On 2013-11-18, at 9:58 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> In user experience landia, it's because people don't like to wait. They feel out of control. This isn't a republican or conservative thing.
>From Sunday's NY Times:
When we think of self-control, we don’t normally see it in these terms — a reasoned decision to wait or not. In fact, the ability to delay gratification has traditionally been seen in large part as an issue of willpower: Do you have what it takes to wait it out, to choose a later — and, presumably, better — reward over an immediate, though not quite as good one? Can you forgo a brownie in service of the larger reward of losing weight, give up ready cash in favor of a later investment payoff? The immediate option is hot; you can taste it, smell it, feel it. The long-term choice is far cooler; it’s hard to picture it with quite as much color or power.
In psychological terms, the difference is typically seen as a dual-system trade-off: On one hand, you have the deliberative, reflective, cool system; on the other, the intuitive, reflexive, hot system. The less self-control you have, the further off and cooler the future becomes and the hotter the immediate present grows. Brownie? Yum.
But what if the reality is a little different? What if the ability to delay gratification is actually more like the commuter faced with a crowded train platform than like a dieter faced with a freshly baked treat? A failure of self-control, suggest the University of Pennsylvania neuroscientists Joseph W. Kable and Joseph T. McGuire, may not be a failure so much as a reasoned response to the uncertainty of time: If we’re not quite sure when the train will get there, why invest precious time in continuing to wait?
Mr. Kable, who has been working on the psychology and neuroscience of decision making for more than a decade, argues that the truth is that in real life, as opposed to the lab, we aren’t nearly as sure we’ll get our promised reward, or if we do, of when it will come.
“The timing of real-world events is not always so predictable,” he and Mr. McGuire write. “Decision makers routinely wait for buses, job offers, weight loss and other outcomes characterized by significant temporal uncertainty.” Sometimes everything comes just when we expect it to, but sometimes even a usually punctual bus breaks down or an all-but-certain job offer falls through.
When we set a self-control goal for ourselves, we often have specific time frames in mind: I’ll lose a pound a week; a month from now, I’ll no longer get cravings for that cigarette; the bus or train will come in 10 minutes (and I’ve committed to taking public transportation as part of lessening my carbon footprint, thank you very much).
But what happens if our initial estimate is off? The more time passes without the expected reward — it’s been 20 minutes and still nothing; I’ve been dieting for a week and a half now and still weigh the same — the more uncertain the end becomes. Will I ever get my reward? Ever lose weight? Ever get on that stupid train?
In this situation, giving up can be a natural — indeed, a rational — response to a time frame that wasn’t properly framed to begin with, according to a series of new studies conducted by Mr. Kable’s decision neuroscience lab at the University of Pennsylvania and published inCognition and Psychological Review.
> At 01:10 AM 11/18/2013, Jordan Hayes wrote:
>> Joanna writes:
>>
>>> My daughter works in a restaurant and she says it's striking
>>> to note the difference between customers waiting to be seated
>>> (anxious, quick to anger, resentful, paranoid) and once they
>>> are seated (grateful, genial, relaxed, trusting, etc.)
>>
>> My explaination of this is what is happening everywhere else: it's the self-centered outlook. This is the same reason why people have Road Rage (or are "bad" drivers in general). It's all about me. And if it's not all about me, then I'm unhappy. It's not just in restaurants.
>>
>> If it's really about the "betrayal of mothers" then mothers have a lot to 'splain, because there are a LOT of people out there with their eyes firmly glued to themselves. Empathy is at an all-time low.
>>
>> /jordan
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