The concept of delayed gratification is that we succeed in life when we put off what’s immediately most pleasing and sacrifice for a better tomorrow. The Marshmallow Experiment has shown those who learn to master the habit of delayed gratification are the ones who increase their chances for a more productive and enjoyable life.
Makes sense, right?
Then why is it that we sometimes make self-defeating choices like the fellow above? Why can some people easily delay gratification while others have absolutely no self-control?
Many economists (and laymen like me too) consider the inability to delay gratification use of normal reasoning processes, but lack of willpower. We believe that we are cognitively in control of our decisions, whether they are rational or irrational.
However, fairly-recent collaborations between both neuroscientists and economists (Neuroeconomics) have found that two separate portions of the brain are activated when presented with a choice of immediate-reward or delayed-reward. These two areas of the brain appear to compete for control over behavior when a person attempts to balance near-term rewards with long-term goals.
According to the pioneers in this field:
Data from neuroscience experiments provide a potential explanation for these observations: short-run decisions engage different brain systems from long-run decisions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Samuel McClure, George Loewenstein, Jonathan D. Cohen, and I have shown that decisions that involve at least some short-run tradeoffs recruit both analytic and emotional brain systems, whereas decisions that only involve long-run tradeoffs primarily recruit analytic brain systems.(1) These findings suggest that people pursue instant gratification because the emotional brain system - the limbic system - values immediate rewards but only weakly responds to delayed rewards.
Also, according to the same authors:
The extent of collaboration and competition between cognitive and affective systems, and the outcome of conflict when it occurs, depends critically on the intensity of affect (Loewenstein 1996; Loewenstein and Lerner 2003). At low levels of intensity, affect appears to play a largely “advisory” role. At intermediate levels of intensity, people begin to become conscious of conflicts between cognitive and affective inputs. Finally, at even greater levels of intensity, affect can be so powerful as to virtually preclude decision making. No one “decides” to fall asleep at the wheel, but many people do. Under the influence of intense affective motivation, people often report themselves as being “out of control” or “acting against their own self-interest” (Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice 1994; Stephen Hoch and Loewenstein 1991; Loewenstein 1996). As Rita Carter writes, “where thought conflicts with emotion, the latter is designed by the neural circuitry in our brains to win” (1999).
“Our results help explain how and why a wide range of situations that produce emotional reactions, such as the sight, touch or smell of a desirable object, often cause people to take impulsive actions that they later regret,” Loewenstein said. Such psychological cues are known to trigger dopamine-related circuits in the brain similar to the ones that responded to immediate rewards in the current study. As described in Randall Parker’s FuturePundit, excitation of the dopaminergic neurons “make us do what we ought not do”.
Hmm.. maybe we don’t have as much control over our decisions as we think.
Accordingly, these findings not only shed light on impulsive decision-making, but they may also aid the understanding of neuropathologies, such as drug addiction and gambling that are characterized by a decreased ability to wait for a large reward.
Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain, the first handbook of Neuroeconomics, is being published for release in September 2008.
Related Links:
What is Neuroeconomics?
Natural Rationality Blog
Neuroeconomics at Caltech
Why Logic Often Takes A Backseat
Paths to Happiness Survey
Post a Comment