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Précis of Breakdown of Will

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2005

George Ainslie*
Affiliation:
Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 116A, Coatesville, PA19320 and Temple Medical College, Philadelphia, PA19140http://www.Picoeconomics.com

Abstract

Behavioral science has long been puzzled by the experience of temptation, the resulting impulsiveness, and the variably successful control of this impulsiveness. In conventional theories, a governing faculty like the ego evaluates future choices consistently over time, discounting their value for delay exponentially, that is, by a constant rate; impulses arise when this ego is confronted by a conditioned appetite. Breakdown of Will (Ainslie 2001) presents evidence that contradicts this model. Both people and nonhuman animals spontaneously discount the value of expected events in a curve where value is divided approximately by expected delay, a hyperbolic form that is more bowed than the rational, exponential curve.

With hyperbolic discounting, options that pay off quickly will be temporarily preferred to richer but slower-paying alternatives, a phenomenon that, over periods from minutes to days, can account for impulsive behaviors, and over periods of fractional seconds can account for involuntary behaviors. Contradictory reward-getting processes can in effect bargain with each other, and stable preferences can be established by the perception of recurrent choices as test cases (precedents) in recurrent intertemporal prisoner's dilemmas. The resulting motivational pattern resembles traditional descriptions of the will, as well as of compulsive phenomena that can now be seen as side-effects of will: over-concern with precedent, intractable but circumscribed failures of self-control, a motivated (“dynamic”) unconscious, and an inability to exploit emotional rewards. Hyperbolic curves also suggest a means of reducing classical conditioning to motivated choice, the last necessary step for modeling many involuntary processes like emotion and appetite as reward-seeking behaviors; such modeling, in turn, provides a rationale for empathic reward and the “construction” of reality.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

Notes

The author of this Précis is employed by a government agency and, as such, this Précis is considered a work of the U.S. government and not subject to copyright within the United States.

1. Even if these elements are governed by different brain centers, neurophysiologists Shizgal and Conover have pointed out that there has to be an “evaluative circuitry” that reduces them to a common currency: “For orderly choice to be possible, the utility of all competing resources must be represented on a single, common dimension” (Shizgal & Conover 1996).

2. For an analogous problem in social organization, see Sunstein (1995).

3. Figure 6B is Figure 10B in the target book. In Figure 10B the slope of increasing appetite is steeper than it is in Figure 10A, whereas to illustrate my point it has to be the same as in Figure 10A. Figure 6B has thus been corrected here.