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The Science of Self-Control by Howard Rachlin
This book proposes a new science of self-control based on the principles of behavioral psychology and economics. Claiming that insight and self-knowledge are insufficient for controlling one's behavior, Howard Rachlin argues that the only way to achieve such control--and ultimately happiness--is through the development of harmonious patterns of behavior.
Most personal problems with self-control arise because people have difficulty delaying immediate gratification for a better future reward. The alcoholic prefers to drink now. If she is feeling good, a drink will make her feel better. If she is feeling bad, a drink will make her feel better. The problem is that drinking will eventually make her feel worse. This sequence--the consistent choice of a highly valued particular act (such as having a drink or a smoke) that leads to a low-valued pattern of acts--is called "the primrose path."
To avoid it, the author presents a strategy of "soft commitment," consisting of the development of valuable patterns of behavior that bridge over individual temptations. He also proposes, from economics, the concept of the substitutability of "positive addictions," such as social activity or exercise, for "negative addictions," such as drug abuse or overeating.
Self-control may be seen as the interaction with one's own future self. Howard Rachlin shows that indeed the value of the whole--of one's whole life--is far greater than the sum of the values of its individual parts.
Most personal problems with self-control arise because people have difficulty delaying immediate gratification for a better future reward. The alcoholic prefers to drink now. If she is feeling good, a drink will make her feel better. If she is feeling bad, a drink will make her feel better. The problem is that drinking will eventually make her feel worse. This sequence--the consistent choice of a highly valued particular act (such as having a drink or a smoke) that leads to a low-valued pattern of acts--is called "the primrose path."
To avoid it, the author presents a strategy of "soft commitment," consisting of the development of valuable patterns of behavior that bridge over individual temptations. He also proposes, from economics, the concept of the substitutability of "positive addictions," such as social activity or exercise, for "negative addictions," such as drug abuse or overeating.
Self-control may be seen as the interaction with one's own future self. Howard Rachlin shows that indeed the value of the whole--of one's whole life--is far greater than the sum of the values of its individual parts.
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First published June 29, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 23, 2012
This is not an ENTERTAINING book. But for pity's sake, it's not mean to be. It is a report of a series of psychological experiments having to do with many aspects of self-control which the author analyzes and attempts to put into a coherent picture. It is NOT a self-help book, but yes, the principles illustrated in the book could definitely be used to increase one's own self-control.
I really can only recommend it, though, to people who can read charts, graphs and experimental data, and then find it meaningful. It is definitely strongly based in experimental (science) data.
That said, I enjoyed it and learned a great deal from it that I do intend to apply to my own life.
I really can only recommend it, though, to people who can read charts, graphs and experimental data, and then find it meaningful. It is definitely strongly based in experimental (science) data.
That said, I enjoyed it and learned a great deal from it that I do intend to apply to my own life.
April 15, 2023
Overall I loved the book, but it's way too verbose in a diluted way. A few pearls inside tons of redundancy:
1) Most important: social connection and addiction are incredibly substitutable for one another, so never stop making the social connections that you wanna make, even if you've been extremely demotivated to do so. Just find different people who can be That Person.
2) "Sunk costs" sometimes are not sunk if you look at the wider history/context.
3) Monkeys are smarter than pigeons, for example, because they can turn a complex sequence into chunks, and when that complex sequence reoccurrs without some chunks, they still remember the other chunks and, thus, continue performing adaptable behaviors even when things change quite drastically. This chunk-juggling is metacognition. Monkeys are much closer to metacognition than pigeons are. As a human, conclusion: improve your metacognition, unless there's something even higher reward out there, like grokking machine learning or biological/organic/analog computing, because hypothetically it can surpass silicone computing. But even using computers isn't useful unless you're great at metacognition, so.. I don't see anything of higher utility than increasing your metacognition. The only question is.. how?
4) There's a self-control equation & it looks like it could be in an Algebra 1 textbook. It's kinda neat that self-control is so easily turned into pretty simple equations.
5) The squirrel is hoarding nuts only in the Autumn, not all the time.
6) "Why then are we all not compulsive gamblers? The answer is that not all of us organize strings of gambles into substrings consisting of losses fol-lowed by a win. For nongamblers the losses are too important to ignore.
Nongamblers see each bet as an individual event, and when considering gambles as individual events, people tend to avoid risk. The woman at the seder, a woman who lived through the Depression and learned well the value of a dollar, is horrif i ed at the thought of risking $50 on a single bet.
But losing $100 a quarter at a time is exciting to her. Each 25-cent bet sneaks in under her threshold of danger and can be ignored until suddenly a $5, or $10, or $100 win ends the string.
The pernicious quality of casinos is that they offer a veritable menu of bets. You can pick from among combinations of amount bet and odds of winning where the loss will be below your threshold of danger and the win (accompanied in the casino by bells, whistles, the clatter of coins) above your threshold of excitement. Of course losses, no matter how small, add up and in a casino must eventually add up to more than the wins. (Our forebears must have been trying to protect us against our tendency to ig-nore small losses when they set a minimum of $2 per bet at racetracks in most states—in the days when $2 was a meaningful sum to most people.)
The harm comes when the excitement of winning becomes the main source of satisfaction in a person’s life".
7) "The establishment of self-control, as well as social cooperation, where none was before, requires a sort of faith. This faith is embodied in an act of imagination—acting as if something were true that is not in fact true—acting as if the probability of reciprocation is high when it has been low in the past. Enough such acts will create the very thing imagined".
8) "The squirrel saves nuts not because its self-concept extends beyond the autumn and into the winter but rather because it wakes up one morning and suddenly f i nds burying nuts to be valuable in itself. The temporal breadth of a nonhuman animal’s interest can, most of the time, remain narrow while Mother Nature takes care of the long view. A squirrel does not have and does not need a broad concept of self".
9) "It is sometimes supposed that in a perfect world there would be no con-f l ict between immediate desires and long-term values. The image of a nat-ural human being living a natural life has this sort of framework—a place where our immediate desires are in harmony with our long-term best in-terests. But as Plato pointed out (Philebos, 21c), life in such a world would be the life of a slug. In such a world we would have no need of a wide self and we would therefore not have one. A person’s self is not a mental ap-pendix or mental decoration but a functional aspect of human life. Will-power, the ability to behave right now in conformance with a valuable long-term pattern of behavior—to turn down the scotch despite its imme-diate value, to choose sobriety over alcoholism—arises not from any intro-spection on our part, not from insight, but rather from what might better be called outsight, from our ability to abstract, from the booming buzzing confusion of the environment, ref l ections of our own behavior over long stretches of time".
1) Most important: social connection and addiction are incredibly substitutable for one another, so never stop making the social connections that you wanna make, even if you've been extremely demotivated to do so. Just find different people who can be That Person.
2) "Sunk costs" sometimes are not sunk if you look at the wider history/context.
3) Monkeys are smarter than pigeons, for example, because they can turn a complex sequence into chunks, and when that complex sequence reoccurrs without some chunks, they still remember the other chunks and, thus, continue performing adaptable behaviors even when things change quite drastically. This chunk-juggling is metacognition. Monkeys are much closer to metacognition than pigeons are. As a human, conclusion: improve your metacognition, unless there's something even higher reward out there, like grokking machine learning or biological/organic/analog computing, because hypothetically it can surpass silicone computing. But even using computers isn't useful unless you're great at metacognition, so.. I don't see anything of higher utility than increasing your metacognition. The only question is.. how?
4) There's a self-control equation & it looks like it could be in an Algebra 1 textbook. It's kinda neat that self-control is so easily turned into pretty simple equations.
5) The squirrel is hoarding nuts only in the Autumn, not all the time.
6) "Why then are we all not compulsive gamblers? The answer is that not all of us organize strings of gambles into substrings consisting of losses fol-lowed by a win. For nongamblers the losses are too important to ignore.
Nongamblers see each bet as an individual event, and when considering gambles as individual events, people tend to avoid risk. The woman at the seder, a woman who lived through the Depression and learned well the value of a dollar, is horrif i ed at the thought of risking $50 on a single bet.
But losing $100 a quarter at a time is exciting to her. Each 25-cent bet sneaks in under her threshold of danger and can be ignored until suddenly a $5, or $10, or $100 win ends the string.
The pernicious quality of casinos is that they offer a veritable menu of bets. You can pick from among combinations of amount bet and odds of winning where the loss will be below your threshold of danger and the win (accompanied in the casino by bells, whistles, the clatter of coins) above your threshold of excitement. Of course losses, no matter how small, add up and in a casino must eventually add up to more than the wins. (Our forebears must have been trying to protect us against our tendency to ig-nore small losses when they set a minimum of $2 per bet at racetracks in most states—in the days when $2 was a meaningful sum to most people.)
The harm comes when the excitement of winning becomes the main source of satisfaction in a person’s life".
7) "The establishment of self-control, as well as social cooperation, where none was before, requires a sort of faith. This faith is embodied in an act of imagination—acting as if something were true that is not in fact true—acting as if the probability of reciprocation is high when it has been low in the past. Enough such acts will create the very thing imagined".
8) "The squirrel saves nuts not because its self-concept extends beyond the autumn and into the winter but rather because it wakes up one morning and suddenly f i nds burying nuts to be valuable in itself. The temporal breadth of a nonhuman animal’s interest can, most of the time, remain narrow while Mother Nature takes care of the long view. A squirrel does not have and does not need a broad concept of self".
9) "It is sometimes supposed that in a perfect world there would be no con-f l ict between immediate desires and long-term values. The image of a nat-ural human being living a natural life has this sort of framework—a place where our immediate desires are in harmony with our long-term best in-terests. But as Plato pointed out (Philebos, 21c), life in such a world would be the life of a slug. In such a world we would have no need of a wide self and we would therefore not have one. A person’s self is not a mental ap-pendix or mental decoration but a functional aspect of human life. Will-power, the ability to behave right now in conformance with a valuable long-term pattern of behavior—to turn down the scotch despite its imme-diate value, to choose sobriety over alcoholism—arises not from any intro-spection on our part, not from insight, but rather from what might better be called outsight, from our ability to abstract, from the booming buzzing confusion of the environment, ref l ections of our own behavior over long stretches of time".
August 22, 2024
Very useful + very difficult to read.
August 5, 2019
Teleological behaviorism, stimuli discrimination, compound functions doesn't cross.
Mathematical explanation of immediate rewards vs future rewards.
Mathematical explanation of immediate rewards vs future rewards.
July 27, 2021
very sciency and interesting framework about self control but hard to get throguh
June 9, 2010
This book had a few really great points and I enjoyed most of it. The author, however, is no Malcolm Gladwell, able to distill a host of information down into something that is easy to read and understandable. By the end I was getting a little tired of the book.
January 3, 2008
We are like pigeons.
Want to read
August 19, 2014reached 23
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews