Duckworth and Gross (2020), "Behavior Change"

Angela L. Duckworth and James J. Gross, “Behavior Change.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 161: 39-49, 2020.

• Suppression of impulses is a mug’s game. But changing the environment and adopting strategies concerning how we react hold promise.

• The requisite changes might be self-initiated, or initiated by others, such as employers or the government. Notice that self-deployed strategies require that people be sophisticated about their self-control shortcomings.

• Please put aside problems that arise from lack of knowledge or skill. This article is devoted to looking at situations where "we know what we should do and how to do it [p. 40]." 

• How to overcome the fact that  (temporarily) tempting options might get chosen over alternatives that are preferred by our more considered selves? The authors outline the "process model of behavior change" to point to methods where the "larger later" option is not sacrificed to the temporarily appealing "smaller sooner" choice. Here's their Figure 2 (p. 40) that outlines the process model: 

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• Habits or self-adopted strategies might allow you to skip the appraisal stage, leading to an automatic response when a familiar situation enters awareness. Giving into temptation, then, is not the done thing, it doesn't present itself as a viable alternative. 

• But sometimes you both want to take the stairs (for exercise) and want to take the elevator (because you are tired). What can be done to encourage stair-taking or other types of physical exercise?

• The process model suggests that you could try to alter the situation, alter where you put your attention, and/or alter your response strategy – or try to inculcate one of those automatic responses that skips the appraisal stage.

• You could begin the day by putting on comfy shoes; you could do things that would make the lazy alternative less available, like not bringing your car keys or bus pass. 

• You could keep track of your steps and adopt a so-many steps per day goal.

• You could reframe the time-consuming walk as “an energy break.”

• You could adopt (and possibly publicize) a rule that you always walk.

• Others can help. For instance, employers can make the stairwells more inviting, or promote the social norm/company culture of  stair use. 

Kirgios, Mandel, Park, et al. (2020) on Temptation Bundling

Erika L. Kirgios, Graelin H. Mandel, Yeji Park, et al., “Teaching Temptation Bundling to Boost Exercise: A Field Experiment.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 161: 20-35, 2020.

• Temptation bundling came to the world's attention (er, my attention) in a 2014 article by Milkman, Minson, and Volpp. Temptation bundling is when you pair a "should" behavior –exercise, for instance – with a "want" behavior, an indulgence such as listening to a captivating, somewhat trashy novel. The idea is that the pairing makes it more likely that you actually will engage in the "should" activity, and it will be more enjoyable than it would be without the tied "want," while you also will reduce the guilt feelings associated without giving in to an indulgence. Hmm, I might have some (vegan, of course) chocolate while blogging...

• The 2014 article had a pretty small sample size (226) and findings that suggested temptation bundling did provide, in the short-term, a boost to engagement with the "should" behavior.

• The 2020 article (which involves as a co-author Katherine Milkman, part of the original temptation bundling team) works with a commercial fitness company to test temptation bundling on a much larger sample. The experiment sticks with the audio books/exercise pairing, but with about 15 times the previous number of participants.

• A new question that is looked at is whether would-be exercisers actually have to be told about temptation bundling, or can an exercise gym company, by giving people an audiobook in the context of encouraging exercise, induce their customers to temptation bundle on their own? The term of art the authors employ is "information leakage." That is, even without being told or advised to bundle, maybe just being given access to an audio book by your gym induces temptation bundling.

• A chain of gyms introduced a 28-day long StepUp Program for their millions of members, with some rewards for participating. The Program was described as “a habit-building, science-based workout program [p. 23].” StepUp served as the locus for tons of research: "Our study was one of 20 preregistered studies embedded in the StepUp Program... [p. 23]." 

• Within the framework of the StepUp Program, more than 2,300 people participated in a temptation bundling experiment. About half of the participants were informed they had been gifted a free audiobook, and they received a code allowing them to choose and download a book. The other half received the same audiobook gift and were encouraged to use the book in a temptation bundle with exercise; this encouragement continued throughout the month.

• Most people (some 86%) didn’t bother to collect their free audiobook. Now I am sad. In some sense, we are back to a small sample: less than 200 subjects in each of the conditions downloaded their free audiobook. 

• Gym attendance is the main variable of interest. The free audiobook offer, whether paired with temptation bundling encouragement or not, increases workouts by something like 10 to 14%, both during the Program and up to 17 weeks later. (This result comes from a variation of the experiment that includes a third control group of participants who are not offered a free audiobook.)

• The marginal impact of the temptation bundling is pretty small (effectively zero during the 28-day treatment period), perhaps inducing some people to go to the gym (in the long run) who would not otherwise have gone. 

• A follow-up lab experiment establishes that information leakage might be what drives the very similar results for the audiobook treatments, with and without the temptation bundling encouragement. (As the lab experiment was not part of the original pre-registration, presumably its utility was understood only after the  original experiment showed near identical results for the two conditions.)

• In my view, this experiment removes a bit of the luster from temptation bundling. I'm a bit disappointed, really – not in the experiment itself, which is superb, but by the meh, alas, results. 

Ainslie (2021) on Willpower

George Ainslie, “Willpower With and Without Effort.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44, e30: 1–16, 2021, pdf here. [This "target" article attracted 26 commentaries, which can be found here. Ainslie's response to the commentaries is here.]

• The basic framework: a Smaller, Sooner (SS) option versus a Larger, Later (LL) option. 

• The SS option is tempting in the moment, even if the LL option is valued more highly at other points of time. 

• Why is SS tempting? Perhaps visceral factors take over, or hyperbolic discounting does its thing. “Preference for the [SS] option is often temporary…[p. 2].” 

• Two different mechanisms, suppression and resolve, are commonly associated with willpower. Habit is a third willpower-adjacent mechanism that can be distinguished from resolve (or from a lack of resolve). 

• Suppression involves avoiding (or blocking or ignoring) the re-evaluation of the two alternatives while waiting for the LL. (Cue the marshmallow test!) Suppression “is necessarily unstable [p. 1],” a “game of keep away [p. 5].” Suppression requires attention, and thus precludes other uses of mental resources that might themselves be rewarding. 

• Resolve refers to sticking with the original valuations by cognitively changing the stakes. “Recursive self-prediction” seems to be a leading approach to resolve, and underlies personal rules. Resolve “is intent that is maintained by an enforcement mechanism [p. 5].” One resolve mechanism is to raise the stakes by viewing giving into temptation not as a one-time deviation, but as the start or continuation of a long series of lapses. (Suppression can be one device for building resolve.) 

• Hyperbolic discounting can be a basis for why people choose the LL alternatives when making category-wide choices, and why they try to bundle individual choices into those larger categories. 

• Scale mismatch makes it hard to overcome current temptations – what would be the harm of eating this tempting dessert? (p.5) The harm lies in undermining the credibility of your weight-control plan. So, there is value in viewing your current choice as a test case. 

• There can be significant value in (legalistic?) distinctions to permit occasional deviations, so that you can give in to temptation to a degree without destroying the credibility of your long-term plan. (What happens in Vegas...)

• "Resolve becomes effortless to the extent that you are confident of maintaining it [p. 8]."

• Habit is a “routine simplification of action [p. 2]” which is not the same as resolve. With habit, the issue is moved out of the choice domain, behavior becomes arational. Ainslie distinguishes routine habits (like showering in the morning) from good habits ("preserved by resolve" and put at risk by unexcused lapses) and bad habits (repeated impulsive behaviors).

Salas-Morellón, Palacios-Huerta, and Call (2021), “Dynamic Inconsistency in Great Apes"

Laura Salas-Morellón, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, and Josep Call, “Dynamic Inconsistency in Great Apes,” July 2021. 

• People often display impatience when they are making decisions about rewards either right now or (larger rewards) with a slight delay. 

• The impatience is reduced if both the options are delayed, say, by an additional month; hence, there is a possibility for dynamic inconsistency, where people opt to be patient for choices concerning the distant future, but when those same choices become closer to the present, the less patient, immediate gratification choice becomes more attractive. 

• Do bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans – who share some 99% of their DNA with humans – display similar choice patterns? If they do, that suggests that human preferences are not due to human cultural factors, but are rather baked into us by our genetic make-up. 

• The "N" is quite small: 6 orangutans, 5 bonobos, and 4 gorillas. One of the gorillas was left out of the full experiment due to not meeting the pre-test criteria. 

• In the experiments, apes are offered the choice between an immediate reward (fruit) and a three-times-larger reward that is delayed by three minutes. 

• The same choices are again offered to apes, but this time, the “fast” reward arrives after three minutes, and the delayed reward arrives in nine minutes. 

• The apes prefer more to less, if the time delay is the same. 

• The apes prefer sooner to later, if the reward is the same. 

• The apes show more patience for the larger reward when both the options are delayed; that is, like humans, they seem to be subject to dynamic inconsistency in their intertemporal choices. 

• As the small sample-size suggests, the statistical significance of the results is quite limited.

Špecián (2019) on True Preferences

Petr Špecián, “The Precarious Case of the True Preferences.” Society 56(3): 267-272, June 2019.

• Are voluntary trades (with no spillovers) Pareto improving? To assert that they are suggests a belief in coherent preferences. This is the standard economics approach: choices reveal underlying, true preferences.

• Behavioral evidence undermines the belief that choices reveal true preferences. Nonetheless, nudges aim to make people better off “as judged by themselves," so there is an appeal to some underlying true preferences from which those judgments emerge.

• But when can we know that people's un-nudged choices do not reflect their true preferences? How can we determine which preferences should be disregarded or questioned? Signposts of potential irrationality might include rare choices, intertemporal choices, choices involving temptation goods…

• Can we rely upon cold-state (as opposed to hot-state) preferences, or long-run, considered preferences, as somehow being "true" preferences? But maybe these proclaimed "more considered" preferences reflect social norms and are just marketed for public consumption, even as people really want to be Mr. Hyde, not Dr. Jekyll. 

• Perhaps Sugden (2008) is right, perhaps there are no underlying coherent preferences at all.

• Nudgers might believe that their interventions make matters better in practice even if these fundamental questions about how to judge individual welfare remain unresolved. [That's pretty much my view, too -- JL] Nudgers should be humble, and wary of overconfidence.

Duckworth et al. (2019) on Academics and Self-Control

Angela L. Duckworth, Jamie L. Taxer, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Brian M. Galla, and James J. Gross, “Self-Control and Academic Achievement.” Annual Review of Psychology 70: 373–99, 2019 [pdf here].

• Definitions of self-control vary (bringing on "jingle-jangle fallacies"); here, self-control is defined as “the self-initiated regulation of thoughts, feelings, and actions when enduringly valued goals conflict with momentarily more gratifying goals [p. 374].” 

• The competing actions examined here are the “academic goal-congruent” (AGC) action (like studying) and the academic goal-incongruent (AGI) action (like looking at your phone); the academic-goal congruent action is (in the cases of interest here) the one that would be chosen “upon reflection [p. 376]” 

• Many AGIs are of recent origin 

• Conflict between competing goals is unpleasant 

• Student multitasking is common, but it hinders learning; screens (laptops, phones) in the classroom are bad bad bad, even for college students. [Maybe instructors should make academics more interesting???]

• Average time-on-academic-task is less than 6 minutes (p. 378) 

• Self-control is a solid predictor of school success; preschool marshmallow tests predict SAT scores – but in general, self-control predicts grades better than it predicts standardized test scores

• The process model of self-control: situation attracts attention leads to appraisal and then to response (and a new situation) 

• Many self-control strategies such as rules, plans, and the inculcation of habits (like “study habits”) aim at skipping the assessment and jumping to the AGC response. Assessments can be altered, too, as with cognitive therapy. 

• Other strategies target the situation – eliminate potential distractions, say – or attention. 

• Focusing on the response is where willpower comes in (as opposed to relying less on the need for willpower), and willpower is a weak reed. 

Lowenstein (2019) Responds to Duckworth, Milkman, and Laibson (2019)

George Loewenstein, “Self-Control and Its Discontents: A Commentary on Duckworth, Milkman, and Laibson.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 19(3): 95-100, 2019.

• Much to admire in Duckworth, Milkman, and Laibson (2019), especially the categorization of strategies to bolster self-control into situational v. cognitive and self-deployed v. other-deployed.

• Two (sort of) implicit assumptions seem to hover around the analysis, however, and I [Loewenstein] want to challenge those assumptions (assumptions which the authors themselves do not accept).

• One assumption that readers might come away with is that worsening problems such as lack of savings or obesity are brought about by self-control shortcomings, and that the strategies presented in Duckworth, Milkman, and Laibson (2019) are appropriate means to solve those problems. But inadequate self-control is not the source of (relatively recent) problems like rises in obesity and declines in savings. Rather, these problems have other, large causes, and thus, other solutions.

• A second assumption that readers might adopt is that self-control is about trying to get people to take a longer-term perspective. But many people suffer from being excessively future-minded (they are "hyperopic") -- these people need enhanced self-control to limit their future focus, to increase their current indulgence.

• The US has only become an outlier among nations with respect to undersaving and obesity in the past 40 years or so -- these problems do not reflect a new wave of a lack of self-control that swept across the land. What has changed is, for instance, a growth in income inequality and in the availability of snack foods and credit cards.

• Self-control is not about the present versus the future; it is about affect (System 1) versus more considered thinking (System 2) – this is why some people indulge insufficiently (“tightwaddism” and workaholism). (Look at the substantial investments people make in education -- do these evince present bias?) Mental accounting (like establishing an entertainment account) can help with future bias, too!

• Behavioral economics research might have a puritanical (or "Calvinist") bias.

Duckworth, Milkman, and Laibson (2019) on Willpower and Beyond

Angela L. Duckworth, Katherine L. Milkman, and David Laibson, “Beyond Willpower: Strategies for Reducing Failures of Self-Control.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 19(3): 102-129, 2019.

• Higher self-control is associated with many good things -- but people struggle with self-control.

• Various models (such as dynamically inconsistent preferences) have been proposed to try to capture the workings (and failures) of self-control, and many strategies are deployed to try to bolster self-control. Exhortations to show more willpower, to just say no, are not that effective. That is, relying on willpower alone, as opposed to other strategies, is almost to give the game away.

• Strategies that try to make willpower more effective can usefully be categorized. In particular, some try to alter the situation (Situational strategies), and some try to target how the decision maker thinks about a given situation (Cognitive strategies). Further, some are undertaken by the decision maker herself (Self-Deployed strategies) and others are enacted by various outside actors, choice architects, including employers and regulators (Other-Deployed strategies). Self-Deployed strategies require that the decision maker understand, at least to some extent, her self-control shortcomings -- in the usual terminology, she must be somewhat sophisticated (not naive) about her intertemporal inconsistencies.

• Four categories of self-control strategies emerge within this two-dimensional framework, then: Self-Deployed Situational Interventions; Self-Deployed Cognitive Interventions; Other-Deployed Situational Interventions; and, Other-Deployed Cognitive Interventions. The authors list and discuss various strategies within each of these categories.

• Self-Deployed Situational Interventions attempt to manage the environment to reduce the need for self-control; such strategies include: deleting a game from your phone or employing other commitment devices (or commitment contracts) that reduce temptations or raise their effective prices; temptation bundling; removing temptations from view (which is one way to raise their effective price); and behavior therapy, such as removing "cues" from your environment when fighting an addiction.

• Self-Deployed Cognitive Interventions include: goal setting (which might be undertaken in public or in private); dividing the goal into bite-sized subgoals, and allowing for small wins along the way; explicit planning and implementation intentions (developing a detailed map of how a goal will be achieved); intensive self-monitoring (such as weighing yourself every day); psychological distancing from temptations or from interpersonal problems; mindfulness and cognitive therapy (generally provided in the form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy).

• Other-Deployed Cognitive Interventions (which might not be recognized by the targets) include: descriptive social norms (like energy use by others in your neighborhood); social labeling (which might motivate you to live up to your identity, as a green consumer, say); age-processed renderings or other techniques to make one's own future self more relatable; and fresh-start framing, as with new year's resolutions.

• Other-Deployed Situational Interventions include: hard paternalism (e.g., social security, high sin taxes); microenvironments (healthy food placed at eye level); default settings or active choice mandates; requirements for choices to be made in advance; and planned interruptions (such as a mandated break on a slot machine, say).[Incidentally, as Loewenstein points out, hard paternalism does not bolster self-control but eliminates the need for self-control.]

Fennell (2019), "Personalizing Precommitment"

Lee Anne Fennell, “Personalizing Precommitment.” University of Chicago Law Review 86(2): 433-458, March 2019.

• Achieving long-term goals such as losing weight or writing a book requires the cooperation of many temporal selves of the same individual -- and perhaps the indulgences of some Mr. Hydes will undermine Dr. Jekyll's best-laid schemes. Precommitment can help, and the law might have a role to play in making such precommitments more available.

• Fennell invokes the "scale mismatch" terminology of Drazen Prelec; scale mismatch is when the goal (such as losing weight) is achieved in aggregate terms but the steps (literally?) to achieve the goal are lots of small individual decisions.

• Rigid rules – exercise one hour every day – might work in overcoming these temporal internalities, but such rules might be excessive or so demanding that they are abandoned.

• Perhaps people can fashion their own, less rigid but more sustainable rules? Good choices of “partitions” and “menus” can aid the process. For instance, appropriate serving sizes and types of serving utensils and single-serve packaging: all of these nudges can contribute to achieving a weight-loss goal.

• Segmentation eases metering and monitoring. How much cake did I eat? It might be easier to know the answer when the cake is consumed in segmented units -- I had three cupcakes -- than when I just keep picking at some unsegmented blob o' cake.

• Writing a book might be made manageable by segmenting the task into chapters and sections. But…while smaller chunks are easier to complete, given scale mismatch, they also look less meaningful in terms of progress, and more capable of postponement.

• Instead of segmenting work time, what about segmenting time not spent working – like limiting breaks to ten minutes?

• Monetary issues often can be addressed with precommitments and partitions. Purchasing a home can be a sort of forced saving – but this commitment device can be undone by easily acquired home equity loans. Can programs be provided that allow people to opt into a "no home equity loans" condition? 

• People might try to earmark money for savings by having special accounts or even physical envelopes -- though the commitment can be undone if an emergency arises. In general, setting high savings targets with sub-partitions (so that prematurely opening one savings envelope does not mean that all the others are opened, too) looks like a pretty good strategy. Even precommitting some money to indulgences can aid the larger goal of saving money. Should bank savings accounts come with earmarked sub-accounts that are made salient in web-based representations, say?

• Online menus could be personalized, by removing some excessively tempting items at the consumer’s request. 

• Rigid rules such as “no dessert” prune the menu to two choices: comply or don’t comply: “the reason that they can be so effective – the extreme chunkiness of the choices they present – is also the reason why they often fail” 

• Rules change the effective payoffs: the good choice becomes more automatic, and the wrong choice bears a higher price. 

• Lapses can induce further failures. Ex ante, it often is best to believe that behavior is bundled, that a lapse today will mean a rapid downward spiral. (Fennell calls such notions "behavioral firewalls"; in this case, good behavior today prevents future bad behavior.) Ex post (after a lapse), however, it is best to believe that the lapse was anomalous, that it doesn’t fore-ordain future behavior. Now the firewall changes: future behavior must be sealed off from the lapse.

• As with money set aside for financial indulgences, limited, planned exceptions can be helpful – but perhaps not implementable, perhaps zero tolerance, rigid rules are needed. 

• Receiving an income tax refund can be a form of forced savings or a welcome source of wam – but private firms can offer products that undo the commitment element of tax refunds. The IRS, incidentally, provides a split-refund facility, to allow the funneling of part of a refund into savings.

Damgaard and Nielsen (2018) on Nudgication

Mette Trier Damgaard and Helena Skyt Nielsen, “Nudging in Education.” IZA DP No. 11454, April 2018.

• Education decisions often involve current costs and greatly delayed benefits. Some decisions are made by “agents” – parents and teachers – on behalf of their “principals,” the students. 

• Many education decisions – such as whether to drop out of school or go to college – are not regular, everyday situations where feedback allows people to adapt to something tolerably optimal over time. 

• Can we be confident that education decisions are well-made? Evidence suggests high returns to more education. The list of potential behavioral biases influencing education decisions is long: self-control shortcomings, limited attention, loss aversion, default effects, social norms, underconfidence… Recall John Stuart Mill: "Those who most need to be made wiser and better, usually desire it least, and if they desired it, would be incapable of finding the way to it by their own lights."

• Perhaps people can be nudged in ways that will improve their choices – and improve them from their own point of view. 

• The targets of nudges can be young scholars, their parents, or their teachers. 

• The authors find 122 studies of field implementations of nudges in education. 

• Opt-in v. opt-out text messages to parents: only 7.8% opt-in, but only 3.5% opt out. Further, outcomes (grades, staying in school) improve with the opt-out default. 

• Framing financial aid as a tuition waiver versus a loan: the waivers steer a lot more law school grads to public interest work. Monetary transfers to families can be framed as being for education, and administered through schools. 

• Mixed results have been reported from framing grades as losses (as in Shrader, Wooten, White, et al., “Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion”).

• Trying to take advantage of peer group effects is tricky, and sometimes counterproductive. Social comparison nudges can be both informational and motivational – and they can backfire.

• Intermediate assignments and deadlines seem to often raise grades. 

• Self-imposed specific task-based goals also seem helpful, along with reminders of the goal. Unrealistically high goals are demotivating. 

• Reminders to parents about their children’s education often seem helpful, too – likewise with providing informative updates to parents.

• Information provision about the returns to schooling seems to have some purchase in developing countries.

• “Boosting” skills like grit and goal-setting holds some hope for improved educational outcomes.

• Prizes: “The public can encourage the acquisition of those most essential parts of education by giving small premiums, and little badges of distinction, to the children of the common people who excel in them.” (Adam Smith) But the older the children, the less effective the prize nudge, and (like social comparisons), prizes can crowd out internal motivations. 

• Growth mindset and social belonging nudges seem to work OK…

• Nudging will only overcome a binding constraint for a (small?) subset of students. 

•  In general, the long-term effects of nudgication remain unknown.

Sjåstad and Baumeister (2018) on Planning Aversion

Hallgeir Sjåstad and Roy F. Baumeister, “The Future and the Will: Planning Requires Self-control, and Ego Depletion Leads to Planning Aversion.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 76: 127-141, 2018.

• The authors hypothesize that the willingness to engage in the task of making plans for the future requires self-control; therefore, people who generally have low self-control ("trait" self-control) are less likely to plan, and people who are "ego depleted," who are fatigued ("state" self-control), also will be less likely to plan. (As with many notions in the behavioral sciences, ego depletion is not without its share of controversy.) 

• This article, therefore, adopts the view that willpower draws on a depletable resource, and that when people have depleted that resource through cognitively taxing tasks, they will, in the short term, display reduced willpower (be ego-depleted). In other words, people with higher trait and state self-control will plan more.

• The authors conduct four studies. Study 1 looks at the correlation between trait self-control and planning; Study 2 and Study 3 ask if depletion (low state self-control) reduces planning; and, Study 4 tries to identify the channel through which ego depletion might undermine planning. 

• Study 1 (N=201, Amazon Mechanical Turk, 30 cent payment per participant!) asks individuals questions about the extent of their self-control, their engagement in planning in the past, and their intended planning in the future. Sure enough, high self-control is associated with high past and future planning. Further, there is some evidence that women plan more than men.

• Study 2 is a lab experiment (n=105), where the control (non-depleted) group starts with a relatively easy, 12-minute writing task (avoid the letters x and z) and the depleted group has a 24-minute, difficult task (avoid the letters A and N); this depletion method is used to overcome problems identified in earlier experiments where shorter or less onerous tasks do not do much to distinguish the two groups. Those with the hard writing task report being both more exhausted and less interested (than those with the easy task) in making plans for the next four weeks. The depleted folks are less happy, too, but it doesn’t seem to be mood differences that dissuade the planning.

• Study 3 takes advantage of the possibility that shopping at Ikea tends to makes couples miserable! The participants (N=112) are Ikea shoppers in Norway, with half surveyed pre-shopping, and half surveyed post-shopping. Those who have completed their shopping report making many more recent decisions than the pre-shoppers, as well as being more exhausted. Further, post-shoppers are less willing to plan, though they do not express lower ambitions for the future. (They still want the benefits of planning, it seems, but are less willing to put in the effort.) 

• Study 4 (N=128) picks up on the mechanism connecting ego depletion with planning aversion. Once again, laboratory participants are separated into depletion groups through differentially trying writing tasks. But in this experiment, they are given the opportunity to actually engage in planning, instead of just being asked about their intentions to plan in the future. 

• The participants are asked how hard they like to work, and how hard they think planning would be. Again, the depleted folks avoid planning; further, they express a lessened desire to exert effort to engage in planning, and this altered desire (greater effort avoidance) mediates much of the relationship between depletion and planning: effort avoidance seems to be a major channel connecting depletion to reduced planning.

• "A vicious circle might develop in which failure to plan creates stresses and difficulties, which impose a further drain on limited self-regulatory resources, which in turn makes people all the more reluctant to plan [p. 139]."

Sugden v. Sunstein on Nudging, Round 2: Sunstein's Turn

Cass R. Sunstein, “’Better Off, as Judged by Themselves’: A Comment on Evaluating Nudges.” International Review of Economics 65(1): 1-8, March 2018.

[Round 1 here; Round 3 here]

• In trying to improve wellbeing, individuals’ judgments of their own welfare are a central metric. This metric is complicated, however, if people have different judgments before and after a nudge, say. 

• Sugden argues that two potential interpretations of “as judged by themselves” (AJBT) are flawed, one by applying only to relatively rare self-control issues, and the second by allowing individual preferences to be sacrificed to the whims of nudgers. 

• Sugden's title asks if people really want to be nudged towards healthier living. The empirical answer is “yes.” 

• AJBT is not our method to rule out charges of paternalism, but rather, to limit the coercive element of paternalistic acts – like a GPS, we want to improve “navigability,” so people can better serve their own interests. Nudges are about means, not ends. 

• Reminders (such as text messages) serve people’s pre-nudge preferences -- likewise with information provision, as with calorie counts. Other nudges can change behaviors in a manner that the nudged individual endorses after-the-fact, but not before, such as a mechanism to dissuade texting while driving. 

• With self-control problems (akrasia), nudges might help to bolster Dr. Jekyll (planner) at Mr. Hyde’s (doer) expense. Sunstein asked folks online if they had a self-control problem: the majority said yes. And programs to ends addictions are quite popular. 

• Yes, preferences can be formed in the process of elicitation; for instance, people might stick with, and endorse, any of various default settings. Then nudgers are forming preferences, but AJBT limits what nudgers can do. 

• To summarize, some nudges serve ex ante preferences when they increase navigability; some help with (widespread!) self-control shortcomings; and some contribute to preference formation, but in a manner that still respects after-the-fact preferences.

Monterosso and Ainslie (2007) on Recovery from Addiction

John Monterosso and George Ainslie, “The Behavioral Economics of Will in Recovery from Addiction.” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 90(Supplement 1): S100-S111, September 2007.

• Addicts have severe self-control issues with respect to the object of their ardor.

• The goal of this article is to suggest that behavioral economics ideas are fruitful not only in thinking about the process of building an addiction, but also in understanding recoveries from addiction.

• Dynamic inconsistency seems to be tied up in addiction: addicts often express (quite credibly) desires to quit or cut down, but do not follow through on those desires.

• But dynamic inconsistency might also suggest pathways out of addiction – and many treatment programs look to develop these pathways, which involve internal, not external, commitment devices (“private side-betting”).

• Drug use would not be a problem if the pain arose immediately, and the gratification arrived after a delay.

• “Hyperbolic discounting implies that the increase in valuation that occurs when moving a fixed unit of time closer to an expected outcome is proportionately greater the closer one is to that outcome. Think of the experience of waiting for an additional day for an important event that is a year off, versus for one that is imminent [p. 3].”

• Hyperbolic discounting sets one up for dynamic inconsistency of the immediate gratification variety; further, addicts tend to display higher discount rates than non-addicted people (though causality might go both ways). How is it that people with this sort of discounting ever recover, and become dynamically consistent with respect to their intentions to indulge in drugs, say?

• A hyperbolic discounter has a multitude of different (time-based) “interests” – it is Jekyll and Hyde and the rest of the London population, too.

• How does one “interest” protect itself against foreseeable future “interests”? One approach is to make the tempting act unavailable, or raise its cost – perhaps by announcing to your social circle that you are on a diet, for instance, or are having a Dryuary. Or maybe you can deflect your attention (subconsciously) from activities that lead to your problem activity, or develop a repugnance towards them.

• These approaches are not really about willpower; rather, they signal a sophisticated understanding of your own future lack of willpower. And yet many treatment programs harp on building willpower.

• Another method to bolster willpower is a form of mental accounting: you bundle current choices with a string of future choices. In this way, a choice to drink today isn’t just about drinking or not drinking today: a choice to drink means that you will make a similar choice in future days – and that prospect might be sufficiently harrowing to keep you from drinking today.

• Experiments show that humans and non-human animals do choose less impulsively when they know that the current choice will bind similar choices down the road.

• What if you knew that having a drink today would have no effect on your future behavior, that you were pre-determined to drink every future day? What if you were told that you were pre-determined to never drink again, whether or not you drink today? It looks like current abstention is bolstered by the notion that it can influence future choices! But people do abstain, so they must see a link between today’s choice and future choices.

• Bundling can arise when someone sees that “I’ll smoke today and quit tomorrow” will also apply tomorrow, ad infinitum. Then, the actual choices today are “I’ll smoke today and forever” or “I’ll stop today and not relapse.” The personal “rule” becomes “never smoke.”

• The situation is like an intrapersonal repeated prisoners’ dilemma: the only reason you choose to “cooperate” today is if you can thereby make it more likely that your future selves also will choose to cooperate.

• But recall: in iterated prisoners’ dilemmas, it is hard to restore cooperation after a single defection. Likewise, a single lapse from abstinence by a recovering addict can lead to a binge. This sort of behavior looks like it is better described by the “bundling” model or willpower, not a story of binding commitments.

• Why would an addict fall off the wagon?: “[T]o the extent that her abstinence is based on a bundling effect, the primary danger comes from factors that reduce her differential expectation of future abstinence as a function of current abstinence [p. 9].”

• This reduction of perceived danger can derive from overconfidence, underconfidence, or rationalization.

• Twelve-step programs emphasize that willpower is unreliable, yet their adherents seem to do better (than those in other treatment forms) in overcoming cravings.

• Twelve-step treatments seem to respond to the threats created by overconfidence, underconfidence, and rationalization. How? (1) powerlessness and its related credos; (2) the focus on abstinence and the permanence of addiction; and (3) the adoption of doable goals, such as “one day at a time,” while tracking the abstinence streak.

• “When a person structures her choices with personal rules she can be expected to express different preferences than she would if she were making a choice just on the basis of its own merits, and these preferences are apt to differ as well among categories of reward, according to their temporal distribution, emotional relevance, dangerousness, impulse control history, and doubtless many other factors [p. 12].” 

• There is a possibility for a deleterious positive feedback loop, where proximity to the temptation good (or a cue) increases the probability of consumption which increases appetite which leads to increased probability of consumption…

Banker et al. (2017) on Sticky Anchors

Sachin Banker, Sarah E. Ainsworth, Roy F. Baumeister, Dan Ariely, and Kathleen D. Voh, “The Sticky Anchor Hypothesis: Ego Depletion Increases Susceptibility to Situational Cues.” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 30(5): 1027-1040, December 2017 [pdf here].

• “Ego Depletion”: Exerting self-control undermines self-control in slightly later situations. 

• Is ego depletion a thing? Maybe, maybe not (pdf here); like many behavioral concepts (for example, grit [pdf here]), ego depletion has its detractors. 

• In a dictator game-type setting, does less altruistic behavior (from ego depletion) come about because self-controls over selfishness are undermined, or because people are more inclined to follow salient situational cues? This latter possibility is the sticky anchor hypothesis: depleted people are more suggestible or manipulable. 

• Some dictator game experiments show that depleted people do indeed keep more of the monetary stake for themselves. 

• Are the dictator game findings due to unleashed selfishness or to sticking with the default? To test between the two mechanisms, the authors switch the default: they conduct reverse dictator games. The other (anonymous) party is endowed with the full stake, but you, as the dictator, can choose to take some or all of it. The default, now, is the unselfish setting, so if depleted people have a hard time overcoming defaults, they will leave more of the cash with the other player (relative to the amount left by undepleted folks). Alternatively, if depletion makes you selfish, depleted folks will take more of the endowment from the other player. 

• The depletion manipulation (in Experiment 1, with overall N=54) involves writing some text without using the letters A or N. (Those in the “undepleted” camp write without using the letters X and Z. Incidentally, this reminds me of the singular novel Ella Minnow Pea.) That is, it is attention control that is the source of ego depletion within this experiment.

• On average, those in the depleted condition take less money for themselves ($2.62) than do those in the undepleted condition ($3.69). So, ego depletion does not seem to increase selfishness; rather, it makes it harder to overcome the influence of environmental cues: defaults become more sticky. Notice that neither group is particularly generous. 

• But maybe the attention control manipulation means that the depleted also feel like failures, because they perform poorly at writing without A’s or N’s: they don’t deserve the money in the reverse dictator game. Vicarious depletion [pdf here] to the rescue! A waiter is really hungry…(alternatively, not so hungry…) 

• Once again, the depleted folks (that is, the now vicariously depleted folks, who feel no shame) stick more closely to the anchor: it doesn’t seem to be a lack of desert that causes them to take less money (or fewer lottery tickets) for themselves. 

• But maybe it isn’t general environmental cues at work, maybe it is just our old friend, the status quo effect. So now (Experiment 3) the authors offer either a high or a low anchor before subjects decide how much money to take. Note that the default (the anonymous other gets all the cash) is unchanged, but there is a new situational cue, the anchor. (Subjects are first asked whether they want to take more or less than the anchor; only then are they asked for the precise amount they want to take.) Will depleted people respond to the anchor (more than non-depleted people do), or just to the default? 

• Both depleted and non-depleted subjects respond to the anchor. But the depleted respond more, particularly in the low-anchor treatment. The influence of environmental cues, and not the status quo per se, is what leads to different behavior by depleted folk relative to the undepleted.

Bhattacharya, Garber, and Goldhaber-Fiebert (2015) on Exercise Nudges

Jay Bhattacharya, Alan M. Garber, and Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, “Nudges in Exercise Commitment Contracts: A Randomized Trial.” NBER Working Paper 21406, July 2015.

• The authors implement a natural field experiment: people who browse their way to stickK.com looking to sign a contract that requires them to exercise regularly are randomized into one of three conditions. 

• The three conditions differ based upon the default length of the exercise commitment contract; the default (which is easy to override) can be 8 weeks, 12 weeks, or 20 weeks. More than 8,000 people take part in the experiment (unbeknownst to them, it seems), though some of the analysis relates to approximately 3,000 subjects for whom a longer period of data is available. 

• A nudge towards longer contract durations succeeds; that is, a 20-week default setting leads to longer duration actual contracts than do the shorter default terms. More than one-in-five contractors choose to put up monetary stakes – they lose money if they fail to exercise to the terms of the contract – that average $23 per week. 

• Not only does the 20-week nudge result in longer duration contracts, it induces more weeks of exercise – though the average weeks of successful exercise are less than half of the specified durations. 

• About 6% of the sample enters into a second commitment contract after the expiration of their earlier contract. The data suggest that people would be much more likely to sign a second exercise commitment contract if they were placed into a long (more than 18 weeks) initial commitment contract, as if the longer duration helps cement an exercise habit. 

• Following the reporting of their empirical results, the authors develop a parallel theoretical model. The model offers a four-period version of a quasi-hyperbolic utility function; the four periods allow for a pre-contract period and, later, the option of signing a second contract. 

• The subjects are assumed to be present biased and sophisticated about their bias – after all, the subjects are interested in committing to exercise. Exercise in the model is a habit-forming good, but one involving current costs along with future benefits. Without commitment, present-biased people will choose to exercise too little, from the point of view of their own long-run (non-present-biased) preferences. 

• Small changes in the depreciation of exercise “capital” (which underpins the habit-forming nature of exercise) lead to large changes in optimal exercise choices. In contrast, even sizable changes in the degree of present bias have little impact on optimal exercise. 

• The authors offer a definition of a nudge that incorporates asymmetric or libertarian paternalism: a nudge in a given period t cannot decrease the person’s period t utility by very much. (But a nudge surely will decrease that utility, that is, it cannot make the period t person better off.) And though nudges must be small in this sense, they nevertheless can have a large effect on exercise choices, in particular, by helping to promote an exercise habit. A large nudge, however, can lead to so much present exercise that in future periods, exercise is eliminated, as the subject finds it optimal to rest on his or her exercise laurels. 

• Are sophisticated but present-biased people better off with a nudge? By definition, here, the person in the nudged period is not better off. Future selves can be helped or harmed, however – the overall welfare effects of nudges for a heterogeneous population are ambiguous.

Coelho do Vale, Pieters, and Zeelenberg (2016) on "The Benefits of Behaving Badly"

Rita Coelho do Vale, Rik Pieters, and Marcel Zeelenberg, “The Benefits of Behaving Badly on Occasion: Successful Regulation by Planned Hedonic Deviations.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 26(1): 17-28, January, 2016.

• Is abstinence or some other zero-tolerance regimen the best approach to avoid succumbing to temptation? The authors argue that planned deviations from the path of righteousness are helpful in reaching long-term goals. 

• Planned lapses, as it were, can bolster one’s motivation to persist in pursuing the long-term goal; improve the emotional experience of the regimen; and, help to sustain willpower. 

• In the absence of planned deviations, any lapse might be interpreted as a failure, and result in complete rejection of the goal (due to its revealed hopelessness). Planned deviations, alternatively, are seen as prizes for progress, not as markers of failure. 

• The studies reported here concern weight loss. The first study (n about 50) takes place at a computer, and involves role-playing a diet. There are two (virtual) diets, each averaging 1500 calories per day. But one diet maintains a limit of 1500 calories day after day, while the second involves 1300 calories/day until the seventh day, when 2700 calories are available. The second part of this experiment has subjects answer questions after opening a box containing snack foods. How many ways can they think of to prevent themselves from falling into temptation? Those who simulate the intermittent diet come up with more distractions; they also feel happier. 

• The second study (n=36) involves actual 14-day diets, one of the straight-striving variety and one of the intermittent type. The subjects keep diaries, and their motivation to continue the diet is tracked. Straight-strivers tend to be more demotivated by deviations from their diet than are the intermittent dieters, and other metrics seem to favor the intermittent approach, too. Nor is there any loss in efficacy of the diet from the intermittent approach. 

• The third study is a web-based survey of university-affiliated personnel (n=64) who are striving towards some long-term goal, such as weight loss. The two conditions involve imagining either a (1) straight or (2) intermittent plan to achieve their goal. Those in the intermittent condition express higher motivation to pursue their goal.

Shakespeare on Women Who Suspect that it is in their Long-Term Interest to Play Coy, But…

Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face,

Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek

For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night

Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny

What I have spoke: but farewell compliment!

(Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, Lines 934-938)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

At mine unworthiness that dare not offer

What I desire to give, and much less take

What I shall die to want. But this is trifling;

And all the more it seeks to hide itself,

The bigger bulk it shows. Hence, bashful cunning!

And prompt me, plain and holy innocence!

I am your wife, if you will marry me;

(The Tempest, Act 3, Scene 1, Lines 1370-1376)

Shakespeare on Self-Control in the Face of Temptation

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.

(Sonnet XCIV)

Milkman, Minson, and Volpp (2014) on Temptation Bundling

Katherine L. Milkman, Julia A. Minson, and Kevin G. M. Volpp, “Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym: An Evaluation of Temptation Bundling.” Management Science 60(2): 283-299, 2014.

• Frequently our willpower to engage in activities we know we should engage in – like exercise – proves wanting. Frequently our willpower to resist alluring activities – like devoting a lot of time to reading a fun novel – also proves wanting. 

• Temptation bundling to the rescue! The idea is only to engage in the tempting activity while you are investing in the desirable but oft-neglected activity: you can only read (or listen to) the compelling novel while you are exercising. 

• The potential benefits of bundling go beyond nudging you to exercise as much as you want to anyway. Rather, the bundling can add to your welfare through two further channels. First, the exercise itself becomes less onerous. Second, the consumption of the tempting good need no longer be followed by guilt attached to squandering time on trifling indulgences. 

• The analysis involves a field experiment at an almost unnamed university. The subjects are 226 university-affiliates with gym memberships who own an iPod with free memory. The subjects are randomly allocated to three treatments. In the full treatment, an addictive novel (such as The Hunger Games) is loaded onto a loaned iPod (one iPod per subject), and the iPod is stored at the relevant gym – so the full treatment group must go to the gym (and, presumably, exercise,) if they want to listen to their novel on that iPod. The intermediate treatment group receives an addictive novel on their own iPod, and is encouraged to only allow themselves to listen to the novel while exercising. The control group is encouraged to exercise and receives a $25 bookshop gift-card that could be used to acquire a tempting e-novel. 

• Each participant undergoes an intake process, with e-novels selected by the non-controls, along with 30 minutes of exercise undertaken while listening to the novel, followed by rating how enjoyable the exercise proved. Everyone agrees not to discuss the experiment with others, and off they go, for the next nine weeks. 

• The treatment conditions lead to more exercise – but only for the first seven weeks (pre-Thanksgiving). In these seven weeks, gym visits average 7.8, 6.5, and 6.1 across the conditions. 

• The full treatment works better for those who report they like the initial workout experience, and for those who are most busy. 

• A concluding outtake visit allows estimates of willingness-to-pay for one month of a novel/exercise commitment device like that provided in the full treatment. About 60% of subjects indicate a positive willingness-to-pay for the commitment. 

• Perhaps the bundled temptation could be made more alluring, such as Netflix-style subscriptions that only work when you are on an exercise machine. Will the private sector create these?

Sadoff, Samek, and Sprenger (2015) on Food-Related Time Inconsistency

Sally Sadoff, Anya Samek, and Charles Sprenger, “Dynamic Inconsistency in Food Choice: Experimental Evidence from a Food Desert.” January, 2015 [pdf].

• The authors present the results of a natural field experiment: the subjects did not know at the time that they were participating in an experiment. 

• The subjects receive $10 in a special budget each week for two weeks; they can buy ten units of food each week, as each unit costs $1. There are 20 different food items available, half of which are healthy, and half of which are unhealthy. The selected food items are delivered to the subjects’ homes. 

• At the onset, before selection or delivery, the more than 200 subjects rate how much they like the 20 food items. Then they choose their items for the first week’s delivery. 

• At the time of delivery of the ten selected items, the subjects are given a surprise presentation of four additional goods, which can be exchanged on a one-for-one basis with any of the delivered items; so, participants have an opportunity to partly change their minds. The four additional items are foods they rated highly, two healthy, two unhealthy, and include at least one item of each type that was not in the pre-arranged bundle. 

• The idea is that any exchanges made at the time of delivery are evidence of time inconsistency; the researchers focus on exchanges that alter the healthy-unhealthy mix: 21% (46 of 218) of the subjects show such an inconsistency, and 44 of those 46 move to a less healthy mix. 

• In the second week, one day before delivery, subjects are asked if they would again like the extra four items brought for a potential exchange (with their new, pre-arranged bundle). One-third of the subjects say “no thanks,” that is, they choose to commit to not being offered a future opportunity to exchange. 

• People who are dynamically consistent in week 1 are more likely (than are the dynamically inconsistent) to say "no thanks" to the offer to have the extra items available. That is, those subjects who successfully fight temptation in week 1 are those who make most intensive use of the commitment device that eliminates temptation. Further, those who prefer not to have the option to change tend to choose relatively healthy bundles in the first instance. 

• The theoretical underpinning of Sadoff et al. (2015) derives from articles by Gul and Pesendorfer, and by Fudenberg and Levine. In these models, the mere existence of a tempting good, even if it is not chosen, in a sense alters a consumer’s reference point in such a way that the value of consuming other goods is somewhat compromised by the tempting option. People in this situation, and who understand it, will want to restrict their options, even though they are eliminating options that they know they will not choose in any event. 

• In the O’Donoghue and Rabin (2003) approach (as described here), alternatively, it is only sophisticated, present-biased consumers who know that they would succumb to temptation who find it worthwhile to restrict their future options. 

• The analysis suggests that encouraging people to make their food choices well in advance of consumption might help spur the consumption of relatively healthy foods. (Note that the grocery deliveries in the experiment generally are not consumed right away, either, and hence the additional items might not be all that tempting. Gains to precommitment might be even larger in the face of more intense temptation.)