What Does Long-Term Thinking Feel Like from the Inside?

Epistemic status: at high risk of single-study syndrome.

In my post on growth mindset, I mentioned time preference. This got me thinking about what kind of thought causes high time preference (meaning impulsive, short-term decision-making) vs high. What kinds of thoughts, specifically, lead to impulsive vs considered behavior? It’s all-too-easy to sit down and create nice long-term plans, but then go right back to old habits like procrastination and comfortable ruts.

I got much of the information here from Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct. It’s a popularization; I don’t recommend it strongly to technical folks (I found all the stories and narration annoying, and wanted more critical evaluation of the facts). However, the end notes (which constitute a good fraction of the book!) make for a good annotated bibliography on the subject. I’m also drawing some references from the book 59 Seconds.

I have relatively low confidence in most of these ideas. It seems like a lot of the stuff is based on a few studies, and might not replicate. Nonetheless, perhaps it’s a bit better than personal anecdote and speculation.

Procrastination Equation

First, the most solid knowledge we have: the procrastination equation. This is actually a general theory of motivation, identifying four key factors in motivation (stealing an image from the article):

This is something of a fake equation; read the research article for actual math. However, this version gives a good summary of key factors. Expectancy times value is essentially the classical utility-times-probability from decision theory; so, that part is perfectly rational. Dividing by the delay models hyperbolic discounting. This is far from rational (it creates temporal inconsistency), but it’s also a somewhat fixed element of our psychology. Impulsiveness, however, is the factor I’ll mainly be addressing. It determines how much the delay matters.

The LessWrong article discusses how to use this equation to debug procrastination; we can do things like tweaking tasks to have higher expectancy (more reliable rewards) or lower delay. If you’re fighting procrastination, go have a look at those strategies; they’re more firmly established by evidence than what I’ll discuss here, for the most part. Impulsiveness is the biggest factor in procrastination, though. If the other strategies aren’t working, what else can we try and do to be more conscientious?

How about we make people more reflective?

Sliding just a bit down on our certainty scale: there seems to be something like reflexive vs reflective responses. Reflexive (IE, reflex-based) responses feel “automatic” and “out of our control”; reflective responses are able to modify these behaviors, inhibiting our automatic reactions or activating other patterns. Reflexive responses are associated with the midbrain; reflective responses are associated with the prefrontal cortex. (I’m purposefully hedging by saying “associated with”; many brain regions are involved in any behavior, but the midbrain and prefrontal cortex have been found to play a significant role in the reflexive-reflective distinction.) In addition, there are associations within the peripheral nervous system. Stress has a tendency to activate the impulsive reflexive decision-making system through the fight-or-flight response; this is associated with the sympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is associated with reflective thinking. Since the parasympathetic nervous system is associated with calmness, one might conclude that reflective thinking is as well; but, it’s a bit more complex. There appears to be a pause-and-plan response, distinct from calmness, which shares some features of a stress response but favors self-control rather than impulsiveness. This pause-and-plan response can be measured effectively by heart rate variability, which appears to be linked in both directions: performing tasks which require you to modulate your impulses creates high heart-rate variability, and also, high heart-rate variability before such a task predicts good performance at the task.

It seems to me that we can modulate this to a fair degree once we are aware of it. Common advice like counting to ten or focusing on slow, deep breaths seems likely to be helpful. Mindfulness techniques like self-distancing also seem likely to be helpful.

Value Affirmation & Moral Licensing

There’s some evidence that value-oriented thinking reduces impulsive behavior. Value affirmation is powerful. Spending 15 minutes writing about what you value has a long-lasting positive effect. However, it may also help to re-frame in terms of values more regularly.

As I discussed in The Internal Lawyer, there’s an effect called self-licensing which causes people to work against themselves. Suppose you are trying to lose weight. Exercising regularly may cause you to eat too much; you “license” one bad behavior in your head, justifying it with the other good behavior. This type of behavior has been observed in a variety of domains.

Before tying this back to value affirmation, let’s think more about why this might happen. I’ve come across three different explanations so far:

1. My “internal lawyer” story: we’re constantly thinking about how to justify our actions. When we do one positive thing for our goals, some part of us says “Aha, now I can do whatever I want!”. We’ve done enough work to push off criticism from the internal judge, so we lose motivation; this results in “licensing” ourselves to work against the progress we’ve made.
2. We seek to reward ourselves for doing well. This results in giving in to pleasurable activities when we’ve done more difficult things, in a way that looks like impulsive behavior, but is actually strategic self-reinforcement. If this sometimes causes us to work against ourselves, maybe that’s the exception rather than the rule; a reasonable loss for an overall beneficial self-management strategy. This is the explanation most people give for their contradictory actions, in my experience.
3. Humans manage a variety of desires, some of which contradict each other. We might desire to have a lot of money saved up in case of disaster, but simultaneously desire nice clothes, fancy electronics, and so on. We manage those desires by a sort of balancing act: desires which haven’t been acted on are felt more strongly, while those which have been acted on quiet down for a while. The result is that putting money away in savings can cause us to go on a shopping spree, undoing our progress. That’s the explanation favored by this paper.

In any case, it turns out that we don’t always act like this, at least not always to the same extent. That’s where value affirmation comes in. In a study in this paper, participants who were asked to evaluate their past actions in terms of progress displayed the usual moral licensing effect, whereas participants who were asked to evaluate their past actions in terms of commitment to their goals had a lessened effect. This sounds a lot like value-affirmation to me. Note, however, that the effect was measured in self-predictions, rather than actual performance, so the conclusion isn’t that strong. This paper offered participants hypothetical cake in a similar procedure. Some participants were asked to recall times where they resisted temptation; others were asked to recall times when they gave in. In both cases, a subset of these were asked to recall the reasons for their decisions as well. (A control group was also offered cake with none of these prompts.) Here are the results:

Recalling reasons appears to make impulsive people act like non-impulsive people, displaying consistency with past behavior rather than the usual reversal created by self-licensing. Perhaps “non-impulsives” habitually think about the reasons why they do what they do?

It’s also interesting that “non-impulsives” chose cake more often when reminded of past failures of willpower. We might hypothesize that non-impulsives think of reasons by default, but also think of past successes rather that failures by default. Impulsives would also appear to think of past successes more than past failures; but for them, this has the opposite effect. Since they don’t remember their reasons by default, thinking of past success leads to self-licensing. (This suggests that they’d be better off thinking of failures all the time; on the other hand, that could lead to depression or counterproductive avoidance behaviors. Shifting to recalling reasons by default seems wiser.)

On the other hand, it’s not clear how well this generalizes to decisionmaking in the wild. It seems like the moral licensing effect is well-supported in the literature, with real choices rather than multiple-choice questions as in the cake-or-salad study. Whether people really fall into “impulsive” and “non-impulsive” groups who act as described above is harder to say.

Counter-Productive Future Thoughts

Another scary result which comes up in a few other studies is that self-licensing appears to operate on hypothetical future behavior as well as actual past behavior. This way of thinking is familiar to procrastinators: you can constantly believe you’ll “do it tomorrow”, justifying slacking off today. The result, of course, is that you keep putting it off further and further until there is no tomorrow to push things off into; you end up doing everything at the last minute.

Perhaps remembering reasons is a sufficient safeguard in this case, like the case with past good behavior. However, there does seem to be a bit more going on here. This study investigates the effect of estimated future free time on decision-making, finding that we act as if we will have much more free time in the future than we eventually do. Perhaps we can try to be unrelentingly realistic about how much time we’ll find we have in the future, to decrease the bias.

A third possible solution is in the book The Science of Self Control, which suggests (based on experiments with smokers) that striving for consistent behavior helps to mitigate the effect. If you’re always thinking “I can do more work tomorrow to make up for it”, you’ll procrastinate. If you’re thinking “I’m trying to be consistent in how much I get done”, then taking today off directly implies taking tomorrow off (to keep it consistent!). For this mental trick to work, you’ve got to think of consistency as actually being more important — otherwise you’ll be tempted to cheat by doing better tomorrow to make up for slumps (and in reality, put this off indefinitely as usual). Instead, consistency has to be viewed as a foundation of performance. If you’re trying to be productive, first you need your productivity to be consistent. If you’re trying to quit smoking, first you need your smoking to be consistent. If you’re trying to eat well, first you need your diet to be consistent. You can’t move your behavior in the direction you want if it’s so unreliable to begin with.

Maybe that’s not for everyone. It’s possible to have very inconsistent, but very productive, work habits. It does seem like we’re constantly fooling ourselves, though, by imagining that our future behavior will be better (and more consistently good), and that we’ll have more free time, etc. I suspect thin is the internal lawyer again, watching how we can present ourselves to others. People like to hear optimistic versions of the future. When we don’t keep what we tell others separate from what we tell ourselves, this messes us up. (But remember, my internal-lawyer model is very made-up.)

Another thing that gets us twisted up is positive thinking. There’s all kinds of books and such that will advise you to vividly visualize your success. This is supposed to motivate you, setting you on the path to get what you want. Turns out, it has the opposite effect! Visualizing success predicts failure. It’s as if the positive visualization satisfies us, and we lose motivation to actually go get what we want. This shouldn’t be too surprising given what we’ve discussed so far. However, those same studies found that expecting success is still a predictor of success, as the positive thinkers would have you believe. It’s visualizing success that de-motivates. Those who visualized success but predicted failure ended up worse off. Those who visualized failure but predicted success were best off.

In terms of the procrastination equation, we need to feel a sufficiently high expectancy; yet, we also need to visualize failure. Why would this be? One reason might be the old motto: hope for the best, and prepare for the worst. Where visualizing positive outcomes lulls some part of us into stagnation, visualizing negative outcomes likely motivates us to deal with those possibilities. Several studies have suggested that mental contrasting, in which one purposefully thinks about both potential success and failure, compares well to thinking about success or failure alone. It stands to reason: to be motivated into action, we must believe that good things are possible if we act, and that bad things are possible if we don’t act.

This isn’t the only helpful way to use visualization, though. One study found that visualising “process” rather than “outcome” works. In the study, that meant visualizing studying rather than visualising getting a good grade. Other research has found that visualising the training process is useful for athletes, as well. It seems this helps form connections in the brain almost like real practice would.

This brings up another point from the procrastination equation, which is that we do better if we set our sights on short-term goals. Perhaps one reason visualizing success de-motivates rather than motivates is that it sets the goal far in the future. As discussed extensively in the previous section, it’s motivationally very important to keep our long-term goals in mind; but, I’d say it’s similarly important to translate these into actionable next steps. This implies a kind of dialog between long-term and short-term thinking. Long-term goals make us think about actionable next-steps, while thinking of single steps also bring to mind the long-term goals they’re connected to. This back-and-forth can be facilitated by another shift in thinking, which has to do with intrinsic vs extrinsic motives.

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

Not all self-affirmations are created equal. People who are instructed to give intrinsic motives get more benefit from value-affirmation than those who are instructed to give extrinsic motives. (I’ve seen a study which found that people who spontaneously give intrinsic reasons end up doing better than those who give extrinsic, too; but I can’t find it now.) Intrinsic motives are self-generated desires which have to do with the task at hand, such as raw pleasure, curiosity, and playfulness. Extrinsic motives are things like money and survival, for which we do many things we aren’t fundamentally interested in. Intrinsic motives have been observed to be better for inducing a flow state. Extrinsic motives may induce more of a fight-or-flight like response, increasing impulsiveness.

This is a paradoxical state of affairs! Those who are following immediate motives, doing what they are doing for the sake of doing it, do better in the long run. Such is human psychology. Luckily, human motives are also malleable. Even if you only went to school in order to make better money later, you can still do better by focusing more on intrinsic goals such as learning. Someone (I forget who) summarized this as: consequentialism is what’s true; but virtue ethics is what works. Our motivation system doesn’t work that well if it has to follow long chains of consequences to derive the value of an action. We work much better if we can think of particular actions as intrinsically good or bad. Take a cue from virtue ethics: don’t turn in work ahead of time because you fear the consequences of being late; do it because you value diligence (or value being ahead of the game; or whatever works for you).

I think this helps with the sort of back-and-forth value-action/action-value thinking I mentioned at the end of the previous section, because it brings actions and values close together. Actually, I feel like someone who writes about extrinsic motives in a value-affirmation exercise is sorta missing the point: you don’t really do things “for money”; money isn’t an end goal. It’s a sign you haven’t gone far enough in the chain of reasons, to find what you really enjoy in life.

In any case! That’s all I have for now. Here is a quick summary of the strategies:

Summary

1. Structure tasks in a way that respects the motivation equation. The brain likes things which grant visceral rewards with high probability and low delay. Improve any of those dimensions and you’re likely to improve your motivation.
2. Be more reflective. Breathe, count to ten, feel the soles of your feet, think of yourself from 3rd-person perspective. Observe and react to your impulses, rather than letting them control you.
3. Remember what you’re after. Remember what you value. Thinking of reasons rather than just actions increases consistency and commitment.
4. Be unrelentingly realistic about future time and behavior. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll have more free time tomorrow than today. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll procrastinate any less tomorrow, either.
5. Consistent performance is the foundation of good performance. Don’t let your internal lawyer fool you into making exceptions “just this once” because you can make it up later. Think of your behavior now as establishing a rule that you’ll have to follow next time as well.
6. Be optimistic, but visualize failure. You need high expectancy to be motivated, but it’s also important to be thinking of what could go wrong so that you don’t get complacent.
7. Visualize process, not outcome. A mental walk-through of what you need to do serves some of the same functions as actual practice. Also, thinking of process helps generate next steps, and possibly helps you think of more things that could go wrong and ways to counter them.
8. Consequentialism is what’s true, but virtue ethics is what works. The human motivation system works better if it values what it’s doing right now, rather than some future payoff.