NO WAY OUT: THE VALUE OF PRECOMMITMENT
In 1519, Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro, a Spanish
conquistador
searching for gold and silver,
led an expedition from Cuba to the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico. He brought with him
five hundred soldiers and three hundred civilians on eleven ships. Cortés’s goal was to head inland,
conquer the natives, claim the land, and steal whatever gold and silver they could get their hands on.
The natives, however, were not going to surrender meekly. Central Mexico was the homeland of
the Aztecs, led by the powerful god-king Moctezuma and known for their bloody human sacrifices.
Cortés’s crew had only a few horses and pieces of artillery. They were hardly a powerful military,
and when the men landed on the coast of Mexico, they hesitated about marching inland. They were
reluctant to leave the safety of the coast, where they could escape by ship. Cortés knew that when they
faced their first battle, the crew would be tempted to retreat if they knew they had the option to sail
away.
So according to legend, he ordered his officers to set the ships on fire. The ships—Spanish
galleons and caravels—were made entirely of wood and waterproofed with an extremely flammable
pitch. Cortés lit the first torch, and as his men destroyed the ships, they burned to the water line and
sank.
This is one of history’s most notorious examples of committing one’s future self to a desired course
of action. In sinking his ships, Cortés demonstrated an important insight into human nature. While we
may feel brave and tireless when we embark on an adventure, our future selves may be derailed by
fear and exhaustion. Cortés burned those ships to guarantee that his men didn’t act on their fear. He
left the crew—and all their future selves—with no choice but to go forward.
This is a favorite story of behavioral economists who believe that the best strategy for self-control
is, essentially, to burn your ships. One of the first proponents of this strategy was Thomas Schelling, a
behavioral economist who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his Cold War theory
of how nuclear powers can manage conflict. Schelling believed that to reach our goals, we must limit
our options. He called this
precommitment
. Schelling borrowed the idea of
precommitment
from his
work on nuclear deterrence. A nation that precommits itself—say, by adopting a policy of immediate
and escalated retaliation—makes its threats more credible than a nation that expresses reluctance to
retaliate. Schelling viewed the rational self and the tempted self as engaged in a war, each with very
different goals. Your rational self sets a course of action for you to follow, but often the tempted self
decides to change course at the last minute. If the tempted self, with its reversed preferences, is
allowed to do what it wants, the result will ultimately be self-sabotage.
From this point of view, the tempted self is an unpredictable and unreliable enemy. As behavioral
economist George Ainslie puts it, we need to “take steps to predict and constrain that self as if it
were another person.”
This requires cunning, courage, and creativity. We must study our tempted
selves, see their weaknesses, and find a way to bind them to our rational preferences. Celebrated
author Jonathan Franzen has publicly shared his own version of burning his ships to keep his writing
on track. Like many
writers and office workers, he is easily distracted by computer games and the
Internet. Talking to a
Time
magazine reporter, he explained how he dismantled his laptop to prevent
his tempted self from procrastinating. He took every time-wasting program off the hard drive
(including every writer’s nemesis, solitaire). He removed the computer’s wireless card and
destroyed its Ethernet port. “What you have to do,” he explained, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable
with superglue, and then you saw the little head off it.”
You may not want to go so far as to destroy your computer to prevent distraction, but you can make
good use of technology to keep your future self on course. For example, a program called “Freedom”
(macfreedom. com) allows you to turn your computer’s Internet access off for a predetermined period
of time, while “Anti-Social” (anti-social.cc) will selectively keep you
off social networks and e-
mail. I myself prefer “ProcrasDonate” (
procrasdonate.com
), which bills you for every hour you spend
on time-wasting websites and donates the money to charity. And if your temptation takes a more
tangible form—say, chocolate or cigarettes—you can try a product like CapturedDiscipline, a solid-
steel safe that can be locked for anywhere from two minutes to ninety-nine hours. If you want to buy a
box of Girl Scout cookies but not finish them in one sitting, lock ’em up. If you want to impose a
moratorium on credit card use, they can go in the safe, too, where your future tempted self cannot get
to them without a stick of dynamite. If it’s action you need to commit to, try putting your money where
your goals are. For example, if you want
to coerce yourself to exercise, you could precommit by
buying an expensive annual gym membership.
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As Schelling argues, this strategy is not unlike a
country that invests in expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal. Your future tempted self will know you
mean business, and think twice before threatening your rational self ’s goals.
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