Bücher online kostenlos Kostenlos Online Lesen

Willpower

Titel: Willpower Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Roy F. Baumeister
Vom Netzwerk:
Stanley made it his “sacred task” in Africa to end the slave trade. It might be a commitment to improve others’ health, or spread humane values, or preserve the environment for future generations. It’s probably no coincidence that environmentalism is especially strong in rich countries where traditional religion has waned. The devotion to God seems to give way to a reverence for nature’s beauty and transcendence. Environmentalists’ exhortations to reduce consumption and waste are teaching children some of the same self-control lessons offered in religious sermons and Victorian primers. Secular greens seem to be instinctively replacing one form of self-discipline with another, and one kind of rules with another: organic instead of kosher, sustainability instead of salvation.
    Nor is it just a coincidence that people who have set aside the Bible end up buying so many books with new sets of rules for living. They replace the Ten Commandments with the 12 Steps or the Eightfold Path or the 7 Habits. Even if they don’t believe in the God of Moses, they like the idea of codes on sacred tablets. These sorts of rules and dogmas may leave you cold—and make you nervous—but don’t dismiss them all as useless superstition. There’s another way to regard these rules, and it comes with enough statistical charts, mathematical game theory, and economic jargon to please the most secular scientists.

Bright Lines
    When Eric Clapton relapsed on that summer evening, when he drove by the pub and couldn’t resist stopping in for a drink, he was undone by what’s called “hyperbolic discounting.” The most precise way to explain that concept is with graphs and hyperbolas, but we’ll try a visual metaphor (mixed with an old allegory).
    Think of Eric Clapton on that Saturday evening as a repentant sinner who is literally on the road to salvation, like the hero of Pilgrim’s Progress, the seventeenth-century allegory. Suppose that he, too, is journeying toward a Celestial City. While traveling through the open countryside, he can see the city’s far-off golden spires and keeps heading in their direction. This evening he looks ahead and notices a pub, strategically situated at a bend in the road so that it’s directly in front of travelers. From this distance it looks like a small building, and he still keeps his eyes fixed on the grander spires of the Celestial City in the background. But as Eric the Pilgrim approaches the pub, it looms larger, and when he arrives, the building completely blocks his view. He can no longer see the golden spires in the distance. Suddenly the Celestial City seems much less important than this one little building. And thus, verily, our pilgrim’s progress endeth with him passed out on the pub’s floor.
    That’s the result of hyperbolic discounting: We can ignore temptations when they’re not immediately available, but once they’re right in front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals. George Ainslie, a renowned psychiatrist and behavioral economist with the Department of Veterans Affairs, worked out the mathematics of this foible by using some clever variations of the familiar experiments testing long-term and short-term rewards. For instance, if you won a lottery with a choice of prizes, would you prefer $100 to be paid six years from today, or $200 to be paid nine years from today? Most people will choose the $200. But what if the choice were between $100 today and $200 three years from today? A rational discounter would apply the same logic and conclude once again that the extra money is worth the wait, but most people will instead demand the quick $100. Our judgment is so distorted by the temptation of immediate cash that we irrationally devalue the future prize. Ainslie found that as we approach a short-term temptation, our tendency to discount the future follows the steep curve of a hyperbola, which is why this tendency is called hyperbolic discounting. As you devalue the future (like those heroin addicts in Vermont who couldn’t think beyond the next hour), you lose your concern about a hangover tomorrow, and you’re not focused on your vow to go through the rest of your life sober. Those future benefits now seem trivial in relation to the immediate pleasure at the pub. What’s the harm in stopping by for one drink?
    For many people, of course, there is no harm in stopping for a drink, just as some people (not many) can enjoy one cigarette at a party and

Weitere Kostenlose Bücher