Thinking and Deciding

490 DECISIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE
We can also make contracts with other people. We can agree, for example, to pay
a friend $100 if she catches us smoking, thus raising the cost. Some people rely on
the sunk-cost effect as a means of self-control, paying large amounts of money for
a “cure” of some bad habit (a smoking or alcohol clinic, a “fat farm,” a psychotherapist),
so that they are then motivated to maintain their new self-control in order to
make sure that “all the money does not go to waste.” (The additional cost of the
self-denial may be integrated with the money already spent, as described earlier.)
Control of attention. One can try to manipulate one’s attention so that one is not
reminded of the availability of a temptation. A person at a party who is also on a
diet may become deeply engrossed in conversation when the hors d’oeuvre tray is
passed around. A person who does not want to be sexually tempted may focus on
other things, avoiding the issue. 9 Attention control can be revoked at any time, so
it may require continued effort (unlike extrapsychic devices, which operate on their
own once they are put into effect).
Mischel and his colleagues have examined the use of attention-control strategies
in children (Mischel, 1984; Mischel and Mischel, 1983). In a typical experiment, a
child is told that she can receive two marshmallows when the experimenter returns,
or she can request and receive one marshmallow at any time before that. At issue
is how long the child waits before requesting the single marshmallow. Waiting is
easier when the marshmallow is covered up than when it is in view, and when the
child thinks about such things as the fluffiness of the marshmallow rather than about
the taste. Older children (and children with higher IQs) know these things and make
use of these attention-control strategies to help themselves wait. Preschool children
choose to keep the marshmallow in view and to think about its taste, almost guaranteeing
their failure.
Control of emotion. People can cultivate emotions incompatible with the emotion
associated with giving in to the temptation. A person who is afraid of getting angry
may cultivate friendliness. (If he is a poor actor, he will be perceived as “sickly
sweet.”) A woman afraid of being seduced may start a quarrel. Or a person may
simply refuse to let an emotion develop. 10
Personal rules. The most interesting mechanism is to make up rules for ourselves:
no more than three beers per evening; no more than one scoop of ice cream
per day, and so forth. The effect of these rules is to redefine the situation. Instead of
seeing a conflict between a fourth beer tonight and a clear head tomorrow morning,
we see a conflict between these two choices repeated over and over for the indefinite
future. By defining the situation this way, we ensure that our behavior tonight will
set a precedent for future behavior in situations that we have defined as the same, as
members of the same class. Therefore, if we give in to temptation tonight, we can
expect to give in on every other similar night. If we remember this rule when we are
9 Such efforts at attention control correspond to various “defense mechanisms” postulated by psychoanalytic
theory, such as repression, suppression, and denial. These defense mechanisms can be understood
as attempts at self-control. Indeed, Freudians would see them in similar terms, as the ego’s ways of mediating
the battle between superego and id.
10 These mechanisms correspond to the Freudian defenses of reaction-formation and isolation of affect.