The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It

WHAT’S YOUR DISCOUNT RATE?
While it’s human nature to discount future rewards, everyone has a different discount rate. Some
people have a very low discount rate, like a high-end store that never puts its best merchandise on
sale. These folks are able to keep the big reward in mind and wait for it. Others have a very high
discount rate. They cannot resist the promise of immediate gratification, like a going-out-of-business
sale that slashes prices up to 90 percent just to get some quick cash. How big your discount rate is
turns out to be a major determinant of your long-term health and success.
The first study to look at the long-term consequences of a person’s discount rate was a classic
psychology experiment best known as “The Marshmallow Test.” In the late 1960s, Stanford
psychologist Walter Mischel gave a bunch of four-year-olds the choice between one treat now or two
treats in fifteen minutes. After explaining the choice, the experimenter left the child alone in a room
with both treats and a bell. If the child could wait until the experimenter returned, he could have both
treats. But if the child couldn’t wait, he could ring the bell at any time and eat one treat immediately.
Most of the four-year-olds took what you and I would now recognize as the least effective strategy
for delaying gratification: staring at the reward and imagining how it would taste. These kids folded
in a matter of seconds. The four-year-olds who waited successfully tended to get their eyeballs off the
promise of reward. There is delightful video footage of the kids struggling to wait, and watching it is
a surprisingly good lesson in self-control. One girl covers her face with her hair so she can’t see the
treats; one boy keeps an eye on the treats but moves the bell far away so he can’t reach it; another boy
decides to compromise by licking the treats without actually eating them, portending an excellent
future in politics.
Although the study taught the researchers a lot about how four-year-olds delay gratification, it also
provided a shockingly good way to predict a child’s future. How long a four-year-old waited in the
marshmallow test predicted that child’s academic and social success ten years later. The kids who
waited the longest were more popular, had higher GPAs, and were better able to handle stress. They
also had higher SAT scores and performed better on a neuropsychological test of prefrontal cortex
function. Being able to wait fifteen minutes for two marshmallows was the perfect measure of
something far more important: How well could a child handle temporary discomfort to accomplish a
long-term goal? And did the child know how to turn the mind away from the promise of immediate
reward?
This individual difference—whether measured in childhood or later years—plays a major role in
how our lives turn out. Behavioral economists and psychologists have come up with complex
formulas for determining people’s discount rates—basically, how much more is your happiness today
worth than your happiness tomorrow? People with higher future-reward discount rates are more
susceptible to a wide range of self-control problems. They are more likely to smoke and drink to
excess, and they have a greater risk of drug use, gambling, and other addictions. They are less likely
to save for retirement, and more likely to drive drunk and have unprotected sex. They procrastinate
more. They’re even less likely to wear a watch—it’s as if they are so focused on the present, time
itself doesn’t matter. And if the present is more important than the future, there is no reason to delay
gratification. To escape this mind-set, we must find a way to make the future matter.