My brain clearly has different procedures for dealing with vague responsibilities it can weasel out of, and serious responsibilities it can’t, and the oath served to stick studying on the “serious” side of the line.
I doubt it’s the oath or the rituals. The key piece (in my experience) that makes this work, is the part where you considered conflicts and consequences. You made explicit under which specific conditions you would do it, and which ones you wouldn’t.
To translate this back into Ainslie’s model, the success of bargaining at any point in time is dependent on the degree of activation of “interests”. If at the time you decide to do something, you envision only the default case, then the interest is only mentally linked to the default, not the situation where “something else comes up”.
However, if you explicitly contemplate all the things that might come up, and decide what you’ll do in each case, then you are mentally linking your “interest” to those contexts, along with a preferred behavior… thus reducing the willpower load required to make those decisions when the time comes, and giving that “interest” a larger say in the bargaining that occurs at that point in time.
I mentioned this briefly in my New Years’ Resolutions video this year, but I’ve been teaching this concept for some time now. A key variable is how well you can mentally put yourself into the conflict situations that will occur, so that you can actually make realistic tradeoffs in “near” thinking, rather than using over-idealistic “far” thinking.
Related is Martha Beck’s concept of “four day wins”, which emphasizes the idea that as long as you make changes to behavior in small enough steps that no unmanageable conflicts arise, you can make that behavior “normal” within four days.
For example, the 4-day win approach to studying 2 hours a day would first be to set a time at which you will simply take out your books and look at them for say, 1 minute, without actually opening them, and to do that for four days. Then, for four days, do that and actually open them to what you’re supposed to be studying, but don’t do any of it. From there on, setting timers for small intervals where you have to stop as soon as the timer goes off.
In either case, whether you do it by exhaustive imagination in advance (as you did), or the 4-day wins method, you are doing the same thing: establishing a conditioned link between the “interest” (in Ainslie’s terminology) and the context where you would like that interest to be active, so as to prevent other interests from dominating the negotiation in that context.
My suggestion for your next experiment would be for you to see how much less ritual you can get away with, as long as you satisfy the criterion of linking your preferred decision and the feeling of your “interest” to as many explicit, specific contexts where other interests might be in conflict.
with the knowledge that if I succeeded I would have a great method of self-improvement and if I failed I would be dooming myself to a life of laziness forever (Ainslie’s theories suggest that exaggeration is good in this case).
So do Tony Robbins’s theories, as described in his 1991 book, “Awaken the Giant Within”. However, this is an area where I disagree with both Robbins and Ainslie!
For certain personality types, creating this sort of bargain is dangerous and damaging if you fail, for reasons that are actually brought up in Ainslie’s book. And those personality types are very likely to fail, for the simple reason that they will not actually do the critical task of considering all the ways in which they might fail.
For example, how many Republican senators and Baptist ministers would you guess have sworn mighty oaths to never have gay sex?
If the subject of your oath is an ideal-belief-reality conflict, you will not “negotiate fairly” with your other interests, which means you won’t really think about the areas where conflicts will arise, which means those other interests will dominate, and your oaths will eventually fall by the wayside.
So I’m glad it worked for you, but I strongly recommend that others NOT add this sort of “leverage”—it’s not necessary and can be damaging. The critical factor is inter-interest linkage, not consequences of failure.
Richard Bandler actually encourages people embarking on something new that they might backslide on, to actually visualize themselves backsliding… repeatedly! And then to imagine this making them MORE motivated to proceed.
And if you think about it, this is actually an example of the same principle I described above—linking an interest to a context where a conflict might occur. In this way, even if backsliding does occur, it still contributes to the goal, rather than detracting from it.
In contrast, what you have done sets up an expectation that a single failure will lead to the destruction of someone’s entire life… and that is NOT a responsible thing to suggest or prime, EVER.
I’m going to have to read this a few more times before I understand it fully, but I want to address one thing right away:
For example, how many Republican senators and Baptist ministers would you guess have sworn mighty oaths to never have gay sex...what you have done sets up an expectation that a single failure will lead to the destruction of someone’s entire life… and that is NOT a responsible thing to suggest or prime, EVER.
The way I dealt with this was to make my oaths in one month blocks. So the Republican would have to swear “I won’t have any gay sex...this month.” Even for the most lustful, this should be possible.
If, at the end of the month, this was so painful he wants to just give up on this, he can. Or if he thinks he can do it, he could also include the statement in his next month’s oath.
What I found was that there’s a very different mental feeling between “I can never do this again” and “I have to wait a month to do this.” The latter is annoying but bearable, and it’s why I included the “never make an open-ended oath” point up there.
(if you want to test this for yourself, but don’t have any repressed homosexual urges, masturbation makes a good test case)
I don’t think this technique is at its best for something where doing it once is a disaster, like gay sex for Baptist ministers. I think it’s better for something like dieting. Tell yourself you won’t eat cookies the whole month, do it in the full knowledge that you’ll start eating cookies again when the oath runs out, pig out on cookies for one day, and then when you have no desire whatsoever for any more cookies, swear to diet again for the next month.
I don’t think this technique is at its best for something where doing it once is a disaster, like gay sex for Baptist ministers.
I’m saying that your “dooming myself to a life of laziness forever” is an artificially created disaster, where none would have existed otherwise. The closeted gay thing was just giving an example of how (as I said), “For certain personality types, creating this sort of bargain is dangerous.”
IOW, using your “doom” model, if a person swears not to eat cookies for a month, and then fails to do so, they will now consider themselves doomed forever. That’s the kind of failure mode I’m talking about.
Hi from the future [1]! Beeminder has a version of this built in: the one-week akrasia horizon. You can change anything about a Beeminder goal, including ending it, at any time, but the change doesn’t take effect for a week. As Katja Grace once said on Overcoming Bias: “[you] can’t change it out of laziness unless you are particularly forward thinking about your laziness (in which case you probably won’t sign up for this).”
[1] I’m mildly terrified that it’s against the norms to reply to something this old. I’ve been thinking hard about your (Scott’s) recent ACX post, “Towards A Bayesian Theory Of Willpower,” and am digging up all your previous thoughts on the topic, so here I am.
As a matter of personal preference, I enjoy (and endorse) commenting and and reading comments on old posts—it nudges everything a bit more toward long content.
Richard Bandler actually encourages people embarking on something new that they might backslide on, to actually visualize themselves backsliding… repeatedly! And then to imagine this making them MORE motivated to proceed.
Something about this really appeals to me. I’m about to begin a fairly large project, I’ll give this a whirl and report back.
I doubt it’s the oath or the rituals. The key piece (in my experience) that makes this work, is the part where you considered conflicts and consequences. You made explicit under which specific conditions you would do it, and which ones you wouldn’t.
To translate this back into Ainslie’s model, the success of bargaining at any point in time is dependent on the degree of activation of “interests”. If at the time you decide to do something, you envision only the default case, then the interest is only mentally linked to the default, not the situation where “something else comes up”.
However, if you explicitly contemplate all the things that might come up, and decide what you’ll do in each case, then you are mentally linking your “interest” to those contexts, along with a preferred behavior… thus reducing the willpower load required to make those decisions when the time comes, and giving that “interest” a larger say in the bargaining that occurs at that point in time.
I mentioned this briefly in my New Years’ Resolutions video this year, but I’ve been teaching this concept for some time now. A key variable is how well you can mentally put yourself into the conflict situations that will occur, so that you can actually make realistic tradeoffs in “near” thinking, rather than using over-idealistic “far” thinking.
Related is Martha Beck’s concept of “four day wins”, which emphasizes the idea that as long as you make changes to behavior in small enough steps that no unmanageable conflicts arise, you can make that behavior “normal” within four days.
For example, the 4-day win approach to studying 2 hours a day would first be to set a time at which you will simply take out your books and look at them for say, 1 minute, without actually opening them, and to do that for four days. Then, for four days, do that and actually open them to what you’re supposed to be studying, but don’t do any of it. From there on, setting timers for small intervals where you have to stop as soon as the timer goes off.
In either case, whether you do it by exhaustive imagination in advance (as you did), or the 4-day wins method, you are doing the same thing: establishing a conditioned link between the “interest” (in Ainslie’s terminology) and the context where you would like that interest to be active, so as to prevent other interests from dominating the negotiation in that context.
My suggestion for your next experiment would be for you to see how much less ritual you can get away with, as long as you satisfy the criterion of linking your preferred decision and the feeling of your “interest” to as many explicit, specific contexts where other interests might be in conflict.
So do Tony Robbins’s theories, as described in his 1991 book, “Awaken the Giant Within”. However, this is an area where I disagree with both Robbins and Ainslie!
For certain personality types, creating this sort of bargain is dangerous and damaging if you fail, for reasons that are actually brought up in Ainslie’s book. And those personality types are very likely to fail, for the simple reason that they will not actually do the critical task of considering all the ways in which they might fail.
For example, how many Republican senators and Baptist ministers would you guess have sworn mighty oaths to never have gay sex?
If the subject of your oath is an ideal-belief-reality conflict, you will not “negotiate fairly” with your other interests, which means you won’t really think about the areas where conflicts will arise, which means those other interests will dominate, and your oaths will eventually fall by the wayside.
So I’m glad it worked for you, but I strongly recommend that others NOT add this sort of “leverage”—it’s not necessary and can be damaging. The critical factor is inter-interest linkage, not consequences of failure.
Richard Bandler actually encourages people embarking on something new that they might backslide on, to actually visualize themselves backsliding… repeatedly! And then to imagine this making them MORE motivated to proceed.
And if you think about it, this is actually an example of the same principle I described above—linking an interest to a context where a conflict might occur. In this way, even if backsliding does occur, it still contributes to the goal, rather than detracting from it.
In contrast, what you have done sets up an expectation that a single failure will lead to the destruction of someone’s entire life… and that is NOT a responsible thing to suggest or prime, EVER.
I’m going to have to read this a few more times before I understand it fully, but I want to address one thing right away:
The way I dealt with this was to make my oaths in one month blocks. So the Republican would have to swear “I won’t have any gay sex...this month.” Even for the most lustful, this should be possible.
If, at the end of the month, this was so painful he wants to just give up on this, he can. Or if he thinks he can do it, he could also include the statement in his next month’s oath.
What I found was that there’s a very different mental feeling between “I can never do this again” and “I have to wait a month to do this.” The latter is annoying but bearable, and it’s why I included the “never make an open-ended oath” point up there.
(if you want to test this for yourself, but don’t have any repressed homosexual urges, masturbation makes a good test case)
I don’t think this technique is at its best for something where doing it once is a disaster, like gay sex for Baptist ministers. I think it’s better for something like dieting. Tell yourself you won’t eat cookies the whole month, do it in the full knowledge that you’ll start eating cookies again when the oath runs out, pig out on cookies for one day, and then when you have no desire whatsoever for any more cookies, swear to diet again for the next month.
I’m saying that your “dooming myself to a life of laziness forever” is an artificially created disaster, where none would have existed otherwise. The closeted gay thing was just giving an example of how (as I said), “For certain personality types, creating this sort of bargain is dangerous.”
IOW, using your “doom” model, if a person swears not to eat cookies for a month, and then fails to do so, they will now consider themselves doomed forever. That’s the kind of failure mode I’m talking about.
Hi from the future [1]! Beeminder has a version of this built in: the one-week akrasia horizon. You can change anything about a Beeminder goal, including ending it, at any time, but the change doesn’t take effect for a week. As Katja Grace once said on Overcoming Bias: “[you] can’t change it out of laziness unless you are particularly forward thinking about your laziness (in which case you probably won’t sign up for this).”
[1] I’m mildly terrified that it’s against the norms to reply to something this old. I’ve been thinking hard about your (Scott’s) recent ACX post, “Towards A Bayesian Theory Of Willpower,” and am digging up all your previous thoughts on the topic, so here I am.
As a matter of personal preference, I enjoy (and endorse) commenting and and reading comments on old posts—it nudges everything a bit more toward long content.
Something about this really appeals to me. I’m about to begin a fairly large project, I’ll give this a whirl and report back.