In the movie, Young Frankenstein, the hero asks his assistants to lock him in a room and commands them not to open the door, no matters how terribly he may scream or how hard he may cry. He knows he will want to come out, so he enlists others to subordinate his later wishes according to the present wishes, which he prefers now. This is called precommitment in the field of self-control studies because it involves acting now against the strength of some later desires, either by taking some options off the table or making them prohibitively costly.
The economists Dean Karlan and John Romalis had a similar concept in the form of a pact to control and reduce their body weight. They had this cleaver little deal that each would have to lose 38 pounds in six months or forfeit half of one’s annual salary to the other. If both failed, the one who lost less would forfeit a quarter of his income to the other. They both lost weight but Romali’s weight popped back up over the limit and Karlan collected $15000 from the other. Karlan had to accept the amount to keep the credibility of the system, without which they’d both get fat.
Karlan, now a professor in Yale, embarked on a venture www.stickK.com, based on precommitment. It enables users to contractually control our own actions, or if violated the agreement, face a penalty that we have chosen. The website has a rakish motto: "Put a contract out on yourself!". There are several ready-made binding agreements to lose weight, quit smoking, exercise regularly or any thing which you want to set as goals. You can choose your own agreement, terms and referee - who would monitor your progress on the set goals.
There could be many other ways to impose the fine other than just monetary, like sending an email to friend or group regarding your failure of achieving the goal. If money is involved, the stick.com would transfer the money to charity or a friend that you have chosen whenever you fail. The website doesn’t take you money whether you fail or succeed other than just the transaction fee.
If you want achieve your goal at any cost, make your risk very high if you lose. You can do so by picking an enemy (called Anti-Charity) who will get the incentive if you fail in your goal. This will have highest achieving rate as you wouldn’t like to lose to your enemy.
A similar venture is Gym-Pact which is specifically to achieve exercise related goals. The catch here is one have to specify how many days one would visit the Gym and the extra amount paid for each missed day.
One can rely only on will power, but precommitment come handy to prevent yielding to sudden desire at later point of time as we know no one is perfect.
Savings and Lottery
Giving the poor an opportunity to precommit for the saving increased their overall saving remarkably by 81%. People were given a piggy bank whose key is with a bank and were not allowed to open their savings till a specified date. This kind of experiment worked as individuals are restrained into eating their savings.
For the retirement accounts, many people prefer early-withdrawal penalties because they knew how susceptible they would be to the temptation of crack open their own nest eggs and they want the barriers left in place to keep themselves away.
Some people put their money in the numbers game, where people bet $1 or half on a three digit number and if they get lucky, they would get around 500$. The odd of winning the lottery is 1 in 1000 and hence they would get $500 for every 1000 bettings. Even though it is a negative interest on saving, but the people are saving at the first place compared to spending the dollar or two.
Paternalism
Human beings have inertia in their lives. They go with default option unless it is very much required them to change it. For example, the automatic enrollment of employees in 401K saving scheme in a company had increased the employee enrollment to 86% from 49% just by changing the default option from self-enrolment to automatic enrollment.
StcikK.com helps people to do this kind of thing for themselves. It allows people to decide which long-term goals they embrace, in effect by becoming their own paternalists. As Vito Corleone might have put it, stickK.com wants you to make yourself an offer you can’t refuse. J
People
Human relationships are important in many ways in the society, but in the self-control arena we are dependent on them as we simply cannot bind our own wills without the help of other people. It is always advisable to tell everyone or blog about your goals/resolutions. You are more likely to uphold them since your reputation is at stake and this acts as a moderating force.
Speed and proximity kill self-control; it pays to keep a buffer of time and space between you and the most dubious gratifications. The Wall Street Journal cities the example of a person who destroyed the online access code for his 401k so he could no longer have instant access to his retirement accounts. His goal was to make it significantly harder and to require human interaction before he could take out money from the account.
Summary: Self-regulation will always be a challenge, unless somebody is going to be in charge (it might as well be ourselves).
-Vish
