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A 2012 study at the University of Rochester altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: one group was given a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted (the unreliable tester group), and the second group had a fulfilled promise before their marshmallow test (the reliable tester group). The reliable tester group waited up to four times longer (12 min) than the unreliable tester group for the second marshmallow to appear.[6][12] The authors argue that this calls into question the original interpretation of self-control as the critical factor in children's performance, since self control should predict an inability to wait, not strategic waiting when it makes sense. The authors suggest that the correlations between marshmallow performance and later life success may therefore be confounded, with successful children being raised in reliable situations.
Keep It Real wrote:I personally struggle with this in many respects - procrastinating writing my novel in favour of smoking a cigarette, or having a lie-in instead.
What strategies do people employ to ensure delayed gratification? Hard work is a difficult thing to come to terms with when there's no immediate pressure - although one knows the rewards are substantial. Any thoughts?
Mr.Samsa wrote:
The long and short of it is that it's easy to fall in to habits like the ones you describe because they are "easy" rewards. The key is to restructuring many aspects of your life so that you are less likely to choose the "easy" reward and, to be honest, simply being aware that you are choosing the easy reward can sometimes be enough to make a good start (which is what Imza's suggestion is about).
Imza wrote:One of these days I'm going to have to figure out where you get the motivation to so elegantly and thoroughly cover these topics on online forums
Imza wrote:Glad to see you back Samsa!
Mr.Samsa wrote:
Also, did you see the recent Simon Baron-Cohen controversy? I blogged about it but it really blew up. He suggested that radical behaviorism needs to be retired from science, based on the reasoning that orca are horribly mistreated as Sea World...
Imza wrote:
I did, it was pretty shocking coming from Simon considering his area of focus is AUTISM! I mean talk about some serious cognitive dissonance there, I wonder if he rejects ABA and other behavioral treatments for it too. I've worked with many neuro-cognitive psychologists and even though they have serious reservations about RD and ABA, they recognize it's effectiveness and utility in science and don't deny the facts.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Imza wrote:
I did, it was pretty shocking coming from Simon considering his area of focus is AUTISM! I mean talk about some serious cognitive dissonance there, I wonder if he rejects ABA and other behavioral treatments for it too. I've worked with many neuro-cognitive psychologists and even though they have serious reservations about RD and ABA, they recognize it's effectiveness and utility in science and don't deny the facts.
I honestly just think that he had no idea what he was talking about or what radical behaviorism is.
Mr.Samsa wrote:One of the main principles underlying choice is known as "the matching law". Basically it tells us that people more or less attempt to allocate choices in accordance with the relative value of the rewards on offer. Importantly, Howard Rachlin and Leonard Green found that when we plot self-control as a result of the matching law, we predict something called "preference reversal".
Preference reversal is in fact a problem that economists had with their understanding of behavior as they had previously assumed that people were "rational agents"; that is, they would choose the larger reward over the smaller one and time shouldn't affect this. However, the matching law tells us that as delay decreases, the value assigned to each option should change on an exponential curve. As such, the relative value of each option switches.
To tie this back into your original question, what this means is that from a [temporal] distance we can make the more rational decision. If, continuing the example I give above, we change the scenario to offering someone $50 in a year or $100 in a year and one month, then people will obviously choose the latter option. But as the time gets closer, if we give them the option to change their minds people can start to experience preference reversal.
George Ainslie (I think?) suggested that we think of self-control like judging the relative size of two buildings, one behind the other. From a distance we would clearly be able to see which building was bigger, but as we walk closer towards the building it becomes harder to see over the top of the building in front. In terms of self-control, as delay decreases it becomes harder to choose otherwise, so even though the evening before we can see that we really should go for a 6am jog to work off some of the holiday weight we've gained, when the alarm goes off the next morning we will tend to hit the snooze button.
Beatsong wrote:Just one question here: Isn't the relative value of opposing choices changed as they get closer, not just because they're closer but because they're more subject to the emotions one is feeling at the time? (Maybe this is even part of what you meant, I don't know).
Value is inextricably tied to emotion. Somebody who feels a strong emotional desire for comfort food will place more value in a chocolate bar than somebody who doesn't. Similarly, either of those individuals will place a higher value in the chocolate bar (and thus a lower relative value in forgoing it) at a moment in their life when that emotion is strong than when it is weak or non-existent.
Surely this is why choices that seem obvious and rational from a distance get changed as the moment for enacting the choice approaches. It's easy to decide I'll go to the gym tomorrow after work, because I'm not currently feeling the combination of tiredness, desire to stay warm inside etc. that I'm going to be feeling tomorrow after work.
Beatsong wrote:… I know when I was a young musician I could avoid any gratification at all, for as long as I needed to, to achieve whatever long term project I was working on. But as I got older and life experience eroded my confidence, that ability got eroded accordingly.
NoFreeWill wrote:I think the problem that one can't be sure that the gratification will ever arrive.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Beatsong wrote:Just one question here: Isn't the relative value of opposing choices changed as they get closer, not just because they're closer but because they're more subject to the emotions one is feeling at the time? (Maybe this is even part of what you meant, I don't know).
Value is inextricably tied to emotion. Somebody who feels a strong emotional desire for comfort food will place more value in a chocolate bar than somebody who doesn't. Similarly, either of those individuals will place a higher value in the chocolate bar (and thus a lower relative value in forgoing it) at a moment in their life when that emotion is strong than when it is weak or non-existent.
Surely this is why choices that seem obvious and rational from a distance get changed as the moment for enacting the choice approaches. It's easy to decide I'll go to the gym tomorrow after work, because I'm not currently feeling the combination of tiredness, desire to stay warm inside etc. that I'm going to be feeling tomorrow after work.
I think most people in the field would argue that what you're describing is simply reinforcement value; so as emotional desire increases for a comfort food then it's reinforcement value will increase (i.e. it's more likely to increase the probability of you choosing it).
I'm not sure if researchers have found any need to explicitly include emotion into the equations at this point, but I think it's probably just a case of looking at the same problem from different levels of analysis. So things like cognitive processes and emotions would be higher order processes composed of the lower order processes described in things like the matching law, if that makes sense.
Beatsong wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:I think most people in the field would argue that what you're describing is simply reinforcement value; so as emotional desire increases for a comfort food then it's reinforcement value will increase (i.e. it's more likely to increase the probability of you choosing it).
How is reinforcement value different from "value" as we're talking about it generally?
Beatsong wrote:I'm not sure if researchers have found any need to explicitly include emotion into the equations at this point, but I think it's probably just a case of looking at the same problem from different levels of analysis. So things like cognitive processes and emotions would be higher order processes composed of the lower order processes described in things like the matching law, if that makes sense.
I don't think I understand what you mean.
On the necessity of including emotion in the equation, I'm pretty sure that could be shown by demonstrating that the effect of pure time is not regular and predictable, and that the emotional situation is the variable that changes it.
Take the following two scenarios for example, identical in terms of time but different in terms of emotion:
1. On Thursday at 5.00 PM, I make a solemn vow that I will start going back to the gym to get fit, starting as soon as I get home from work on Friday at 5.00 PM.
2. On Friday at 5.00 PM, I make a solemn vow that I will start going back to the gym to get fit, starting on Saturday at 5.00 PM.
The difference between the long term and short term appraisal of values is 24 hours in both cases. But in the first case, the short term decision is made when I'm knackered after a long working week, everyone else in my family is winding down and relaxing etc. In the second case, the short term decision is made on my day off when I am refreshed and relaxed, and have had a lie in and some time to chill out first.
I think I'd be much more likely to fulfill my vow in the second case than the first, but the time element you describe can't account for that. So there must be another variable as well, which I'd suggest is my emotional state at the time.
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