Cognitively Yours 1.20

 

Raja R, Author

"Understanding the role of willpower is likely to be important for developing effective treatments for addiction and in helping guide people toward making healthy choices"

A few years ago, I was having a conversation with Head of a financial institution. He was narrating to me about his investment experience. He remarked that his best investment as far as returns was one which he invested two decades before, which he lost track of as he misplaced the statement of account. He was able to lay his hands on the document two decades later and to his surprise found that it has yielded great returns. He remarked that he would not have benefited had he tracked the investment regularly, as he would have redeemed much earlier.

This reminded me of a study conducted among the respondents in Chile, examined the roles of financial literacy and impatience on retirement saving and investment behaviour. It was found that the impatience measure strongly predicts respondents’ self-reported retirement saving and health investments. Financial literacy is also associated with more retirement saving, but it is less closely associated with sensitivity to framing of investment information. More than the financial literacy, impatience and craving for instant gratification affected the retirement savings.

In his book “Nudge”, Thaler mentions hosting a dinner for some guests and put out a large bowl of cashew nuts to nibble on. Within a few minutes it became clear that the bowl of nuts was going to be consumed in its entirety, and that the guests might lack sufficient appetite to enjoy all the food that was to follow. Leaping into action, Thaler grabbed the bowl of nuts, removed the bowl to the kitchen, where it was put out of sight. When he returned, the guests thanked him for removing the nuts. Before Thaler removed the nuts the group had the choice of whether to eat the nuts or not—now they didn’t.

Just before Thaler removed the nuts, the dinner guests had three options: eat a few nuts; eat all the nuts; and eat no more nuts. Their first choice would be to eat just a few more nuts, followed by eating no more nuts. The worst option was finishing the bowl, since that would ruin dinner. Had the nuts remained on the table, the group would have finished the bowl, thereby reaching their least favorite option. The group is said to display behavior that is dynamically inconsistent. Initially people prefer A to B, but they later choose B over A. Most people realize that temptation exists, and they take steps to overcome it.

At its essence, willpower is the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals, and there are good reasons to do so. University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth, PhD, and Martin Seligman, PhD, explored self-control in eighth graders over the course of a school year. The researchers first gauged the students’ self-discipline (their term for self-control) by having teachers, parents and the students’ complete questionnaires. They also gave students a task in which they had the option of receiving $1 immediately or waiting a week to receive $2. They found students who ranked high on self-discipline had better grades, better school attendance and higher standardized-test scores, and were more likely to be admitted to a competitive high school program. Self-discipline, the researchers found, was more important than IQ in predicting academic success.

Delaying Gratification

More than 40 years ago, Walter Mischel, PhD, a psychologist now at Columbia University, explored self-control in children with a simple but effective test. His experiments using the “marshmallow test” as it came to be known, laid the groundwork for the modern study of self-control. Mischel and his colleagues presented a preschooler with a plate of treats such as marshmallows. The child was then told that the researcher had to leave the room for a few minutes, but not before giving the child a simple choice: If the child waited until the researcher returned, she could have two marshmallows.

If the child simply couldn’t wait, she could ring a bell and the researcher would come back immediately, but she would only be allowed one marshmallow. In children, as well as adults, willpower can be thought of as a basic ability to delay gratification. Preschoolers with good self-control sacrifice the immediate pleasure of a chewy marshmallow in order to indulge in two marshmallows at some later point. Ex-smokers forfeit the enjoyment of a cigarette in order to experience good health and avoid an increased risk of lung cancer in the future. Shoppers resist splurging at the mall so they can save for a comfortable retirement. And so on.

Some experts liken willpower to a muscle that can get fatigued from overuse. Some of the earliest evidence of this effect came from the lab of Roy Baumeister. In one early study, he brought subjects into a room filled with the aroma of fresh-baked cookies. The table before them held a plate of the cookies and a bowl of radishes. Some subjects were asked to sample the cookies, while others were asked to eat the radishes. Afterward, they were given 30 minutes to complete a difficult geometric puzzle. Baumeister and his colleagues found that people who ate radishes (and resisted the enticing cookies) gave up on the puzzle after about 8 minutes, while the lucky cookie-eaters persevered for nearly 19 minutes, on average. Drawing on willpower to resist the cookies, it seemed, drained the subjects’ self-control for subsequent situations.

Since that work was published in 1998, numerous studies have built a case for willpower depletion, or ego depletion, as some experts call it. In one example, volunteers who were asked to suppress their feelings as they viewed an emotional movie gave up sooner on a test of physical stamina than did volunteers who watched the film and reacted normally. In another, people who actively suppressed certain thoughts were less able to stifle their laughter in a follow-up test designed to make them giggle. Understanding the role of willpower is likely to be important for developing effective treatments for addiction and in helping guide people toward making healthy choices, such as eating well, exercising and avoiding illicit substances.

Research on willpower offers suggestions for sticking with healthy behaviours. The lessons are:

First lesson, know your limits

Your supply of willpower is limited and you use the same for many different things, without your realisation. The willpower you expended on each of trivial and unrelated events depletes how much you have left for others, especially the important and more critical decisions. What matters is the exertion and not necessarily the outcome. If you struggle with the temptation and still give in, you’re still depleted as you have struggled. The more tiring decisions are the ones that seem tough to you even though they may be perceived as obvious by others. Your rational self should be fully convinced to invest today on a correction in the markets, but it can deplete you to pass up for postponing the investment for the future, in search of more correction in the market.

Watch for symptoms

There is no obvious “feeling” or symptoms for depletion. You have to observe yourself for subtle, easily misinterpreted signs. Are you more than usually reluctant to decide on even simple things? Do you find it difficult to exert yourself mentally or physically? Then it is more likely that you are depleted. Then frustrations will bother you more than usual. When you are depleted, you are liable to make mistakes and you will tend to favour options with short-term gains and delayed costs. Try to assign extra weight to long-range consequences of the decisions. It is wise to articulate and put in writing your reasons for your decision and how they make sense, lest you succumb to irrational biases and lazy short-cuts.

Pick Your battles

It is very difficult to control or even predict the stresses that come into your life. But, you can choose the calm periods, or at least the peaceful moments, to make a crucial decision. Decision on investments, choosing a healthy diet are best done when you can allocate much of your willpower to the decision making.

Make a to-do list or at least a to-don’t list

Once you make a specific plan, your unconscious will be mollified. You need to at least plan the specific next step to take; what to do, how to do. Having a not to do list - what to avoid will also help, as we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.

This is similar to apophatic theology (via negativa or Neti of Indian philosophy) - negative theology as against cataphatic theology - positive theology defined by positive statements. 

Beware of the planning fallacy

The planning fallacy - cost and time overrun can affect everyone, but it takes a special toll on procrastinators who expect to get the job done in one concentrated burst of effort at the last minute. This happens when investors postpone their investment for savings tax, till the deadline and realise that time is not enough to take a well-informed decision and paucity of time makes them take a sub-optimal decision.

Don’t forget the basics

As you start working towards your goal, your brain will automatically economize on willpower expenditures in other ways. When you strive to take a decision on savings for tax, focus also on your asset allocation and how this tax savings investment adds to your asset allocation, lest be carried away only by tax savings feature.

The power of positive procrastination

Procrastination is usually a vice, but very occasionally there is such a thing as positive procrastination. You can avoid eating a chocolate by telling that you would defer eating it. A deferment strategy works better than trying to deny altogether. “The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work is simple. The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment”- Benchley. Positive procrastination typically is avoiding one task by doing something else and rarely sitting doing nothing at all.

Keep Track

Monitoring is crucial for any kind of plan you make. It can even work if you don’t make a plan at all. Keeping a check on your weight or tracking your investments and recording it will help you to take corrective action. Monitoring helps you to improve your long-term planning.

To sum up, preserving willpower and self-control are very much essential for taking decisions correctly. Many use various methods to maintain self-control. Some outsourced the job to God. Others outsource self-control to friends, smart phones, websites that monitor behaviour and enforce bets etc. Self-control is essential for savouring your time on earth and sharing joy with fellow human beings. People with stronger willpower are more altruistic. Inner discipline leads to outer kindness.

manaḥ-prasādaḥ saumyatvaṁ maunam ātma-vinigrahaḥ

bhāva-sanśhuddhir ity etat tapo mānasam uchyate

                                                                - Bhagavad Gita

Meaning,

Serenity of thought, gentleness, silence, self-control, and purity of purpose—all these are declared as the austerity of the mind.

References: Willpower - Rediscovering our greatest strength by Roy F Baumeister, The Nudge by Richard Thaler