🤺 Don't Battle Temptation, Preempt It
How pre-commitments prevent self-control failures
Before jumping into this week’s Brainlift, I hope you’re all doing well wherever you are! Last week, parts of my little town in New York were destroyed in a flood caused by Hurricane Ida. Our apartment complex was surrounded by 8 feet of water (pic below), we had no power for three days, and our car was fully submerged and destroyed. But with the help of some generous friends, we got through relatively unscathed and happy. My heart goes out to anyone who is suffering at the moment. Please stay safe.
Anyway, with that slightly terrifying image to distract you, it’s time to talk about self-control.
Doing nothing doesn’t always mean doing nothing. Sometimes, when you decide not to act on an impulse, there’s a whole drama playing out behind the scenes in your mind: “Oh I really want to do it”, “But I can’t do it because it’s not good for me”, “Maybe if I just did it this once”, etc.
In short, controlling yourself is highly effortful, and resisting temptation requires valuable energy. Now, researchers have found a way to calculate exactly how much self-control costs.
💵 How much would you pay to avoid self-control?
Last week, Raio & Glimcher published a paper titled “Quantifying the subjective cost of self-control in humans”. They recruited 138 dieting participants, made sure they were hungry, and then identified which foods each participant found most tempting.
Each participant then entered a repeating auction game in which they were given $10 and asked how much of it they would bid to avoid being stuck in a room with their favorite food. Each bid had only a 2% chance of reaching an auction, so participants were always incentivized to make their highest possible offer in order to maximize their chances of winning if they got to the rare auction stage. Whenever their bid didn’t make it to auction, they simply kept the $10 and waited for their next auction opportunity.
If people didn’t make it to auction on their first bid (i.e. 98% of the time), their favorite food was put on the table in front of them for 30 mins. Every few mins during that time, they had an opportunity to re-bid for another possible auction to remove the tempting food from the room.
On average, dieters were bidding ~15% of their $10 endowment to stop the pain of self-control (~$1.50). They wanted to keep the full $10 for themselves, but they were willing to give up a couple of bucks just to avoid the frustration of resisting temptation.
During the 30-min wait time, 22% of people grabbed their temptation and ate it, which goes to show just how tough self-control really is. Those people who ate the food were quite aware of their self-control weaknesses though. Their bids were twice as high as everyone else’s bids. People were also willing to pay more to avoid self-control if they felt stressed during the experiment.
The researchers came up with another plan to see whether they could increase people’s bids. They ran the experiment again but this time told everyone that there would be a $15-dollar penalty for eating the food during the 30-min wait.
With the new threat of a penalty for self-control failures, not a single person in the experiment ate the tempting food. But they were willing to pay more to avoid self-control. They were now bidding around $3—double what they were bidding in the first experiment. When there are bigger costs to failing at self-control, we get more desperate to avoid it altogether.
🍩 Pre-commitments
The bids in the experiments above were acting as “pre-commitments”. When we know that our self-control often fails us, we can work around it with ingenious strategies.
Pre-commitment puts us in a very different state of mind to self-control. It recruits different areas of the brain, and it doesn’t come with the same emotional baggage—willpower feels like effortful resistance while pre-commitment feels like a passive action completed in advance. So when you have the choice, pre-commitment seems like a sensible option.
There are plenty of examples of how we use pre-commitments in everyday life. For example, when it comes to our money—where impulsivity can be disastrous—we often voluntarily restrict our credit limits and refuse interest-free installment loans for big purchases. We understand that our self-control might let us down in the future.
A study published back in 2002 also looked at how students pre-commit to deadlines during their studies. In one study program at MIT, students had to submit three papers, but they could choose whether to pre-commit to progressive deadlines for each of them, or use the latest possible deadline for all three papers (i.e. the final lecture of the program).
A rational decision would be to choose the latest deadline, write up the papers whenever most convenient, and then give yourself the longest possible time to revise each paper before submitting everything at the final deadline. But only 27% of students chose this flexibility. The vast majority committed to earlier deadlines than necessary, even though missing those deadlines would come with grading penalties.
Students set themselves costly deadlines to preempt the possibility that they might procrastinate and start working on the papers too late. Freedom is great, but it often means we act in our short-term interest at the cost of our long-term interest. To prevent self-control failures, students quite literally restricted their own freedom by imposing unnecessary deadlines and penalty risks.
Of course, when preempting isn’t possible and you find yourself in the throes of self-control, you simply have to grit your teeth and do your best. Here’s a great 2-min video of kids fiercely battling temptation:
⭐️ Takeaway tips
There are many ways to avoid unhealthy actions but the most successful strategies involve some form of pre-commitment. Even if you have a strong self-control ability, you’ll have an easier time resisting your temptations if you remove the need to resist in the first place:
Keep temptations invisible: Unhealthy cravings are less likely to tempt you if you can’t see them—the greatest resistance begins when a temptation is staring you in the face. So in a supermarket, for example, a good pre-commitment strategy is to avoid the aisle that contains your favorite unhealthy snacks. Out of sight, out of mind.
Try temptation bundling: You can incentivize healthy but effortful actions (e.g. going to the gym) by pairing them with something you really love. If you pre-commit to listening to your favorite playlist or grabbing a tasty protein shake only when you go to the gym, you have one extra motivator to get up and go.
Make commitments public: The costs of failing a public commitment are greater than the costs of failing a private commitment. So like the students who voluntarily set themselves costly project deadlines, boost the intensity of your own commitments by pledging to healthier behaviors in front of friends and family. You then have several people holding you to account.
💡 A final quote
“Conquer thyself, till thou hast done this, thou art but a slave; for it is almost as well to be subjected to another's appetite as to thine own.”
~ Richard Francis Burton
❤️ If you enjoyed this, please share it with a few friends. If you’re new here, sign up below or visit erman.substack.com
📬 I love to hear from readers. Reach out any time with comments or questions.
👋 Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD