Sirens and Frogs

It’s one of our least favorite things to exert,         self-control, but Dan Ariely made it interesting and pertinent in the fifth week of his course on behavioral economics. Here are some things that have stuck with me:

Procrastination. Self-control issues are the result of a “present focus bias,” i.e., the tendency to give more weight to our current state than any possible future state. This is a basic explanation for why we procrastinate, even when we know it’s not in our best interests.

Reward Substitution. We discount many things that are good for us because the benefits lie in the future. Reward substitution—using a reward that is more immediate and, therefore, more motivating—can be helpful. Rewards can be things such as convenience, how we appear to others, social recognition, money, loss aversion, or even regret to encourage desired behavior.

• “Missed it by that much.” Regret = the comparison between where we are in life and where we think we could have been. We feel worse if we miss a plane by two minutes rather than by two hours because we imagine all the ways we could have made it two minutes sooner.

Ulysses Contracts. These are self-control contracts named for Ulysses, who avoided the sirens’ calls by having his sailors tie him to the mast and who had his sailors avoid them by putting beeswax in their ears. Think of the siren call of using your cell phone while driving. Do you know yourself as well as Ulysses knew himself and his men? Do you put your phone where you can hear it ring and it would be difficult but not impossible to reach? Or do you need to move it completely out of reach and turn it off so you can’t hear it? When you know you’re going to be tempted, but you’re willing to do something now to “bind” your current self in order to prevent your future self from misbehaving, you’re using a self-control contract.

Temptation. When we can actually distract ourselves from temptation, we’re more likely to resist. However, continually exerting self-control throughout the day weakens our ability to resist temptation. Do tasks that require self-control earlier in the day. As Mark Twain so famously put it for the benefit of all us procrastinators:

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”