The Irrational Bundle. Dan Ariely

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the rain. Within a few minutes the room had filled with half a dozen high-powered banking executives, including the head of the bank’s credit card division.

      I began by describing how procrastination causes everyone problems. In the realm of personal finance, I said, it causes us to neglect our savings—while the temptation of easy credit fills our closets with goods that we really don’t need. It didn’t take long before I saw that I was striking a very personal chord with each of them.

      Then I began to describe how Americans have fallen into a terrible dependence on credit cards, how the debt is eating them alive, and how they are struggling to find their way out of this predicament. America’s seniors are one of the hardest-hit groups. In fact, from 1992 to 2004 the rate of debt of Americans age 55 and over rose faster than that of any other group. Some of them were even using credit cards to fill the gaps in their Medicare. Others were at risk of losing their homes.

      I began to feel like George Bailey begging for loan forgiveness in It’s a Wonderful Life. The executives began to speak up. Most of them had stories of relatives, spouses, and friends (not themselves, of course) who had had problems with credit debt. We talked it over.

      Now the ground was ready and I started describing the self-control credit card idea as a way to help consumers spend less and save more. At first I think the bankers were a bit stunned. I was suggesting that they help consumers control their spending. Did I realize that the bankers and credit card companies made $17 billion a year in interest from these cards? Hello? They should give that up?

      Well, I wasn’t that naive. I explained to the bankers that there was a great business proposition behind the idea of a self-control card. “Look,” I said, “the credit card business is cutthroat. You send out six billion direct-mail pieces a year, and all the card offers are about the same.” Reluctantly, they agreed. “But suppose one credit card company stepped out of the pack,” I continued, “and identified itself as a good guy—as an advocate for the credit-crunched consumer? Suppose one company had the guts to offer a card that would actually help consumers control their credit, and better still, divert some of their money into long-term savings?” I glanced around the room. “My bet is that thousands of consumers would cut up their other credit cards—and sign up with you!”

      A wave of excitement crossed the room. The bankers nodded their heads and chatted to one another. It was revolutionary! Soon thereafter we all departed. They shook my hand warmly and assured me that we would be talking again, soon.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ