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CHAPTER SUMMARY
The Idea
: Feeling bad leads to giving in, and dropping guilt makes you stronger.
Under the Microscope
•
The promise of relief.
What do you turn to when you’re feeling stressed, anxious, or
down?
•
What’s terrifying you?
Pay attention to the stress of what you hear or see in the media,
online, or from other sources.
•
When setbacks happen.
Do you respond to a willpower failure with guilt and self-
criticism?
•
Resolving to feel good.
Do you use fantasies of your future self to fix your feelings now,
more than you take concrete steps to fix your behavior?
Willpower Experiments
•
Stress-relief strategies that work.
The next time you’re stressed out, try one of the stress-
relief strategies that really work, such as exercising or playing sports, praying or
attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or
family, getting a massage, going outside for a walk, meditating or doing yoga, and
spending time with a creative hobby.
•
Forgiveness when you fail.
Take a more compassionate perspective on your setbacks to
avoid the guilt that leads to giving in again.
•
Optimistic pessimism for successful resolutions.
Predict how and when you might be
tempted to break your vow, and imagine a specific plan of action for not giving in.
SEVEN
Putting the Future on Sale: The Economics of Instant Gratification
I
t was a competition you don’t see every day: nineteen chimpanzees versus forty humans. And not just
any humans—students from Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. The
chimps were from the equally prestigious Wolfgang Koehler Primate Research Center in Leipzig.
After all, in a match-up with Harvard and Max Planck, you can’t throw just any old circus chimps into
the ring.
The challenge: Delay the gratification of an immediate snack to win more food. The temptation:
grapes for the chimps, and raisins, peanuts, M&M’s, Goldfish crackers, and popcorn for the humans.
First, all the competitors were offered a choice between two and six of their favorite edible rewards.
This was an easy choice—both humans and chimps agreed that six was indeed better than two. Then
the researchers complicated the choice. Each competitor was given the opportunity to eat two treats
immediately,
or
wait two minutes for six. The researchers knew the participants preferred six to two.
But would they wait for it?
This study, published in 2007, was the first to directly compare the self-control of chimpanzees and
humans. What the researchers found, however, says as much about human nature as about the
evolutionary basis of patience. Although both chimps and humans preferred six treats to two if they
didn’t
have to wait, the species made very different decisions when they had to wait. Chimpanzees
chose to wait for the larger reward an impressive 72 percent of the time. The Harvard and Max
Planck Institute students? Only 19 percent of the time.
How are we to interpret this crushing defeat of humans by incredibly patient primates? Are we to
believe that chimpanzees have been blessed with a secret source of self-control? Or that we humans
at some point in our evolutionary history
lost
the capacity to wait two minutes for peanuts?
Of course not. When we’re on our best behavior, humans’ ability to control our impulses puts other
species to shame. But all too often, we use our fancy brains not to make the most strategic decisions,
but to give ourselves permission to act
more
irrationally. That’s because a big prefrontal cortex is
good at more than self-control. It can also rationalize bad decisions and promise we’ll be better
tomorrow. You can bet those chimpanzees weren’t telling themselves, “I’ll take the two grapes now,
because I can always wait for the six grapes next time.” But we humans have all sorts of mental tricks
for convincing ourselves that the time to resist temptation is tomorrow—and so we of the gigantic
prefrontal cortices find ourselves giving in again and again to immediate gratification.
Whether we look to economics, psychology, or neuroscience for an explanation, many of our
problems with temptation and procrastination come back to one uniquely human problem: how we
think about the future. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has made the bold claim that humans are
the only species to think in any meaningful way about the future. And while this ability has led to all
sorts of wonderful contributions to the world, such as psychic hotlines and sports betting, it also gets
our present selves into trouble. The problem is not so much that we can foresee a future, but that we
cannot see it clearly.
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