HOWTO: Change your behavior

Time-inconsistent Preferences and Consumer Self-Control

Abstract Why do consumers sometimes act against their own better judgment, engaging in behavior that is often regretted after the fact and that would have been rejected with adequate forethought? More generally, how do consumers attempt to maintain self-control in the face of time-inconsistent preferences? This article addresses consumer impatience by developing a decision-theoretic model based on reference points. The model explains how and why consumers experience sudden increases in desire for a product, increases that can result in the temporary overriding of long-term preferences. Tactics that consumers use to control their own behavior are also discussed. Consumer self-control is framed as a struggle between two psychological forces, desire and willpower. Finally, two general classes of self-control strategies are described: those that directly reduce desire, and those that overcome desire through will power.

Resistance Is Futile. To Change Habits, Try Replacement Instead. (Published 2018)

An inconvenient bit of neuroscience: The more you try not to think about a bad habit, the harder it gets to resist. So think about something else.

It’s the Effort That Counts: The Effect of Self-Control on Goal Progress Perceptions

Does the amount of self-control consumers must exert to choose a goal-consistent action influence their perceptions of goal progress? For example, if you choose to go to the gym when one of your favorite TV shows is on (vs. when nothing interesting is on TV), do you perceive that you have made a differential amount of progress toward your goal, despite completing the exact same workout? In eight studies (N = 7,515), the authors demonstrate that consumers perceive that they have made more progress on their goals when more (vs. less) self-control is required to choose to complete an identical goal-consistent task. This is because when consumers exert more (vs. less) self-control to choose a goal-consistent task over the goal-inconsistent alternatives, they infer higher commitment to the goal. The higher inferred commitment, in turn, leads consumers to perceive that future goal pursuit will be easier. The authors demonstrate this effect across a variety of tasks and means of exerting self-control, as well as with both hypothetical scenarios and real-behavior studies.

be diligent

For individuals It's challenging to work a process when it moves slower than feels appropriate. In the context of computer conversations, the tactic of s...

Anticipation and Choice Heuristics in the Dynamic Consumption of Pain Relief

Humans frequently need to allocate resources across multiple time-steps. Economic theory proposes that subjects do so according to a stable set of intertemporal preferences, but the computational demands of such decisions encourage the use of formally less competent heuristics. Few empirical studies have examined dynamic resource allocation decisions systematically. Here we conducted an experiment involving the dynamic consumption over approximately 15 minutes of a limited budget of relief from moderately painful stimuli. We had previously elicited the participants’ time preferences for the same painful stimuli in one-off choices, allowing us to assess self-consistency. Participants exhibited three characteristic behaviors: saving relief until the end, spreading relief across time, and early spending, of which the last was markedly less prominent. The likelihood that behavior was heuristic rather than normative is suggested by the weak correspondence between one-off and dynamic choices. We show that the consumption choices are consistent with a combination of simple heuristics involving early-spending, spreading or saving of relief until the end, with subjects predominantly exhibiting the last two.

Want to Create (and Maintain) a New Habit? Science Says Harness the Power of ‘Temptation Bundling’

Want to create a new habit? Temptation bundling provides the incentive and the motivation.

The myth of self-control

Psychologists say using willpower to achieve goals is overhyped. Here’s what actually works.

The Habit Graph

Applying network theory to behavior change

Self-Distancing: What It Is and How You Can Use It to Make Better Decisions – Effectiviology

It’s hard to set your emotions aside when you’re faced with a difficult decision. This is problematic, since our emotions often cause us to make the wrong decision in important areas of life, including in our relationships, our finances, and our health.

Self-Control and Optimal Goals: A Theoretical Analysis

Consumers set goals to achieve a variety of objectives such as losing weight, saving for retirement, and achieving better health. A large body of literature in psychology and consumer behavior shows that goals can help consumers achieve these objectives. However, there is almost no research that examines how we should set optimal goals. The purpose of this paper is to develop a parsimonious framework that examines how goals can help performance and how we should set optimal goals. We use the literature on hyperbolic discounting to model these issues. Our results show that goals can often increase performance but can also sometimes encourage procrastination. We show that some goals are worse than having no goals, even when the goals are achieved and the consumer exerts more effort because of the goal. We also find that the presence of goals can lead to myopic consumers behaving as if they were hyperopic. Our results also show that the most difficult goals should be assigned to consumers with moderate levels of motivation and self-control problems. We also find that it is sometimes optimal to set goals that are never achieved.

Save More Today or Tomorrow: The Role of Urgency in Precommitment Design

To encourage farsighted behaviors, previous research suggests that marketers should invite consumers to precommit to adopting these behaviors “later.” However, the authors propose that people will draw different inferences from different types of precommitment offers, and that these inferences can help explain when precommitment is (and is not) effective at increasing adoption of farsighted behaviors. Specifically, the authors theorize that simultaneously offering consumers the opportunity to adopt a farsighted behavior now or later (i.e., offering “simultaneous precommitment”) may signal that the behavior is not urgently recommended; however, offering consumers the opportunity to adopt that behavior immediately and then, only if they decline, inviting them to adopt it later (i.e., offering “sequential precommitment”) may signal just the opposite. In a multisite field experiment (N = 5,196), the authors find that simultaneously giving consumers the chance to increase their savings now or later reduced retirement savings. Two preregistered lab studies (N = 5,080) show that simultaneous precommitment leads people to infer that taking action is not urgently recommended, and such inferences predict less adoption of recommended behaviors. Importantly, offering sequential precommitment increases inferred urgency, predicting greater adoption. Together, this research advances knowledge about the limits and potential of precommitment.

A revolution in our sense of self | Nick Chater

Psychologists have tried to plumb the depths of human motivation to make sense of our behaviour. But our inner mental world is a fiction, sustained by constant improvisation

Self-Control and the Theory of Consumption

To study the behavior of agents who are susceptible to temptation in infinite horizon consumption problems under uncertainty, we define and characterize dynamic self-control (DSC) preferences. DSC pr...

Impatience: The Pitfall of Every Ambitious Person

Big splashes don’t happen. Overnight success doesn’t exist. We have to remind ourselves of that whenever we show impatience.

Eroding a virtue: AI trains people to expect instant answers – and that’s bad news for patience

Patience is a virtue that researchers have linked to many parts of well-being. But it’s also something that needs a bit of practice and training – and can be undermined by instant, easy gratification.