The Procrastination Equation (30 page)
Read The Procrastination Equation Online
Authors: Piers Steel
Maslow, A. H. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York: Harper.
17
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Su, X. (2007). A model of consumer inertia with applications to dynamic pricing. Berkeley: University of California.
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This form of precommitment is also known as counteractive control, contingency management, and side bets.
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Surowiecki, J. (Feb. 14, 2006). Bitter money and Christmas Clubs. Forbes.
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Retrieved from http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/09/markets-in-self.html
23
Here is one more example. To stop addicts from relapsing, a Denver cocaine addiction center encourages self-inflicted blackmail. Patients write an incriminating letter to the authorities, revealing their misdeeds and urging the strongest punitive response. If these patients then fail to pass a random series of drug tests, those letters are delivered.
Schelling, T. C. (1992). Self-command: A new discipline. In G. Loewenstein & J. Elster (Eds.), Choice over time (pp. 167–176). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
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Thaler, R., & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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Lane Olinghouse.
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Allen, K. (1996). Chronic nailbiting: A controlled comparison of competing response and mild aversion treatments. Behavior Research and Therapy, 34(3), 269–272.
27
As Seymour originally bragged, “You are looking at a man who developed a foolproof system for fidelity.” Richler, M. (1980). Joshua then and now. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart.
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Mischel, W., & Ayduk, O. (2004). Willpower in a cognitive-affective processing system. In I. Baumeister & K. Vohs (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation: Research, theory, and applications (pp. 99–129). New York: Guilford Press.
29
See also: Caspi, A., Roberts, B., & Shiner, R. (2005). Personality development: Stability and change. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 453–484.
Lee, P., Lan, W., Wang, C., & Chiu, H. (2008). Helping young children to delay gratification. Early Childhood Education Journal, 35(6), 557–564.
30
The average is over one violation per minute under attempts of active suppression. If you did make it to the minute mark, see if you can go an additional sixty seconds. It becomes much tougher.
Wenzlaff, R., & Wegner, D. (2000). Thought suppression. Annual Reviews in Psychology, 51(1), 59–91.
Wegner, D. (1994). White bears and other unwanted thoughts: Suppression, obsession, and the psychology of mental control. New York: The Guilford Press.
31
Of note, this is an inherent problem with any Panglossian approach that advocates you not think any negative thoughts. Such advice is doomed to fail by its very design.
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Alternatively, the twentieth-century cultural critic Ernst Cassirer observed: “Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances.”
Mischel, W., & Baker, N. (1975). Cognitive appraisals and transformations in delay behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31, 254–261.
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Deacon, T. W. (1997). The symbolic species. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Gifford, A. (2002). Emotion and self-control. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 49, 113–130.
Gifford, A. (2009). Rationality and intertemporal choice. Journal of Bioeconomics, 11(3), 223–248.
34
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1131.
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Kearney, A. (2006). A primer of covert sensitization. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 13(2), 167–175.
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My example was actually rather mild compared to the ones Joseph Cautela, one of the originators of the technique, develops. Here Joseph describes its use in avoiding desserts:
I want you to imagine you've just had your main meal and you are about to eat your dessert, which is apple pie. As you are about to reach for the fork, you get a funny feeling in the pit of your stomach. You start to feel queasy, nauseous, and sick all over. As you touch the fork, you can feel food particles inching up in your throat. You're just about to vomit. As you put the fork into the pie, the food comes up into your mouth. You try to keep your mouth closed because you are afraid that you'll spit the food out all over the place. You bring the piece of pie to your mouth. As you are about to open your mouth, you puke; you vomit all over your hands, the fork, over the pie. It goes all over the table, over other people’s food. Your eyes are watering. Snot, mucus are all over your mouth and nose . . .
Cautela goes on (and on) but I think that is all the description you or I can probably stomach. I have no reason to hate apple pie and I would like to keep it that way. But it was effective, wasn’t it?
Cautela, J. R. (1972). Covert sensitization scenes: A compilation of typical scenes used in the application of covert sensitization to a variety of maladaptive behaviors. Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College.
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Lohr, S. (September 22, 2009). A $1 million research bargain for Netflix, and maybe a model for others. New York Times, B1.
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Of note, mindfulness meditation may be a relevant way of increasing your attention control, but this has yet to be proven. As described by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist who pioneered the practice in the West, “meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind . . . to witness whatever comes up . . . and to recognize it without condemning it or pursuing it.” Consequently, even if the impulse to pursue a temptation does arise, the decision to act upon this impulse is not automatic. If mindfulness meditation does prove helpful, however, I am still skeptical about its practical value. It can take a long time to effectively master and in the meantime you will find it really, really boring. This makes it exactly the type of practice that boredom-sensitive procrastinators are going to put off. In other words, if you have the patience to foster mindfulness, you probably don’t need the added self-control in the first place.
Brown, K., Ryan, R., & Creswell, J. (2007). Mindfulness: Theoretical foundations and evidence for its salutary effects. Psychological Inquiry, 18(4), 211–237.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. New York: Hyperion.
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Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automa-ticity of being. American Psychologist, 54(7), 462–479.
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Bargh, J. (2006). What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious social behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36(2), 147–168.
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Lustig, C., Hasher, L., & Tonev, S. T. (2001). Inhibitory control over the present and the past. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 13(1), 107–122.
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Tullier, M. (2000). The complete idiot’s guide to overcoming procrastination. Indianapolis, IN: Alpha Books.
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Especially see the work of psychologist Fuschia Sirios, whose work on household safety behaviors emphasizes reducing clutter, such as putting away “hazardous tools after they are used” or keeping “stairs and walkways at home free of clutter and other tripping hazards.”
Sirois, F. M. (2007). “I'll look after my health, later”: A replication and extension of the procrastination-health model with community-dwelling adults. Personality and Individual Differences, 43(1), 15–26.
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Lay, C. H., & Schouwenburg, H. C. (1993). Trait procrastination, time management, and academic behavior. Journal of Social Behavior & Personality, 8(4), 647–662.
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Again, even pigeons are capable of using this type of attentional control.
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There are lots of do-it-yourself kits that provide precisely this, like the
Contr014,
Kill A Watt,
Wattson Energy Meter
or the
Owl
(aka,
The Electrisave
); they should pay for themselves within months. Also, the hypermiler car subculture is an early adopter of this insight. With an arsenal of tricks, a few not for the faint of heart, like coasting in the draft of an eighteen-wheeler or the “death turn,” they eke out incredible gas mileage just by the way they drive. But what hypermilers rave about most is a mini-computer called the
Scan Gauge,
which plugs into any car built after 1995. Velcroed prominently on your dashboard, it provides instantaneous feedback on a choice of critical outcomes like cost per mile and cost per trip, not just miles per gallon (though that is a nice start). Suddenly, driving cost-consciously and environmentally becomes upfront and second nature. Once the abstract notion of reduced gas consumption, which appeals to our prefrontal cortex, becomes more immediate, tangible, and vivid, so that it appeals to our limbic system, we will freely use less gas. For example, I have seen my thrifty mother-in-law drive for thirty minutes to a fabric store just to return one
extremely
low-cost item. Once you calculate in gas costs, the round-trip cost her money, but still she drove. Travel costs are vaguely known, while that purchase was right there in her hands. If she drove a different kind of car, one which calculated her travel costs automatically on the dashboard, I doubt she would have made the journey. This type of technology should increase our mileage by 25 percent just by reducing idling, speeding, and unnecessary acceleration. If we could tie in the automatic “tire pressure monitoring system,” indicating how much your underinflated tires are costing you, driving efficiency could increase over 3 percent. Incorporating an “air filter monitoring system” and gas mileage potentially jumps another 10 percent. Given that cars produce the bulk of greenhouse gases, this implementation alone could easily meet the targeted reductions for the Kyoto Protocol, the international environmental treaty.
Gaffney, D. (January/February 2007). This guy can get 59 MPG in a plain old Accord. Beat that, punk.
Mother Jones
.
Grunwald, M. (August, 2008). The tire-gauge solution: No joke.
Time.
Jones, T. Y. (June, 2008). Hypermilers: Breaking the 100-MPG barrier.
Edmunds Inside Line.