Choices and Actions: The Self in Control

© 2014 Wadsworth Cengage Learning

1. When people are thinking about the details of an action, they are more likely to be influenced by others.2. Individuals who feel that abilities are fixed and stable are more likely to choose challenging tasks than those who believe abilities to be changeable.3. After we’ve set a goal, we become more optimistic thinkers than when we are setting goals.4. When asked their most pessimistic estimate for finishing a task people are usually very accurate in their predictions. 5. People suffer less stress in a situation if they believe they can get out of it than if they believe they must remain in that situation, even if they don’t ever leave the situation.6. When asked whether they would like to take $1000 today or $1200 in two weeks most people would choose the $1000 today.7. Even when a new boyfriend might be nicer, more fun, and richer, women tend to stick with the boyfriend they have.8. Keeping track of where you spend your money will not affect how you spend your money.9. Some people actively try to fail and do things that will hurt them because they fear success.10. Children that are able to delay gratification will be more successful in their adult life.11. Suicide rates are higher in richer countries, in the pleasant months of the year.

 

• What You Do, and What It Means• Freedom of Action• Goals, Plans, Intentions• Self-Regulation• Irrationality and Self-Destruction

• Consider the story of Kim Hyun Hee, who blew up Korean Airlines Flight 858• What themes of human action does this story highlight?

• Which aspects of the situation contributed to Hee’s behavior?

• When has your behavior not matched your beliefs?

• To understand human behavior you must understand the meaning for the behavior.

• Human behavior is guided by ideas and is partly dependent on meaning.

• Culture is a network of meaning and humans who live in culture act based on meaning.

• Meaning depends on language and is learned through culture.

• Inner processes (thoughts, feelings, and motivations) serve interpersonal functions. (Built to relate)

• Imagining something makes it more likely to happen

• Imagining a good outcome is not has effective as imagining yourself doing all the hard work to produce the success.

• 18 Holes in His Mind – Major Nesmith

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WpNSImh6Z8&list=PLMTCsY2CLsf3BnYRIWmSofx3P5MXjn_Da&feature=share&index=10

• Human life is full of choices• The two steps to making choices

• Whittle the range of choices to a few• Carefully compare the remaining options

Decision making•Risk aversion – greater weight is given to possible losses than possible gains.•Temporal discounting – the greater weight is given to the present over the future.•Certainty effect – the greater weight is given to definite outcomes than to probabilities.•Keeping options open – People prefer to postpone decisions rather than make them right away.

• Status quo bias

• Omission bias

How does reactance shape human desires?How do people react when told they can’t have something?•You want the forbidden option more•You need to reassert your freedom•You feel aggression towards the person restricting your freedomHow are people motivated to gain and preserve their choices?

• Entity theory: good and bad traits are innate and permanent (people are the way they are)

• Incremental theory: traits can change and be improved upon (people can change)

• Which theory, entity or incremental, do you subscribe to? Why?

• Why are entity theorists more subject to learned helplessness?

• Do people have free will?• How do external factors constrain decision-making?

• When are people able to make choices freely?

• Self-determination theory: people work better if they are intrinsically motivated

• What other benefits do perceived autonomy produce?• Consider the panic button effect

• How does gender influence decisions about sex?

• Why are men less inhibited about sex?• Error management theory – minimize the most costly type of error, yet they identify different errors

• Roots in evolutionary theory• Temporal discounting

• Goals• Ideas of some desired future state• Link between values and action

• How are goals influenced by inner processes and cultural factors?

• Why is setting and pursuing goals a vital job of the self?

• Setting goals• Choosing among possible goals• Evaluating their feasibility and desirability

• Pursuing goals• Planning and carrying out behaviors to reach goals

• How do both deliberate and automatic systems help us pursue goals?• Which system helps people set goals?• Which helps us resume activity after interruption?

• Which system reminds us of the goal when we lose our focus?

• How can the Zeigarnik effect explain how the two systems work together?

• How does the hierarchy of goals help people succeed in life?

• Goal shielding: shutting off thoughts of other goals while pursuing a single goal• How is goal shielding helpful? How can it have a negative effect?

• How does making plans help people accomplish goals?

• How can making plans be detrimental to reaching goals?• Why would monthly plans be more likely to lead to success than daily plans?

• Planning fallacy: the belief that your project will finish on time, even though you know most similar projects don’t• How does the optimistic bias lead to planning fallacy?

• People plan differently for short- versus long-term goals

• How can you combat planning errors with your own goals?

• Effective self-regulation relies on:• Standards: ideas of how things could be• Monitoring: keeping track of behaviors• Capacity to change: aligning behavior with standards

• Willpower can be depleted• Resisting temptation uses up willpower• Consider the chocolate vs. radishes experiment:

• Which group showed more willpower? • Which group was more successful at their tasks?

• What can self-regulation theory tell us about how to succeed at dieting?• Commitment to standards

• Set high and low level goals• Monitoring

• Keep track of what you eat• Willpower/capacity to change

• Decrease other demands to increase strength for dieting

• How do habits represent past goals?• How can habits help you pursue current goals?

• How can habits be detrimental to achieving goals?

• What are some examples of self-defeating behaviors?

• How does self-defeating behavior poke holes at traditional theories that people are rational beings?

• Self-defeating acts result from:• Tradeoffs• Faulty knowledge and strategies

• Inability to delay gratification is one type of self-defeating behavior• Overemphasizing the present rather than the future

• Sight of rewards undermines self-control• Ability to delay gratification as a child turned into more success as an adult

• In what other ways must gratification be delayed?

• Is the ultimate in self-destructive behavior.• It involves a tradeoff between continued suffering and immediate cessation of those feelings.

• Individuals who commit suicide were often highly self-aware.

• Suicidal people feel that they are a burden to hose around them.

• One theory cannot account for all suicides. Individuals have other reasons to commit suicide, such as the reasons held by suicide bombers.

• Fits the now-versus-future pattern• Willing to trade away future to end present suffering

• Humans have an elaborate inner system for controlling behavior

• Humans think about the present and future and think about different levels of meaning.

• Human capacities link events in the distant past to those in the future.

• Humans can use complex reasoning and engage in self-regulation.

• Self-directed action can also have its dark side, namely irrational/self-destructive behavior

• In what ways do humans have free will? In what ways do we not?

• How do self-regulation and self-destructive behaviors illustrate free will or the lack thereof?

• Human behavior is guided by many factors

• Humans break complex tasks, such as making a choice or pursuing a goal, into smaller steps

• Self-regulation and self-destructive tendencies often guide human behaviors