Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

by Anna Lembke

An experiment by the neuroscientist Warren Bickel and his colleagues looked at the impact on study participants’ tendency to delay gratification for a monetary reward after having read a narrative passage that projected a state of plenty versus a state of scarcity. The plenty narrative read like this: “At your job you have just been promoted. You will have the opportunity to move to a part of the country you always wanted to live in OR you may choose to stay where you are. Either way, the company gives you a large amount of money to cover moving expenses and tells you to keep what you don’t spend. You will be making 100 percent more than you previously were.” The scarcity narrative read like this: “You have just been fired from your job. You will now have to move in with a relative who lives in a part of the country you dislike, and you will have to spend all of your savings to move there. You do not qualify for unemployment, so you will not be making any income until you find another job.” The researchers found, not surprisingly, that participants who read the scarcity narrative were less willing to wait for a distant future payoff and more likely to want a reward now. Those who read the plenty narrative were more willing to wait for their reward. It makes intuitive sense that when resources are scarce, people are more invested in immediate gains, and are less confident that those rewards will still be forthcoming in some distant future.