Depletable self-control

[pscot]

If you've ever bought a pair of socks on Amazon or tried to get 6 people to decide on a restaurant you may have felt that our range of choices has proliferated to the point of chaos. This article looks at the effect of so called tradeoff decisions and self-control decisions on subsequent behavior as factors in peoples inability to escape poverty, but the implications are clearly much broader.

http://www.tnr.com/article/environment-energy/89377/poverty-escape-psychology-self-control

......Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”

In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as possible, and to make the best decision in light of one’s personal goals. And, in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource.

This theory of depletable willpower has its detractors, and, as in most academic topics studied across disciplinary fields, one finds plenty of disputes over the details. But this model of self-control is now one of the most prominent theories of willpower in social psychology, at the core of what E. Tory Higgins of Columbia University described in 2009 as “an explosion of scientific interest” in the topic over the last decade. Some skeptics correctly emphasize the vital role of motivation, and some emphasize instead that “attention” is limited. But the core of the breakthrough is that resolving conflicts among choices is expensive at a cognitive level and can be unpleasant. It causes mental fatigue.

Nowhere is this revelation more important than in our efforts to understand poverty. Taking this model of willpower into the real world, psychologists and economists have been exploring one particular source of stress on the mind: finances. The level at which the poor have to exert financial self-control, they have suggested, is far lower than the level at which the well-off have to do so. Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” The poor have to make financial tradeoff decisions, as Shafir put it, “on anything above a muffin.”

Last December, Princeton economist Dean Spears published a series of experiments that each revealed how “poverty appears to have made economic decision-making more consuming of cognitive control for poorer people than for richer people.” In one experiment, poor participants in India performed far less well on a self-control task after simply having to first decide whether to purchase body soap. As Spears found, “Choosing first was depleting only for the poorer participants.” Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost.
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[truedelphi]

1. I think that in layman's terms we would call this "overload."

And for the poor, knowing that no matter what decisions they make, they are still stuck inside the meat grinder makes it even worse.

[phantom power]

2. "The problem with being poor is it takes up all your time."

Old saying.

[bananas]

3. This has implications for robotics and free will

Self-control and willpower are related to autonomy and free will.

If a robot doesn't exhibit depletable self-control, it will fail a Turing test.
But do we want robots to have depletable self-control?

Martin Heisenberg and his students have been doing free will experiments on fruit flies.
John Conway and his colleagues have shown that, if a scientist has free will, then so do subatomic particles.
Do fruit flies and subatomic particles also have depletable self-control?
Or does it only afflict larger more complex creatures?

We want to send space probes exploring Mars and other planets which will be as autonomous as possible, because of the long communication delays. As our technology progresses, will space probes also be afflicted by depletable self-control? Will they need to take vacations and coffee breaks to replenish their self-contol?

The army wants fleets of killer drones which will be autonomous, able to decide on their own whether to mistakenly strafe an innocent hillside wedding. Will killer drones also need to take vacations and coffee breaks to keep them from losing self-control?