PROFESSOR: All right. So I left you at the end of
last lecture with this incredible cliffhanger I put
up on the slide, but... So let me get a running start
and let you know where we were, finish up that lecture,
and then move in to the topics for today. So as you recall, at the end of
last lecture I was talking about a particular critique
which has been offered by contemporary social
psychologists of Aristotle's moral theory. As you recall, Aristotle has a
moral theory whose fundamental notion is that of the person
with good character--the one who acts as the well-raised one,
the person with practical wisdom would act. Aristotle calls that person
the phronimos. And John Doris, in the essay
we read, gave voice to a concern which a number of
philosophers have expressed in recent years, which is the
concern that Aristotle's moral theory commits a mistake. It commits what psychologists
call the fundamental attribution error. And that's the idea that it's
character rather than circumstance that's the primary
determinant of action. And Doris adduced a number of
psychological studies that purport to show that the primary
determinant of action is circumstance rather
than some standing feature of the person. So he told us the story of the
guys in the phone booth and suggested that it's a local
feature of mood that determines whether people are
likely to be helpful rather than a standing feature
of character. He told us the story of the Good
Samaritan study, again suggesting that it was
circumstance or situation that affected behavior, not standing features of character. We ourselves read and thought
about the Milgram experiments: circumstances in which people
find themselves behaving in ways that one might think
are out of character. And we talked about previously,
and we'll talk about it again, the idea of
moral luck: the idea that one may find oneself in
circumstances that lead to behavior. So there is no doubt that there
is an element of truth to the claim that circumstance
is a major contributor to behavior. It's undeniable that there are
circumstances that contribute to how it is that people act. But that strand of social
psychology that Doris is stressing is, I think, only
part of the story. So in addition to circumstance
contributing to character, there's a large body of research
in psychology known as personality psychology which
looks at a set of traits that seem to be pretty well
established in people by their first year of life. These are traits that are quite
stable over time, and that end up correlating with a
large range of other measures. These are things like openness
to new experience, conscientiousness in carrying
out responsibilities, extroversion as opposed to
introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism: a certain
kind of anxiety. So although it is the case
that circumstance plays a major role in determining how
it is that people behave, it is also the case that there
are contributions from individual personality. And one of the most dramatic
pieces of evidence in favor of that are Walter Mischel's famous
deferred gratification studies which I'll discuss
now and then again later in the lecture. It looks like, if Mischel's
studies which involve thousands and thousands of
children are to be trusted, that the early capacity for
self-regulation or delay of gratification in the face
of temptation is highly predictive of all sorts of
things ranging from SAT scores to social relations in school. Social and cognitive functions
seem to correlate with the certain features about
early experience. So although it is undoubtedly
the case that the situationist critique gets something right
and it is undoubtedly a mistake to think that the sole
contribution to behavior is character, and that the features
of the environment play no role, to say that only
contribution to behavior is circumstance and that there's no
contribution on the part of the individual is, I
think, a mistake. And those of you who are
interested in looking at what those individual differences
look like in children early on may enjoy watching some of the
videos of the Mischel studies where you get to see children
sitting in front of marshmallows, looking
like this, or this, or this, or this. Or--poor thing--she's destined
for low SAT scores, but wow is that marshmallow going
to taste good. So any of you who wants to watch
some of these, here are three very different
presentations of the marshmallow case. And again, these slides will be
up so you can go get them off the Internet. OK. So that's the closing of last
lecture, and obviously a straightforward segue way into
the topic of today's lecture which is the question in some
ways with which we began this section of the course: the
question of strategies for regulating oneself in the face
of weakness of the will. Now, what we emphasized in last
lecture was Aristotle's picture of what it takes for
someone to be virtuous. And Aristotle said that in order
to be virtuous, you need to satisfy four conditions. You need to know what's the
right thing to do, you need to decide to do that thing because
it's the right thing, you need to do so stably, and
you need to do so in a way that doesn't cut against
your inclinations. Those are the four features
that are required to be virtuous on Aristotle's
picture. And corresponding to virtue on
the other end of the spectrum, is the Aristotelian notion of
vice which is basically its exact opposite. It's a harmonious, stable,
knowledgeable, decided tendency to act in keeping with
exactly what's wrong. So the vicious person has
knowledge of what's the wrong thing to do, decides to do it
because it's the wrong thing, stably does so, and doesn't feel
any inclination to do the right thing. So those are two ends of the
Aristotelian spectrum. In fact, there are two things
which lie a bit beyond the end of the Aristotelian spectrum. As you know from you reading
guide, Aristotle also identifies the notion somewhat
akin to the state that Jonathan Shay calls
the berserk state. This is the state that Aristotle
calls bestiality, a state below virtue and vice. And he gives examples from some
of the Greek tragedies of tearing a body apart
limb from limb. So Aristotle thinks it's
possible to move out of the moral realm altogether. Vice, on the Aristotelian
picture, is still a kind of stable and predictable way
to act in the world. Bestiality lies below that. And above virtue lies this
idea of divinity: a state whereby regulating
with respect to virtue isn't even required. But the heart of the discussion
that we read in chapter seven of Aristotle's
Ethics for today concerns itself with this
range of states between virtue and vice. And Aristotle gives a really
nice taxonomy of those which I think is helpful for
understanding what it is to engage in self-regulation. I should stress that I am no
Aristotle scholar, and that what I'm providing is
a somewhat contrived reconstruction. But I think it's helpful for
getting a handle on what these distinctions amount to. So we might ask first, what
would a state look like that shares with virtue that one
has knowledge of the right thing to do, that one decides to
do it for that reason, and that one has the inclination,
but that lacks a kind of character, or logical stability,
that Aristotle takes to be a hallmark
of true virtue? That, I think, is the state
that Aristotle calls temperance. One's inclined to do the
right thing because it's the right thing. And one knows what the
right thing is. But there isn't the sort of
predictable, law-like, stability of character
that virtue requires. Corresponding to temperance,
on the other side of the scale, is what Aristotle calls
intemperance which is, in some sense, the mirror image
of temperance. Here one is simply inclined to
do the wrong thing because it's the wrong thing. But not as a hard feature of
character in the way that he gives in the case of vice,
but just as a matter of temperament. So the temperate person,
with inclination, does the right thing. They're inclined to do
the right thing and they act in that way. The intemperate person, with
inclination, does the wrong thing and feels no conflict
in the face of it. What happens if we remove
another one of the Aristotelian features? What happens if we have
knowledge of what's the right thing to do and the decision to
do the right thing, but our inclination pulls us in
the other direction? So we have made a decision to
act in keeping with what's right, at least at an abstract
level if not a concrete one, we have a sense of
what's right. Aristotle says, and I put this
approximation in front of the knowledge that "what the
continent and incontinent person have is the recognition
of the general rule, but some difficulty recognizing whether
the general rule applies in this particular case." So the
continent person has a sense of what the right thing to do
is, has made a decision to act in keeping with that, but her
inclination pulls her in another direction. She finds it difficult to avoid
the chocolate cake. She finds it difficult to get
up when her alarm rings. She finds it difficult to resist
the marshmallow in order to get the second. But somehow she contains herself
and acts against her inclination. The mirror image of the
continent person is Aristotle's incontinent
person. In terms of their decision,
they are like the continent one. They want to do the thing that
corresponds with morality. Like the continent person,
they have a sense of the general rule, a little
difficulty seeing how it applies in this particular
case. And like the continent person,
they have an inclination to go towards a pleasure which
attracts them. But unlike the continent person,
the incontinent person finds herself unable to overcome
the inclination. And so, below the line,
she acts in keeping with what's wrong. Finally, Aristotle considers
a pair of cases where the attraction to doing the wrong
thing is not a desire for a pleasure, but a desire
to avoid pain. So in some cases, one doesn't
get full credit for being continent, one doesn't resist a
pleasure, but one is willing to put up with a certain amount
of discomfort in the face of doing the right thing. Aristotle calls that resistance:
continence in the face of pain. And corresponding to that, below
the line, is softness: incontinence in the
face of pain. Doing the wrong thing because
one has given in to a certain kind of discomfort. So I put this list before you
because I think it's not completely clear on a first
read, or a second, or a third, or a fourth through Book Seven
of Aristotle's Ethics, how carefully structured Aristotle's
picture of the human soul and its strengths
and weaknesses is. But I think that if we see
it as a set of paired characteristics, each of which
lacks or has certain of the features of paradigmatic
Aristotelian virtue, then we can get a pretty clear sense
of what the Aristotelian picture looks like. And I encourage you, armed with
this framework, to go back to the text which we've
been reading over and over in this class: the text at the end
of Book One and beginning of Book Two of Aristotle's
Ethics. And try, yet again, to see what
the picture of virtue is that Aristotle is
concerned with. So what I want to do in the
remainder of the lecture today -- and we're going to need our
clickers pretty soon -- is to talk about Aristotle's
idea of incontinence. What it is to be in a situation
where one knows what the right thing to do
is, in the abstract. One's committed to doing
the right thing. But one has an inclination
that pulls in the other direction, and one gives
in to that inclination. So we're to ask, by starting
to give you a choice. And let me say, this
is a real poll. I have here the money, right
here in this envelope. And I have here -- I'm not kidding -- I have here a class list. And
during the ten seconds that you're answering this poll, I
will close my eyes and select a name from the class list. So
I'm asking you right now. You'll have 10 seconds once
I start the timer to choose what you want. One of you is really going to
get either $5 right now, or $6 on Thursday. And It could be you. OK. So clickers out. We have 10 seconds left. OK. So let's see what the responses
are on this. OK. 22% of you want $5 now. 78% of you want $6
in two days. Sarah Cox? Sarah Cox, are you here? Sarah Cox, which
did you choose? STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE]. PROFESSOR: OK. Well, I'll keep this right with
me, and I'll put it in my copy of Aristotle's Ethics. So I'm good for my word. OK. 22% of you, however, would
be just getting the envelope right now. OK, second poll. Which do you choose? And again, I have money. I have a second envelope. It's in my bag. And you can choose $5 in 35
days, or $6 in 37 days. OK? $5 in 35 days, or
$6 in 37 days. Polling open. Ten seconds. Ten, nine, eight -- $5, 35 days. $6 in 37 days. And let's see how the
numbers came out. OK. All right. You experimental error folks are
very good at showing the experimental error aspect of
pushing buttons on these. Or maybe, maybe there are
some of you who see this as being different. OK, 20% of you were preferring
to take $5 today over 6$ on Thursday, even though almost
none of you wanted to take the same decision in a month. Now, let me point something out
to you which, of course, to the rational part of your
soul is completely obvious. These bets are identical. I offered you $5 on the 15th
versus $6 on the 17th. Or I offered you $5 on the 22nd
versus $6 on the 24th. When it comes to the 22nd of
March, oh 22% of you, who gave different answers in these two
cases, you will be in exactly the same situation with respect
to the $5 and $6 that you are with respect to the
$5 and $6 right now. There's no difference between
this choice and this choice. Nonetheless, it turns out to be
consistently the case that human beings and non-human
animals have a tendency to start acting differently towards
delayed rewards when they are happening in the far
future and when they are happening in the near future. So for many decades the
psychologist, George Ainslie, has studied decisions that have
the following structure. One has a choice between a
smaller reward that one can get sooner, like the $5 as
opposed to the $6, or a larger reward that one can get later. And Ainslie has studied this
phenomenon in the context of human and non-human animals. And I'm going to read aloud a
quote to you, which will be up on the slides on the web site,
that gives you a sense of what this phenomenon amounts to. Ainslie calls it hyperbolic
discounting. And he says "people often, and
lower animals always, discount the prospect of future rewards
in a curve that's more deeply bowed than a rational,
exponential curve." So it's perfectly rational to
discount future rewards if there's uncertainty
involved, right? If I offered you $5 now or $6
in 20 years, it would make perfect sense to take the $5
now because your degree of uncertainty about whether
you would get the $6 is sufficiently great with respect
to your degree of certainty that you
would get the $5. But the difference, I hope,
between thinking whether you and I and this classroom are
going to be around this Thursday, as opposed to three
weeks from now on a Thursday, is trivial. "Over a range of delays,"
continues Ainslie, "from seconds to decades, there are
pairs of alternative rewards such that subjects prefer the
smaller, earlier reward over the larger later alternative
when the delay to the smaller reward will be short." Right? Those of you who preferred
$5 today as opposed to $6 on Thursday. "But prefer the larger, later
reward when the smaller alternative will be more
delayed." $5 in 35 days versus $6 in 37 days. "Even though the time from the
earlier to the later reward stays the same. The curves that fit the
observed data best are hyperbolic. That is, they show value as
inversely proportional to delay." So again, what happens is, that
for a period of time, A, the larger reward is preferred
to the smaller one, right? That's you. It's in 37 days. It's in 36 days. It's in 35 days. It's in 34 days. All that time, you prefer the
$6 two days later to the $5 now, or to the $5 two
days earlier. And then all of a sudden as
the event draws near, the value of the smaller reward
looms larger in your mind. Decision after decision
has this structure. Suppose you want to train to be
a competitive cyclist, or some sort of athletic endeavor,
that's your larger, later reward. Suppose that one of the things
that's incompatible with your becoming a competitive cyclist
is the eating of Crisco covered cupcakes. You're walking along, and at the
beginning it's completely clear to you that what you
prefer is to be a cyclist. You wake up in the morning, you say:
"what I'm going to do is plan for my bicycling. I'm not going to be distracted
by stupid things like Crisco covered cupcakes." And you walk
along and still to you now, there's your eyes, you
see ahh, the reward of the bicycle is greater than the
reward of the cupcake. And all of a sudden as the
cupcake grows nearer, you take the smaller, sooner reward and
the larger, later falls out from possibility. Suppose you resolve that
tomorrow morning you're going to get up super early to write
your paper for Philosophy 181, COGSCI 281. And so you set your alarm,
and you have the ringing of the alarm. And when you go to bed
you set it for 5:30. You can see that larger later
reward is a bigger one. And it comes to be 5:30 in the
morning and the alarm is ringing, and you turn it off. And oops, away goes the
possibility of the larger, later reward. Or suppose you're one of
Mischel's subjects in the marshmallow study. Here's your larger, later
reward: two marshmallows. Here's your smaller, sooner
reward: one marshmallow. Ask in the abstract, it's
pretty clear to you two marshmallows is definitely
better than one marshmallow until -- until what? Until you're sitting in the room
with the one marshmallow and oops, you lost
your chance. So what I want to do in the
remainder of the lecture today, is talk a little bit
about the psychological state of the children involved in
Mischel's studies, and then connect that for you to some
more general research on self-regulation. And finally connect that to the
discussion of principles that we had in our reading
from Nozick today. So when Walter Mischel began
doing these marshmallow studies roughly 40 years ago,
there was a theory in place that the best way to engage in
self-regulation was to think about the reward that you were
going to get if you did the right thing. So on that theory, the best
way for kids to be able to resist the one marshmallow
in order to get the two marshmallows would be for the
experimenter to make it incredibly vivid to them that
if they waited, they could have two marshmallows. So kids were brought into the
room in one of two conditions. In one of the conditions, there
was one marshmallow over here and two marshmallows
over there. The rewards were visible. The kids came in. And they lasted, on average,
about four minutes before they reached over and grabbed the
single marshmallow, thereby losing the second. When the rewards were hidden,
however, when the kids couldn't see the marshmallows
and were brought into the room and told you can either have one
marshmallow now, or if you can wait long enough, you can
have two marshmallows. Kids waited, on average,
12 minutes. Then Mischel wondered what was
driving the capacity of the children with hidden rewards to
sustain their self-control long enough. So the second condition he tried
was to take the kids who were in the circumstance where
the rewards were hidden, and tell them to think really hard
about the reward, think really hard about those marshmallows. The effect of thinking hard
about the marshmallows was that the performance dropped to
exactly the level that it had been in the case of
the kids for whom the reward was visible. And in fact, thinking about the
reward in the visible case made it no worse. So the problem was that when you
thought about the reward, it became salient and resistance
became difficult. So, thought Mischel, what if
we try it the other way? What if we take the kids for
whom the reward is visible and ask them to think happy
thoughts about something else, right? Look around the room, recite
the alphabet, tell yourself the story about the three little
pigs, do something to keep yourself distracted. And the result was that if the
kids thought distracting thoughts, they acted exactly
as the kids in the hidden rewards situation. And it made no difference in the
hidden situation to think distracting thoughts. So the presence of the
temptation before your mind is part of what makes the
temptation difficult to resist. And indeed,
Mischel thought about this more generally. He presented kids with either
a photograph or a real marshmallow, it didn't matter
which, and asked them either to pretend that it was real or
to think about tasting this, think about how excellent that
marshmallow is going to taste. And the delay which kids were
able to impose upon themselves averaged about six minutes. Whereas when he had even a real
marshmallow before them, and asked the kids to pretend
that it's imaginary or to think about it abstractly,
think about the number of marshmallows there are, think
about the letter that the word marshmallow starts with, think
about the nature of a candy store and how -- I mean, these are four-year-olds
-- think about the nature of a
candy store and how candy stores work in an
abstract sense. Kids were able to regulate
themselves for 18 minutes. So what was going on here? What ties together the cases
where we get very short numbers: kids are only able to
last four minutes, then give in to the temptation. And what ties together
the cases where we get large numbers? Mischel's hypothesis, and this
fits with the material that we discussed on January 20th, is
that there are two systems of processing rewards. There's a hot system which
acts on what Plato or Aristotle would call appetite,
or perhaps spirit. It acts on the basis
of passion. And when we think about things
with a vivid, emotional attraction to them, that system
gets activated and Plato's horses, Aristotle's
non-rational parts, system one, aliefs and all the
rest get going. That's the system that's active
when the rewards are visible and there's
no instruction. When you're thinking vividly
about the rewards, the appetitive parts of soul are
brought on line, and resistance to temptation
becomes difficult. By contrast, when kids are asked
to think abstractly or to pretend that the marshmallow
is imaginary, a cool, rational system--a
system that is the one involved in belief that is
Plato's charioteer, that is the System Two of the dual
processing tradition--that is the belief in the alief-belief
tradition--comes on line. And in the face of this cool
processing system, which gives us a sort of rational distance
from what we confront, all of a sudden self-regulation
becomes possible. So Mischel's studies fit in
to a larger framework for thinking about how to
overcome temptation. One which you'll not be
surprised to hear is articulated, as is almost
everything that we're thinking about in this course, in one
of the two great founding narratives of the Western
literary tradition--in this case, Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus, pictured here in
elegant, white tunic, is trying to get home from
the Trojan War. He's trying to get back to his
wife who is waiting faithfully for him at home, and it's
taking him about 20 years to do so. And along the way as he tries to
go home, he faces all sorts of temptations which threaten
to divert him from his path. And the temptation that he
faces in this picture, illustrated here in the form
of these beautiful flying women who look, to me, a little
bit like dementors from Harry Potter. He, however, finds them
enormously tempting. And he's trying to figure out
how to get the ship past the sirens, whose songs threaten to
cause the ship to founder upon the shoal, so that he
can get home to Penelope. And what he comes up with are
two different strategies. The first strategy he applies
to his sailors. You will see that around
the ears of each of them is cotton batting. He blocks their ears so that
the apparent utility of the sirens is reduced for them. Unable to hear their song, the
sailors are able to continue rowing the boat past their
source of temptation. What he does to himself, as
you can see, is he has himself, at point A on the
Ainslie curve, lashed to the mast. Because, like Mischel's
children and like Ainslie, he recognizes that when the siren's
song is available to him directly, he will be in
that B state where the smaller, sooner reward--like
turning off your alarm clock or eating that cupcake--looms
larger to him. So what Odysseus does is, he
ties himself to the mast. Even though the temptation of the
reward is evident to him, he has rendered himself unable
to act on that temptation. And there is a tradition, in
the contemporary decision theory literature, to use this
metaphor of Ulysses and the sirens, Odysseus and the
sirens depending which translation you use of the
name, to think about strategies for self-regulation. And it turns out that it's
helpful, I think, to think about these strategies as
falling into three categories. If you're trying to get past
a temptation that has the structure that we've been
looking at in this class, of smaller, sooner reward that,
because of temporal discounting, looms
disproportionately large in your decision structure. One way to get around it is by
means of external constraints. You can separate yourself from
the ability to act on the temptation. You can turn off the Internet on
your computer, you can use one of those cell phone condoms,
you can render yourself unable to act on the
basis of that which is going to distract you from
your path. You can put your alarm clock
all the way across the room you can take the cupcakes out
of your house, you can put your credit card in a glass
of water in the freezer. All of these are ways of
separating yourself from the ability to act on
the temptation. Or you can separate yourself
from the appeal of the temptation in some way. You can reduce its subjective
utility to you by, for example, blocking your ears so
you won't even notice that the temptation is there. So that's a way of externalizing
responsibility for decision making
in this case. And it's an extraordinarily
effective way of self-regulating. You are an agent in the world. The actions which you're
going to perform are actions on the world. And separating yourself from the
ability to perform those actions is one way to get
around temptation. A second way to get around
temptation, which we've discussed a lot in the last
two classes, is by direct appeal to the spirited or
appetitive parts of your soul. So you can manipulate incentive structures for yourself. You can change the relative
utilities of the various rewards. You can subject yourself to
interpersonal pressures. Remember we put the smiley faces
on your computers so that the gaze of the eyes of
others would help you stick to your tasks. Or you can cultivate
habits, right? You can get spirit and appetite
into line with reason by cultivating natural ways
of responding to things. But the third way that you can
get around temptations, is the one which we haven't discussed
yet, and that is by means of reason. And it is in this light that
Nozick discusses the roles that principles can play in
allowing us not to be incontinent. So Nozick points out, quite
generally, that what principles do is they group
actions by putting them under a general rubric so that linked
actions are viewed or treated in the same way. If one takes on as a principle
to be a vegetarian, then any act of eating meat is seen as a
violation of that principle. Even if one thinks there are
circumstances where eating meat might be the right thing to
do, all things considered. What the principle does is to
classify that act with other acts of eating meat so that the
actions become symbolic of one another. Smoking a single cigarette isn't
so bad, but smoking lots of cigarettes is. And one thing that a principle
can do is to let you have any one instance stand as
an example of all. Principles, says Nozick,
constitute a way of binding ourselves to the mast, not
through external constraints like ropes, but through internal
commitments to following their mandates. And he points out that
principles are affected in a wide range of cases. Intellectually, if you have
the idea that there's a principle that connects one set
of facts to another, then the principle can transmit
probability or support. The old cases came out
a particular way. Every time you observed a
certain kind of causation, it had a particular structure. You identified a principle, and
you're now in a position to make predictions
about new cases. Interpersonally, they
let you appear to be a reliable person. Your past actions were of
a certain kind, right? Every time I said I would give
you money, I gave you money. So you can conclude on that
basis I have a principle: repay my debts. And on that basis, you predict
my future actions. It's in fact, exactly because
of that, that I switched all the written exercises to
Thursdays rather than having extensions on some of them. My thought was this: suppose I
had given extensions on two of the essays from Tuesday
to Thursday? I'd look unprincipled about the regulations for this course. How will I be in a position
to enforce the course's requirements if I appear
unprincipled? Ah, suppose I adopt a new
principle, the Thursday due date, with respect to which
I am unwavering? Introspect a minute. Strangely, that seems more
authoritative than having most of them due on Tuesdays
and some on Thursdays. Intrapersonally, conceptualizing
oneself in terms of principles gives a kind
of narrative continuity to one's life. My past self was the kind of
person who would never do X. My past self is the kind of
person who always does Y. Articulating it in terms of a
principle lets me connect my future self to my past self. It gives me a sense of
continuity over time. And finally, intrapersonally,
principles provide ways of overcoming temptation. Ooh, every time I see a cupcake
I want to eat it, but if I have a principle that I
don't eat dessert after 4:00 pm, then it's easy. I don't have to make
a decision on a case-by-case basis. The single act of eating
that cupcake once. Why that once? Why wouldn't I then do it all
the time becomes a way of committing myself to
future actions. Those of you who practice an
instrument know that the easiest practice schedule is
to practice every day. Because if you practice every
day, there's no question of whether this is one
of the days that you're going to practice. If you are committed to a
certain kind of religious behavior, or a certain kind of
dietary restriction, or a certain kind of exercise
regimen, the easiest way to implement it is to say always,
with respect to this domain, will I behave in those ways. And, in fact, Nozick suggests
that this is exactly the way to use principles to get
past the Ainslie curve. The mark of a principle, he
says, is that it ties the decision whether to do an
immediate particular act to a whole class of actions
of which the principle makes it part. The act now stands for
the whole class. I discovered that I'm overusing
a particular kind of relaxational substance
on weekends. And the most straightforward
way for me deal with that situation is to put
a categorical restriction on my behavior. Moreover, points out Nozick,
I can make use of a really interesting irrationality
about myself to fight irrationality with
irrationality. Remember, I pointed out to you
a few lectures ago, that people who lose a $10 bill on
the way to the theater are happy to buy a new ticket
when they get there. But people who lost a $10
ticket on the way to the theatre are unhappy to do so. That's an instance of a general
phenomenon known as sunk costs, that when we've
invested a lot of effort in something, we're reluctant to
stop acting on its basis, even if right then we don't prefer
to do it anymore. And so Nozick suggests that if
during A, that period leading up to the Ainslie curve, we
invest many resources in the future in pursuit of the larger
reward, the fact that we tend not to ignore sunk costs
provides us with a way to get past the temptation
during the period, B, to choose the smaller, sooner. If I decide I want to go to six
plays a year and I buy six tickets, then even if it's
raining on one of the nights that I was supposed to go, my
tendency towards sunk costs will help me act on my action. All right, last two minutes. Let me connect this
to what we've done and where we're going. This, as you know, is the last
lecture in the first unit of the course. We began this unit by reading
Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational popular chapter--and
we ended this unit by reading Ariely's
Predictably Irrational popular chapter on procrastination. But, unlike your experience on
January 11th, you now have a philosophical framework in which
to place his discussion. Unlike on January 11th, you
now have a psychological framework in which to place
his discussion. You've read Haidt, you've read
Batson, you've read the dual processing work, you've read
Milgram, and Shay, and Stockdale and Kazdin. And you've read his own
scientific presentation of the case, and you've thought about
the connections between them. What comes next? What comes next is a chance, in
your 5th and 6th directed exercises, to address three
psychology articles which you, yourself, are going to choose
and summarize, and then come up with an experiment
on the basis of. What comes next is a chance to
think about the philosophical framework by writing your
first and second essays. And what comes at the end of the
course, and I'll preview it now, is a chance to think
about the connections between them in the context of your
final directed exercise. Which is going to be to design
a week of the course yourself in which you choose texts
that you think multiply illuminate the topic. So next lecture we'll move on to
our discussion of morality. And I'll connect it back to some
of the issues we've been talking about so far. And I look forward to seeing
you on Thursday, and especially to giving away the
$6 to the very rational student who was lucky
enough to earn it.
