Time-inconsistent preferences
Also called “dynamic inconsistency” or “time inconsistency”. This is the feature of the human brain that is responsible for impulse purchases, dieters’ ice-cream binges, the difficulty of quitting smoking, and the tendency for people not to save for retirement. The common feature is that people value a little pleasure today more than they do a lot of pleasure in a month. (My experience is that ADHD exacerbates this, but can’t back up the feeling with hard evidence.)
One fascinating thing about this cognitive “feature” is that people usually don’t realize they have it. And even when they do realize it to some extent, they often still fail to plan as if they had it. How often do people take into account that they will almost certainly have moments of weakness when planning exercise routines or diets? (This actually another bias itself: the bias blind spot.) We’re in denial about this basic, important feature of our minds.
(Read on to see how to practically compensate for this.)
What’s even more interesting is that this time inconsistency isn’t itself irrational. Preferences are arational or pre-rational*. But our mistaken belief that our future selves will have as much willpower as we currently do, (or our inability to act on the abstract knowledge of this trait,) is in fact irrational, and a bias. But even if time consistency itself isn’t irrational, I do think it makes us less happy than we’d otherwise be. Our long term goal (our meta-preference) is to maximize our happiness**, and our short term goals of having just one more smoke are inconsistent with our long term goals.
* I wonder how the people over at Overcoming Bias would treat inconsistent time preferences. The justifications that apply to attempts to overcome real biases don’t apply straightforwardly to time inconsistency.
** Well, our conscious goal, anyway. Our genetic goal is to reproduce, and the inconsistency between the two is the source of both many biases, and of a lot of the difficulty of understanding yourself.
So what we’re facing is, at the root, an attempt by one person with one set of desires (say, consistent exercise) to impose their will upon another, similar person with incompatible desires (staying away from the gym). In the service of explicating this point of view, let me start speaking of myself in the third person, and as three different entities. Each entity will represent my state of mind at one point in time. (Hopefully my sanity will not be the price of this exercise.) Let A be my introspecting self, and B my exercise-avoiding self on any given day. A wants B to exercise, and tries to figure out how to control B to get him to exercise. Let S be all my future selves, with B either choosing to exercise or not.
Now, I don’t think A’s desire to control is bad. If A comes up with a way to force B to exercise regularly, S will probably be happier overall as a result. And what’s more important is that B will agree with this logic, too. (In fact, I’m in more of a B-ish than an A-ish state of mind right now, and yet I’m aiding and abetting A in his conspiracy against B. Oh, right, sanity.) So there’s no point in time where B is going to be completely opposed to going to the gym. It’s just that there are interfering desires, like to continue a previous activity, or to continue lazing about lethargically, that B has but that A doesn’t have. So there are two basic approaches that can be taken. One, to increase B’s desire to exercise, and two, to decrease B’s interfering desires. The first can sometimes be accomplished by training B to remind himself of A’s desires. Simply bringing the desires to B’s mind in a salient way can increase the strength of the desires. Things like visualization, mantras, mottos, statements of intent, and self-hypnosis can help with this. Basically, anything that makes B more likely to think about why he wants to exercise, even in the face of other desires, when it comes time to actually do so.
Decreasing B’s interfering desires is another story. The main problem is that A also shares those desires, to some degree. So A wouldn’t rationally try to eliminate those desires, or the possibility of their pursuit. (I don’t want to stop reading books just so I have less temptation to skip exercise or stay up too late. Even a dieter doesn’t want to completely give up treats.) But increasing the cost of pursuing them in lieu of the desired activities is a viable strategy, and has myriad forms. You can put a dollar in the swear jar every time you slip, or $5 every time you miss exercising. You can assign rewards for small milestones, like a relaxing bath after grading a big stack of papers. Use your imagination.
Strategies that provide a delayed reward, like a nicer/bigger meal or a treat for exercising, or a vacation for meeting a weight goal or finishing a project, are much less effective, since they’re often almost as delayed as the intrinsic payoffs. Rewards should come within a few minutes of doing the right thing, and ideally, would be given at the time the right choice was made. For instance, I could allow myself a glass of chocolate milk before bed only if I made it there before a certain hour. If I decide to put down the book at bedtime, I get the treat.
And the occasional slip is not necessarily a problem. If even A would agree that reading the archives of this awesome new blog instead of sleeping that night is worth it, then it’s not really the fault of a time inconsistent preference. But make sure that you don’t stay in B-mode permanently. When one tactic fails you, keep going and try other tactics. If you don’t have long periods of wasteful dormancy, your personal development will be so much quicker.
A problem with these cost-increasing strategies is that they often rely on self-imposed punishments, which can’t be so severe that B isn’t consistent in imposing them, and rewards, the denial of which is a punishment that also takes willpower to impose. There are a variety of tricks one can perform that make avoiding punishment harder to do, but starting an arms race to outsmart yourself is a losing battle, and is wasteful anyway. (Wouldn’t you rather spend the time doing something useful rather than coming up with elaborate plots to punish or reward B?) So what happens when the severity of the punishment is more severe than you can self-impose, but less than is necessary to make the A’s course of action desirable to B? You can start finding other people to help. There are all sorts of social desires and expectations and manipulations that friends can use to help you out. And they can enforce the withholding of various types of bonds and fees (like the swearword jar).
That kind of practice seems common enough. But what if you don’t have the luck to have the kind of friends or family that you can ask to do that? And wouldn’t it be nice to take control of your life without such nanny-like figures in your life? Well, here’s another idea: targeted voluntary induction of dissociative identities. (That was fun, if pointless.) Try to think of yourself as having a “working” mode and a “chores” mode and a “going to bed now” mode and whatever else you need. When you’re B, you enter ones of those modes in order to do the thing you want to do. Since it isn’t really you doing it, but “working” you, the cost to B of doing the right thing has decreased, since the effort is offloaded onto the alternate identity. You can practice trying to separate your different desires into these identities so that outside of them, those desires really don’t have any force. And you can cultivate a less distracted and distractable attitudes within those identities. And if necessary, you can cultivate other modes for storing away interfering desires, as play modes. That way in the main mode (planning mode) you aren’t tempted to just not invoke the work modes, because in the main mode all you consider are long-term desires.
How easy this is, if it’s possible, I don’t know. But apparently it’s possible even if you’re not really trying (albeit in circumstances surrounding extreme trauma or abuse) so maybe the skill can be developed. And if my impressions are accurate, a lot of people do this to a limited extent. In fact, I think it’s inherent, in a very limited form, in any form of self-punishment or reward, and probably in other mental activities, like any sort of internal “on the other hand…” dialogue. Maybe, because of my ADD, I just need to take it further before it starts working to my advantage.
