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BLINDED BY REWARD
In our opening competition of self-control, the humans agreed that six snacks were worth more than
two. It wasn’t until the experimenter put the two snacks on the table and said, “Do you want these
now, or do you want to wait?” that 80 percent of the Harvard and Max Planck students changed their
minds. They weren’t bad at math; they were blinded by the promise of reward. Behavioral
economists call this the problem of
bounded rationality
—we’re rational until we aren’t. We will be
perfectly rational when everything is in theory, but when the temptation is real, the brain shifts into
reward-seeking mode to make sure we don’t miss out.
Influential behavioral economist George Ainslie has argued that this type of reversal is behind
most failures of self-control, from alcoholism and addiction to weight gain and debt. Most people,
deep down, want to resist temptation. We
want
to make the choice that will lead to long-term
happiness. Not the drink, but sobriety. Not the deep-fried doughnut, but the tight derrière. Not the
fancy new toy, but financial security. We only prefer the short-term, immediate reward when it is right
there staring us in the face, and the want becomes overwhelming. This leads to
bounded willpower
—
we have self-control until we need it.
One reason we’re so susceptible to immediate gratification is that our brain’s reward system did
not evolve to respond to future rewards. Food was the reward system’s original target, which is why
humans are still exceptionally responsive to the smell or sight of anything yummy. When dopamine
was first perfecting its effects in the human brain, a reward that was far off—whether by sixty miles
or sixty days—was irrelevant to daily survival. The system we needed was the one that ensured that
we snapped up rewards when they were available. At most, we needed the motivation to pursue a
near
reward—the fruit you had to climb a tree or cross a river to get your hungry hands on. A reward
you had to work five, ten, twenty years to obtain? In the millennia before college degrees, Olympic
medals, and retirement accounts, such delay of gratification would have been literally unthinkable.
Saving for tomorrow, maybe. Saving for ten thousand tomorrows from now, not so much.
When our modern selves contemplate immediate versus future rewards, the brain processes these
two options very differently. The immediate reward triggers the older, more primitive reward system
and its dopamine-induced desire. Future rewards don’t interest this reward system so much. Their
value is encoded by the more recently evolved prefrontal cortex. To delay gratification, the prefrontal
cortex has to cool off the promise of reward. It’s not an impossible feat—after all, that’s what the
prefrontal cortex is there for. But it has to fight a feeling that’s been known to make rats run across
electrified grids and men blow their life savings on a slot machine. In other words, it’s not easy.
The good news is, temptation has a narrow window of opportunity. To really overwhelm our
prefrontal cortex, the reward must be available now, and—for maximum effect—you need to see it.
As soon as there is any distance between you and the temptation, the power of balance shifts back to
the brain’s system of self-control. Take, for example, the Harvard and Max Planck students whose
self-control collapsed at the sight of two M&M’s. In another version of the study, experimenters
asked the students to make the choice
without
putting the rewards on the table. This time, the students
were much more likely to choose the larger, delayed reward. Not being able to see the immediate
reward made it more abstract and less exciting to the reward system. This helped the students make a
rational choice based on mental calculations, not primal feelings.
This is good news for those who want to delay gratification. Anything you can do to create that
distance will make it easier to say no. For example, one study found that just putting a candy jar
inside a desk drawer instead of on top of the desk reduced office workers’ candy consumption by one
third. It isn’t any more difficult to open a drawer than to reach across a desk, but putting the candy
away reduced the constant stimulation of desire. When you know your own triggers, putting them out
of sight can keep them from tempting your mind.
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