checkup.

There is not much place for waiting in today’s marketplace. In fact you can think about the whole capitalist system as being designed to get us to take actions and spend money now – and those businesses that are more successful in that do better and prosper (at least in the short term).  And this of course continuously tests our ability to resist temptation and for self-control.

It is in this very environment that it’s particularly important to understand what’s going on behind the mysterious force of self-control.

Several decades ago, Walter Mischel* started investigating the determinants of delayed gratification in children. He found that the degree of self-control independently exerted by preschoolers who were tempted with small rewards (but told they could receive larger rewards if they resisted) is predictive of grades and social competence in adolescence.

A recent study by colleagues of mine at Duke** demonstrates very convincingly the role that self control plays not only in better cognitive and social outcomes in adolescence, but also in many other factors and into adulthood. In this study, the researchers followed 1,000 children for 30 years, examining the effect of early self-control on health, wealth and public safety. Controlling for socioeconomic status and IQ, they show that individuals with lower self-control experienced negative outcomes in all three areas, with greater rates of health issues like sexually transmitted infections, substance dependence, financial problems including poor credit and lack of savings, single-parent child-rearing, and even crime. These results show that self-control can have a deep influence on a wide range of activities.  And there is some good news: if we can find a way to improve self-control, maybe we could do better.

Where does self–control come from?

So when we consider these individual differences in the ability to exert self-control, the real question is where they originate – are they differences in pure, unadulterated ability (i.e., one is simply born with greater self-control) or are these differences a result of sophistication (a greater ability to learn and create strategies that help overcome temptation)?

In other words, are the kids who are better at self control able to control, and actively reduce, how tempted they are by the immediate rewards in their environment (see picture on left), or are they just better at coming up with ways to distract themselves and this way avoid acting on their temptation (see picture on right)?

It may very well be the latter. A hint is found in the videos of the children who participated in Mischel’s experiments. It’s clear that all of the children had a difficult time resisting one immediate marshmallow to get more later. However, we also see that the children most successful at delaying rewards spontaneously created strategies to help them resist temptations. Some children sat on their hands, physically restraining themselves, while others tried to redirect their attention by singing, talking or looking away. Moreover, Mischel found that all children were better at delaying rewards when distracting thoughts were suggested to them. Here is a modern recreation of the original Mischel experiment:

A helpful metaphor is the tale of Ulysses and the sirens. Ulysses knew that the sirens’ enchanting song could lead him to follow them, but he didn’t want to do that.  At the same time he also did not want to deprive himself from hearing their song – so he asked his sailors to tie him to the mast and fill their ears with wax to block out the sound – and so he could hear the song of the sirens but resist their lure. Was Ulysses able to resist temptation (the first path)?  No, but he was able to come up with a very useful strategy that prevented him from acting on his impulses (the second path).  Now, Ulysses solution was particularly clever because he got to hear the song of the sirens but he was unable to act on it.  The kids in Mischel’s experiments did not need this extra complexity, and their strategies were mostly directed at distracting themselves (more like the sailors who put wax in their ears).

It seems that Ulysses and kids ability to exert self-control is less connected to a natural ability to be more zen-like in the face of temptations, and more linked to the ability to reconfigure our environment (tying ourselves to the mast) and modulate the intensity by which it tempts us (filling our ears with wax).

If this is indeed the case, this is good news because it is probably much easier to teach people tricks to deal with self-control issues than to train them with a zen-like ability to avoid experiencing temptation when it is very close to our faces.

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* Mischel W, Shoda Y, Rodriguez MI (1989) Delay of gratification in children. Science. 244:933-938.

** Moffitt TE, Arseneault L, Belsky D, Dickson N, Hancox RJ, Harrington H, Houts R, Poulton R, Roberts B, Ross S, Sears MR, Thomson WM & Caspi A (2011) A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth and public safety. PNAS. 108:2693-2698.

The original PNAS piece is here

My own worst enemy: procrastination and self-control

My problem with “Just Say No”

One of the main difficulties I face on a daily basis is an inability to say “no.”  Sometimes my difficulties bring me back to the song in Oklahoma! Where Ado Annie sings “I’m just a girl who can’t say no,” and it looks to me that I’m basically like her (granted, she and I are responding to quite different propositions).  I have always had this problem, but it used to be that nobody really asked much from me, so this weakness didn’t pose a real problem.  But now that behavioral economics has become more popular, I receive invitations to speak almost every day. Accordingly, my inability to say “no” has turned into a real challenge.

So why do I (and I suspect many others) suffer from what we might call the “Annie” bias? I think it is because of three different reasons:

1) Avoidance of regret: Regret is a very interesting, uncomfortable feeling.  It is about not where are, but where we could be. It is too easy to imagine that things could have been better. Imagine, for example, that you missed your flight either by two minutes, or by two hours: under which of these conditions would you be more upset?  Most likely, you will feel more upset if you missed your flight by two minutes. Why?  After all, your actual state is the same:  in both cases you are stuck at Newark for five hours waiting for the next flight, watching the same news report on CNN, responding to email on your smartphone, and munching on expensive and not very good food. They key is that having missed your flight by just a few minutes, you continuously think about all the things you might have done to get on the plane on time – leaving the house five minutes earlier, checking your route to avoid traffic jams, and so on. This comparison to how things could have been, and the feeling of “almost” makes you miserable.  By contrast, a two-hour delay is not as upsetting because you don’t make these kinds of regretful, “woulda, coulda, shoulda” comparisons. (Comparing your current state to some other idealized one, by the way, is a huge source of general unhappiness, especially when comparing yourself to your likeminded peers.)

Now think of a circumstance in which you don’t feel regret at the moment, but want to avoid feeling regret in the future. Let’s say you are buying an expensive new flat-screen TV. As you are whipping out your credit card to pay for it, the salesperson offers you an extended warranty for an additional 10% off the sticker price. You don’t relish the thought of paying more for this extended warranty, but the salesperson asks you to imagine how would you feel if, six months down the road, the TV stopped working and you had passed on the opportunity for the extended warranty. To make the moment even more salient, the salesperson adds that the offer is only available to you now (and only now!). With this final push, you go ahead and purchase the extended warranty – paying a premium in order to avoid the possibility that in the future you will hit yourself over the head and tell yourself that you should have purchased the extended warranty when you had the chance.

What has all this got to do with my own inability to say “no”? My version of the extended warranty is that I get invited to all kinds of stimulating conferences and meetings in amazing places, with interesting people. And the invitations always feel as if they are my only chance to see that particular place and meet those particular people.

2) The curse of familiarity: I suppose I also suffer from a form of the “identifiable victim effect” that I described in Chapter 9.  As you recall, when a problem is large, general and abstract, it is easy for us to turn our heads away and not care too much about it. But when the problem is close to home our emotions are evoked, and we are more likely to take action. Similarly, when I receive formal invitations from people I don’t know, it is relatively easy to politely turn down their offer. But when I receive invitations from people I do know, even if only superficially, it’s a different story altogether. And the better I know someone, the harder it is to say “no, sorry, you know I would really love to come, but I just can’t.”

One of the clever ways I attempt to deal with this version of the identifiable victim effect is to ask my wonderful assistant Megan to say no for me in the cases where I have to do so. This way, I don’t have to feel the pain of saying “no”, and because she is not saying “no” for herself, she has a much easier time with it than I do.

3) The future is always greener: I also find that it’s easier to say “yes” to things in the future, particularly the distant future. If someone asks me to come to an event in the next month or two, I generally have no choice but to say “no” because I’m either traveling or fully booked — there’s just no space in my schedule. [I have to admit that sometimes when someone asks me to come to an event and my calendar says that I’m already booked, I feel relieved.] But when someone asks me to do something in a year, my calendar naturally looks far emptier. (Of course, the feeling that I will have lots of extra time in the future is just an illusion – my life will likely be just as full of myriad, often unavoidable things. It’s just that the details aren’t filled in yet.

The basic problem is this: when we look far into the future, we assume that the things that are limiting and constraining us in the present won’t be there to the same degree. For me, I somehow imagine that meetings with students and administrators and colleagues, not to mention reviewing papers and so on, won’t be part of my daily life eight months in the future.

My friends Gal Zauberman and John Lynch, who have done research on this topic, recently gave me some interesting advice. They suggested that I imagine every single event I’m asked to attend will occur exactly four weeks from the present. With this exact schedule I mind, I should then ask myself whether I find it important enough to squeeze it in or cancel something else. If the answer is “yes,” then I should accept the invitation; but if my answer is “no,” I should pass. This is easier said than done, and I have not yet been able to consistently cultivate this frame of mind, but I am starting to adapt this mindset.

Perhaps what I need is to add some technological aid to Gal and John’s advice. What if I had an advanced calendar application made just for people who have a hard time admitting out how busy they will be in the future? Ideally, such an application would take all my meetings and travel from a given period and, based on that schedule, simulate what my time would look like in a year. This would allow people like me to respond to requests in a more realistic, less hopeful way. Perhaps this advanced calendar application is something I should start working on in a few months…

***

Thankfully, my own irrationalities tell me that there is still a lot of room for research and improvement.

Irrationally yours

Dan

A few months ago I got to visit Woods Hole (a fantastic place by the way) when they were having their TEDx event — and here is my talk.

One of the challenges of human life is knowing that what’s good for us in the long term often doesn’t seem good for us right now. Dieting, for example, is not very fun now, but good for us in the future; the same goes for saving money or submitting to preventive medical tests. When we face such tradeoffs, we often focus on the short-term rather than our long-term goals, and in the process we get ourselves into trouble.

But wait! There is hope. By understanding where we fall short, there are methods we can use to overcome our natural (and less than desirable) inclinations.

Here is a letter I got last week:

Dear Professor Ariely,

I have something of a story that intrigued me along the lines of your ‘dishonesty’ experiments. My wife’s cousin (I’ll call her Mary) is generally a nice, honest person. She and her fiancé found an iPhone on vacation. They decided to keep the phone, a nice item of value. Soon after, the owner started calling repeatedly (his name comes up on the screen). Mary chose to not answer the phone. After many calls were unanswered, the calls stopped. Mary kept the phone.

Mary’s situation is special because it is an instance where the lost object can ‘communicate’ with the finder and ‘ask’ to be returned. To what extent and to how long would the average person wait before answering? Would they directly refuse to return the item, or demand compensation?

What if you could rig a phone to deliver a series of text messages that become increasingly personal? Would the finder then feel more connected to the owner, feel empathy, and be more likely to return the phone?

As a side note, the owner of the iPhone was able to remotely shut down the phone so nobody could benefit. The unfortunate outcome is a lost phone. The upside is the empowerment given to the owner, who as a last resort just stops the functionality.

What do you think?

Jack

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Dear Jack,

I think that there are two very interesting points here:

The first is that Mary probably realized that if she answered the phone she would feel obligated to return the iPhone to its owner. And since she did not want to give it up, she simply did not answer the phone. This act is in essence a very sad type of self-control.  Generally we try to exert self-control when we want to assure that we will behave well (save money, take medications, not procrastinate), but here Mary was trying to avoid the temptation that would have made her behave in a kind way.

The second interesting idea is that people are more likely to return items that are more personal. Text messages are one extreme example of this principle, but maybe it would also work for wallets with pictures, books with names, cloths with initials, etc.

Not sure if this helps, but maybe we could learn something from Mary’s behavior.  And for sure don’t leave any valuables unattended during thanksgiving.

Irrationally yours

Dan

In Chile last June, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Felipe Kast, the new government’s minister of planning, and a few of his compadres. (We also went dancing, but that is another story.) One of the topics we talked about was the Chilean retirement saving plan.

By law, 11% of every employee’s salary is automatically transferred into a retirement account. Employees select their preferred level of risk, with the following restrictions: They may not choose either 100% equities or 100% bonds, and the percentage of equity that they can select diminishes as they age. When employees reach retirement, their savings are converted into annuities. The government auctions off the rights to annuitize retirees in groups of 250,000.

This brilliantly conceived approach solves thorny behavioral and institutional challenges. Behaviorally, it recognizes that people are not good at two aspects of financial planning for retirement—deciding to save and eliminating risk in later years—and it forces them to act in a better way. At the same time, the system acknowledges that people who enroll in retirement plans are reasonably good at managing their own risk. So investment choices are left to the individual, with limits on too-risky behavior, especially as a person ages, when bad choices can do irrecoverable damage.

Institutionally, Chile has cracked an age-old problem with annuities. It’s risky business to predict how long people will live, so insurance companies charge a high premium to cover that risk, which makes for an inefficient market. Annuities also suffer from an adverse selection problem, further increasing risk. (The classic example of adverse selection is health insurance: The healthiest people are the least likely to opt in, which increases the pool’s riskiness, making health care less appealing for insurance companies and policies more expensive for the people who want them.) By pooling the risk, the Chilean government makes annuities an attractive business with more competition and better prices. And since everyone is forced to annuitize, the adverse selection problem simply disappears.

I was impressed with this system and wondered how it would fly in the United States, where our own mandated savings program—Social Security—undergoes sporadic efforts to privatize it.

I suspect Americans would consider the Chilean system heavy-handed and limiting—a flagrant example of nanny-state control. You can force me to save money when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Paradoxically, we happily accept deeply controlling (and expensive) regulation on our behavior in other areas with little thought or protest. Consider the strictures we allow on driving. Wear a seat belt. Drive this speed. Bear the cost of air bags. Pollute only this much. Don’t text while driving.

Why do we accept so much government intervention in driving but chafe when it comes to a few simple rules that would help us make better financial decisions? It’s probably not because we think we’re smarter about finances than driving. I think the reason has to do with our ability to imagine negative consequences. Car wrecks have a way of vividly communicating our incompetence as drivers and making the benefits of regulation crystal clear. Poor money management can carry similarly devastating consequences, but they are less readily apparent. Even in times of economic crisis, we don’t recognize our own bad judgment because people around us are in the same boat and we compare our fortune with theirs.

But the inability to see our own irrationality shouldn’t be an excuse to let it go unchecked. We need to analyze what people and markets are good at and what they’re not good at, and use those insights to improve our institutions. Chile’s approach to saving shows us that it can be done, and done well.

This post first appeared at HBR

For the last 2 years I have been positing this video in celebration of the new school year, and all the hopes and promises we make to ourselves that this year things will be different….

Somewhat unsurprisingly, this video is still as relevant as always.

Happy new school year

Dan