Predictably Irrational (17 page)

Well, they never called me back. (It might have been that they were worried about losing the $17 billion in interest charges, or maybe it was just good old procrastination.) But the idea is still there—a self-control credit card—and maybe one day someone will take the next step.

Reflections on Immediate Gratification and
Self-Control

Oscar Wilde once said, “I never put off till tomorrow what I can do the day after.” He seemed to accept and even embrace the role of procrastination in his life, but most of us find the allure of immediate gratification so strong that it wrecks our best-laid plans for dieting, saving money, cleaning the house—the list is endless.

When we have problems with self-control, sometimes we delay tasks that we should do immediately. But we also exhibit problems with self-control when we attend too frequently to tasks that we should put off—such as obsessively checking our e-mail.

The danger of continually checking e-mail was crucial in the plotline of the movie
Seven Pounds
: Will Smith's character checks his phone for e-mail while driving and veers head-on into an oncoming van, killing his wife and six other people. This is just a movie, of course, but compulsively checking e-mail while driving is more common than most of us would care to admit (go ahead, raise your hand
*
).

I hope that you're not that addicted to e-mail, but too many of us suffer from an unhealthy attachment to it. A recent Australian report found that workers spent an average of 14.5 hours, or more than two working days a week, checking, reading, arranging, deleting, and responding to e-mail.
⁸
Add to this the rise of social networks and news groups, and you can most likely double the time we spend in virtual interaction and message management.

I, for one, have very mixed feelings about e-mail. On one hand, it lets me communicate with colleagues and friends all over the world without the delays of snail mail or the constraints of talking on the phone. (Is it too late to call? What time is it in Auckland anyway?) On the other hand, I receive hundreds of messages a day, including many involving things I don't really care about (announcements, minutes of meetings, and so on). Regardless of whether I care, the ongoing stream of e-mail is a constant distraction.

I once tried to overcome this distraction by resolving to check e-mail only at night, but I quickly discovered that this would not do. Other people expected me to do as they do—check e-mail constantly and rely on it as a sole means of communication. As a result of not checking my e-mail regularly, I ended up going to meetings that had been canceled, or arriving at the wrong time or place. So I gave in, and now I check e-mail way too often, and as I do I constantly sort the messages into categories: spam and unimportant e-mail that I delete right away; messages I might care about or need to respond to at some point in the future; messages I need to respond to immediately; and so on.

In bygone days the mail cart came around the office once or twice a day with a few letters and memos—not so with e-mail, which never takes a break. For me, the day goes like this: I start working on something and get deeply into it. Eventually I get stuck on some difficult point, and decide to take a quick break—obviously, to check e-mail. Twenty minutes later I get back to the task, with little recollection of where I was and what I was thinking. By the time I'm back on track, I've lost both time and some of my focus, and this outcome assuredly does not help me solve whatever problem caused me to take five in the first place.

Sadly, this is not where the story ends. Enter smart phones—an even greater time sink. A while ago I got one of these lovely, distracting gadgets in the form of an iPhone, which meant that I could also check e-mail while waiting in a checkout line, walking into the office, riding in the elevator, while listening to other people's lectures (I haven't yet figured out how to do this during my own lectures), and even while sitting at traffic lights. In truth, the iPhone has made the level of my addiction very clear. I check it almost ceaselessly. (Businesspeople recognize the addictive properties of these devices: this is why they often call their BlackBerries “CrackBerries.”)

I
THINK E-MAIL
addiction has something to do with what the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner called “schedules of reinforcement.” Skinner used this phrase to describe the relationship between actions (in his case, a hungry rat pressing a lever in a so-called Skinner box) and their associated rewards (pellets of food). In particular, Skinner distinguished between fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Under a fixed schedule, a rat received a reward of food after it pressed the lever a fixed number of times—say 100 times. (To make a human comparison, a used-car dealer might get a $1,000 bonus for every 10 cars sold.) Under the variable schedule, the rat earned the food pellet after it pressed the lever a random number of times. Sometimes it would receive the food after pressing 10 times, and sometimes after pressing 200 times. (Analogously, our used-car dealer would earn a $1,000 bonus after selling an unknown number of cars.)

Thus, under the variable schedule of reinforcement, the arrival of the reward is unpredictable. On the face of it, one might expect that the fixed schedules of reinforcement would be more motivating and rewarding because the rat (or the used-car dealer) can learn to predict the outcome of his work. Instead, Skinner found that the variable schedules were actually more motivating. The most telling result was that when the rewards ceased, the rats who were under the fixed schedules stopped working almost immediately, but those under the variable schedules kept working for a very long time.

This variable schedule of reinforcement also works wonders for motivating people. It is the magic (or, more accurately, dark magic) that underlies gambling and playing the lottery. How much fun would it be to play a slot machine if you knew in advance that you would always lose nine times before winning once, and that this sequence would continue for as long as you played? It would probably be no fun at all! In fact, the joy of gambling comes from the inability to predict when rewards are coming, so we keep playing.

So, what do food pellets and slot machines have to do with e-mail? If you think about it, e-mail is very much like gambling. Most of it is junk and the equivalent to pulling the lever of a slot machine and losing, but every so often we receive a message that we really want. Maybe it contains good news about a job, a bit of gossip, a note from someone we haven't heard from in a long time, or some important piece of information. We are so happy to receive the unexpected e-mail (pellet) that we become addicted to checking, hoping for more such surprises. We just keep pressing that lever, over and over again, until we get our reward.

This explanation gives me a better understanding of my e-mail addiction, and more important, it might suggest a few means of escape from this Skinner box and its variable schedule of reinforcement. One helpful approach I've discovered is to turn off the automatic e-mail-checking feature. This action doesn't eliminate my checking, but it reduces the frequency with which my computer notifies me that I have new e-mail waiting (some of it, I would think to myself, must be interesting or relevant). Additionally, many applications allow users to link different colors and sounds to different incoming e-mail. For example, I assign every e-mail on which I'm cc'd to the color gray, and send it directly to a folder labeled “Later.” Similarly, I set my application to play a particularly cheerful sound when I receive a message from a source I've marked as urgent and important (these include messages from my wife, students, or members of my department). Sure, it takes some time to set up such filters, but having once gone to the trouble of doing so, I've reduced the randomness of the reward, made the schedule of reinforcement more fixed, and ultimately improved my life. As for overcoming the temptations of checking my iPhone too frequently—I am still working on that one.

Further Reflection on Self-Control:
The Lesson of Interferon

Several years ago I heard an interview on NPR with the Delany sisters, who lived to be 102 and 104. There was one particular part of the interview that remained with me. The sisters said that one of their secrets for a long life was never marrying, because they never had husbands to “worry them to death.” This sounds reasonable enough, but it isn't something to which I can personally attest (and it also turns out that men benefit more from marriage anyway).
²⁸
One of the sisters said that another secret was to avoid hospitals, which seemed sensible for two reasons—if you're healthy in the first place, you don't need to go, and you're also less likely to catch an illness from being in the hospital.

I certainly understood what she was talking about. When I was first hospitalized for my burns, I acquired hepatitis from a blood transfusion. Obviously, there's no good time to get hepatitis, but the timing could not have been worse for me. The disease increased the risks of my operations, delayed my treatment, and caused my body to reject many of the skin transplants. After a while the hepatitis subsided, but it still slowed my recovery by flaring up from time to time and wreaking havoc on my system.

This was in 1985, before my type of hepatitis had been isolated; the doctors knew it wasn't hepatitis A or B, but it remained a mystery, so they just called it non-A-non-B hepatitis. In 1993, when I was in graduate school, I had a flare-up; I checked into the student health center and the doctor told me I had hepatitis C, which had recently been isolated and identified. This was good news for two reasons. First, I now knew what I had, and second, a new experimental treatment, interferon, looked promising. Given the threat of liver fibrosis, cirrhosis, and the possibility of early death from hepatitis C, it seemed to me that being part of an experimental study was clearly the lesser of two evils.

Interferon was initially approved by the FDA for treatment of hairy cell leukemia (which has no other real treatment) and, as is often the case with cancer therapy, the treatment regimen was particularly distasteful. The initial protocol called for self-injections of interferon three times a week. I was warned that after each injection I would experience fever, nausea, headaches, and vomiting, and this warning was accurate. So, for six months on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I would arrive home from school, take the needle from the medicine cabinet, open the refrigerator, load the
syringe with the right dosage of interferon, and plunge the needle into my thigh. Then I would lie down in the big
hammock—the only interesting piece of furniture in my loftlike student apartment—from which I had a perfect view of the television. I kept a bucket within reach to catch the vomit that would inevitably come up, after which the fever, shivering, and headache would begin. At some point I would fall asleep and wake up aching with flulike symptoms. By noon I would be more or less OK and would go back to work.

The difficulty that I, and the rest of the patients, had with the interferon was the basic problem of delayed gratification and self-control. On every injection day I was faced with a trade-off between giving myself an injection and feeling sick for the next 16 hours (a negative immediate effect), and the hope that the treatment would cure me in the long term (a positive long-term effect). At the end of the six-month trial the doctors told me that I was the only patient in the protocol who had followed the regimen in the way they designed it. Everyone else in the study skipped the medication numerous times, which was hardly surprising, given the challenges. (Lack of medical compliance is, in fact, a very pervasive problem.)

So how did I do it? Did I simply have nerves of steel? No. Like anyone else, I have plenty of problems with self-control. But I did have a trick. I basically tried to harness my other desires in an effort to make the prospect of the terrible injection more bearable. For me, the key was movies.

I love movies. If I had the time, I would watch one every day. When the doctors told me what to expect, I decided that I would not watch any movies until after I injected myself, and then I could watch as many as I wanted until I fell asleep.

On every injection day, I would stop at the video store on the way to school and pick up a few films that I wanted to see. I would have these in my bag and would eagerly anticipate watching them later that day. Then, immediately after I took the injection, but before the shivering and headache set in, I jumped into my hammock, got comfortable, made sure the bucket was in position, and started my mini–film fest. This way, I learned to associate the initial injection with the rewarding experience of watching a wonderful movie. Only an hour later, after the negative side effects kicked in, did I have a less than wonderful feeling about it.

Planning my evenings in this way helped my brain associate the injection more closely with the movie than with the fever, chills, and vomiting, and thus, I was able to continue the treatment.

D
URING THE SIX-MONTH
treatment, it looked as though the interferon was working, and my liver function improved dramatically. Unfortunately, a few weeks after the trial was over, the hepatitis returned, so I started a more aggressive treatment. This one lasted a year and involved not only interferon but also a drug called ribavirin. To compel myself to follow this treatment, I again tried the injection-movie-hammock procedure as before. (Thanks to my somewhat faulty memory, I was even able to enjoy some of the same movies I had watched during the first treatment with interferon.)

This time, however, I was also interviewing at various universities for a job as an assistant professor. I had to travel to 14 cities, stay overnight in hotels, give a talk to groups of academics, and then submit to one-on-one interviews with professors and deans. To avoid telling my prospective colleagues about my adventures with interferon and ribavirin, I would insist on a rather strange schedule of interviews. I routinely had to make some excuse about why I arrived early the day before the interview but could not go out for dinner that evening with my hosts. Instead, I would check into the hotel, take out the injection from a little icebox that I carried with me, inject myself, and watch a few movies on the hotel television. The following day I would also try to delay the interviews for a few hours, but once I felt better I would go through the interview as best I could. (Sometimes my procedure worked; sometimes I had to meet people while I still felt wretched.) Fortunately, after I finished my interviews I received excellent news. Not only had I been offered a job, but the combination treatment had eliminated the hepatitis from my liver. I've been hepatitis-free ever since.