Chapter 4 - Behavior Control

• What You Do, and What It Means

• Freedom and Choice

• Self-Regulation

• Irrationality and Self-Destruction

Behavior Control

• Korean Air Lines Flight 858 - Kim Hyun Hee

• Themes about human behavior– Influence of values and culture– Trust and obedience of cultural leader– Working as a team– Planned action, focus on details, and goals

at different levels– Quest for good backfired

What You Do, and What It Means

• Human actions are based on meaning– Meaning is learned by culture

• Thinking allows you to make use of meaning– Perform action mentally before physically

• Imaging something makes it more likely to happen

Levels of Meaning

• “By” test to differentiate level of meaning

• Higher levels - more meaningful

• Focus on lower levels to solve problems

• Higher level may invoke guilt; lower level focuses on details of operation

Changing Meaning

• Focus on low level of meaning– More vulnerable to influence and change

views

• Focus on high level of meaning– Change behavior by shifting to a low level

and then back to high level of meaning

Different Meanings, Same Level

• Entity theorists– Enjoy doing things at which they succeed– Learned helplessness

• Incremental theorists– Enjoy learning, challenges– Strive to improve performance

Goals, Plans, Intentions

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

• Goals are influenced by inner processes and cultural factors

• Setting and pursuing goals is a vital job of the self

Goals, Plans, Intentions

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

• Pursuing goals– Planning and carrying out behaviors to

reach goals

Goals, Plans, Intentions

• Mindsets of setting and pursuing goals differ– Setting goals – realistic– Pursuing goals – optimistic

• Goals help individuals resume an activity after interruption

Goals, Plans, Intentions

• Conscious and automatic systems help pursue goals– Conscious system helps set goals; resume

activity after interruption; devise alternative plans

– Automatic system reminds us of the goal

• Zeigarnik effect

Goals, Plans, Intentions

• Interlinked, hierarchy of goals– Distal and proximal goals

• Planning– Focus attention on reaching goal– Specific guidelines on what to do– Motivate people to work on goals

Goals, Plans, Intentions

• Plans that are too detailed or rigid can be discouraging

• Plans tend to be overly optimistic

• Overly optimistic plans– Planning fallacy– Future versus short term plans

Freedom and Choice

Freedom of Action

• More or Less Free– Sometimes constrained by external factors– Other times can freely choose

• Self-determination theory

• Perceived freedom produces benefits– Panic button effect

Making Choices

• Two Steps to making choices– Whittle the range of choices to limited few– Carefully compare the remaining options

Influences on Choice

• Risk aversion

• Temporal discounting

• Certainty effect

• Keeping options open– Status quo bias– Omission bias

Is Bad Stronger Than Good?Avoiding Losses Versus Pursuing Gains

• Bad outcome of losing has a stronger effect than the good outcome of winning– More willing to take a gamble versus a

certain loss

• People are influenced more by what they stand to lose than what they stand to gain.

The Social Side of Sex Gender, Sex, and Decisions

• Genders based decision to pursue sex on different factors– Error management theory– Roots in evolutionary theory– Temporal discounting

• Men’s mind-set emphasizes the present and discounts the future

Reactance Theory

• ‘Reverse psychology’

• Consequences– Makes you want the forbidden option more– Reasserting your freedom– Aggression toward person restricting your

freedom

• People are motivated to gain and preserve their choices

Self-Regulation

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

with standards

Undermining Monitoring

• Dieting – Eat more while watching television– Eating binges – lose track of monitoring

• Alcohol intoxication– Reduces attention to self – Difficult to self-regulate

Self-Regulation

• Capacity to change – Willpower– Willpower can be depleted

• Resisting temptation uses up willpower– With practice, can be strengthened

Food for Thought Dieting as Self-Regulation

• Self-regulation principles for effective dieting– Commitment to standards

• High and low level goals– Monitoring

• Keeping track of what you eat– Willpower/Capacity to change

• Decrease other demands to increase strength for dieting

Irrationality and Self-Destruction

Self-Defeating Acts

• Paradoxical– Rational beings acting irrationally

• People almost never directly seek failure, suffering or misfortune

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

Self-Defeating Acts

• Self-defeating Tradeoffs– Frequent when reward is immediate; cost

delayed– Self-handicapping

• Faulty knowledge and strategies– “I do my best work under pressure”

Tradeoffs - Now Versus Tomorrow:Delay of Gratification

• Self-defeating behaviors– Overemphasize the present rather than the

future

• Capacity to delay gratification– Seeing what you wants stimulates greater

desire for it

• Resist temptations by avoiding the sight or thought of it

Life’s Temptations

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Suicide

• Extreme irrational, self-destructive behavior

• Often involves tradeoffs

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

suffering

What Makes Us Human?

• Humans have an elaborate inner system for controlling behavior– Make choices in novel ways– Link here-and-now with distant realities– Use complex reasoning processes– Better developed self-regulation– Capacity for self-destructive behavior