Willful

by Richard Robb

  Nozick concedes that “the situation is … complicated.”12 Yet no one would suggest that a person who is hungry has to solve a brainteaser to know what to do. This puzzle arises from mistaking intertemporal choice for a preference that can be added together with other preferences. Satisfying hunger and obtaining nourishment are inputs into our utility function; discounting the future is not. Nor is it a desire that can be traded off for, or combined with, other desires.

  The answer to the puzzle, then, is: no, don’t add the two factors together. A person who expects to live a long time might be frugal and discount by 2 percent, but if he learns he’s about to die, he might logically wish to abandon his previous plan and live it up.

  9

  Homo Economicus and Homo Ludens

  A few years ago, I joined a game of football in Central Park with strangers. The teams were evenly matched. While the game was under way, both sides wanted to win. But why did they care? Why did I? I had never seen my teammates or opponents before and would never see them again. There was no prize for winning, no lasting increase in status. During that hour, my experience was essentially dynamic. I was caught in the flow, seeking victory. Shortly after the game was over, I forgot the final score.

  According to rational choice, I should have been willing to trade victory at some rate of exchange. So how much would I have paid for a touchdown? The truth is that even if I could have paid a sum of money to guarantee victory without anyone knowing, I wouldn’t have considered it. Victory in that game couldn’t have been meaningfully traded off for other things. But although I couldn’t have put a price on winning, it wasn’t some priceless treasure that transcends money, like the lives of my children. It was an essentially arbitrary aim that only mattered while the process was taking place. The point was not to win, but to struggle to win and meet each new challenge as it arose. For a professional football player, winning may be purposeful because it maximizes his earning prospects. But if he also loves to play and forgets about the money in the middle of a game, then he is not merely optimizing.

  I am aware that there is a price for nearly everything, including the outcome of a low-stakes football game. If a top-hatted man had interrupted the game to offer me $1 million to lose intentionally and I trusted that he was not playing a trick, I would have taken the money. (I would also have thrown the game for considerably less than that, of course.) Apart from the $1 million, engaging with this odd benefactor would be a kind of adventure, a game of its own. I’d want to take the money to see what it was all about. But this sort of offer doesn’t usually arise, and since I am interested in explaining everyday activity, this thought experiment doesn’t tell us much.

  While the Central Park football game unfolded, my interest in winning couldn’t be shoehorned into purposeful choice. As we saw in Chapter 8, no sensible model leads to “preferences” for different paths through time, even given perfect information about the future. A come-from-behind victory in my football game might have been in some sense better than winning easily, and winning easily would be better than losing, but “better” doesn’t really apply here because the different paths can’t be ranked.

  Before the mathematization of economics in the mid-twentieth century, it was not radical for economists to recognize that people care about the process as well as results.1 By this, the economists didn’t mean some version of what we now call cognitive bias—the manufacturer whom Alfred Marshall described in Chapter 2 as motivated more by the pursuit of victory than increasing his wealth is not making a mistake.2

  Thorstein Veblen pointed out that rational choice (or “marginal utility theory,” as he called it) “offers no theory of a movement of any kind, being occupied with the adjustment of values to a given situation … For all their use of the term ‘dynamic,’ neither Mr. [John Bates] Clark nor any of his associates in this line of research have yet contributed anything at all appreciable to a theory of genesis, growth, sequence, change, process, or the like, in economic life.”3 “Genesis, growth, sequence, change, [and] process” are not minor matters; they are fundamental to our experience. An additional theory is needed to stand alongside purposeful choice and address those facets of life that it ignores.

  Johan Huizinga’s Homo ludens, the playing/sporting human, in contrast to Homo economicus, embodies Keynes’s view of time as “organic rather than atomistic.”4 Huizinga defined play as “a free activity … connected with no material interest … It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.”5 Dancing would be an equally good metaphor. Huizinga frames action as a continuous flow rather than a sequence of discrete moments. Instead of adhering to plans that are dictated by preferences, the Homo ludens chooses how to respond to new scenarios as they arise and which challenges to tackle. These choices and the ensuing struggle are for-itself.

  This depiction of choice through time shares elements with prospect theory, an influential thrust of behavioral economics. In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky proposed this psychological account of various anomalies such as the tendency to become more risk averse when confronting small losses rather than small gains or to take inordinate risks to earn back previous losses. According to prospect theory, a person facing choice under uncertainty begins by computing a base-case outcome or reference point, then characterizes each outcome as a gain or loss relative to that reference point. As in for-itself choosing, in prospect theory the status quo anchors decisions no matter the circumstances or probabilities, and the decision-maker pushes ahead from there.

  Because prospect theory assumes that choices are fully determined by preferences, however, it cannot provide a dynamic account of how individuals navigate through time. Nor does it allow for unpredictable behavior. In the for-itself framework, choosing involves will, so observers cannot predict precisely which challenges people will embrace.

  For-Itself Action Involves Free Choice

  At some point, we must stop calculating and act. Keynes attributed this “spontaneous urge to action” to “animal spirits.”6 By this he meant much more than “irrational exuberance.” He meant instead the exercise of will that lies at the heart of all action.7 Rational choice economics allows for no such spirits: choice happens automatically within a world the individual did not create. The individual encounters only the outcome. But these spirits are at home within for-itself theory, in which the act of choosing, of overcoming the state of indeterminacy that prevails before the choice is made, is crucial and the outcome often less important than we might imagine.

  This is not to say that the way a choice is made can never matter in the purposeful realm. It can, in the service of self-interest. In the Western movie Shane, Joe Starrett tries to drive Shane off his land. Shane says he’ll leave after Starrett puts down his gun. Starrett asks what difference it makes when Shane is leaving anyway. Shane answers, “I’d like it to be my idea.” Shane, a tough guy, cares about how he leaves. He’s better off proving that he can’t be pushed around. Meek, polite people, too, can care about how choices are made. In an example from Amartya Sen, you want to sit in the most comfortable chair at a garden party but don’t want to be a “chair grabber.”8 You’ll sit there only if the host insists. You’d like it not to be your idea.

  These calculated choices contrast with true acts of will, which are experienced as free. They are not dictated by preexisting preferences or an authority who oppresses us. Of course, this freedom isn’t absolute, since we always face rules and constraints to varying degrees. Chess is no fun unless you play strictly by the book, but in a friendly baseball game, there’s a lot of leeway for adapting rules to the conditions and number of players.9

  Consumers, too, operate within constraints but still want to feel that their decisions arise without coercion. A good salesperson does not push too hard or seek to rob the consumer of the experience of choice. Perhaps this is why ads don’t generally focus on conveying information that makes an airtight case for the product.
Singers on a hilltop belting out “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” sell more soda than a clear presentation of product information, for example, that consumers prefer Coke in taste tests, that you can pour it in a glass with a scoop of ice cream, and so on. No one wants an open-and-shut case: that would leave no room for the exercise of will. So sellers remind consumers that the product exists, then let their reason be a slave to their passions. The “soft sell” allows prospective buyers to connect the dots. This applies in other arenas as well—in movies, and perhaps in real life, people rebel against the romantic interest who seems too perfect. (The extreme case of the soft sell is the anti-sell, in which customers are actively discouraged. Bernie Madoff was famously a master of this dark art.)

  Parents try to stake out the middle ground that allows children to choose freely which challenges to pursue, while steering them clear of mistakes. After graduating from college with a degree in archaeology and anthropology, my daughter, Alice, asked me which career was best. Did she need to work at a not-for-profit to be a good person? The second question was relatively easy. I told her about the butcher, the brewer, and the baker. As Adam Smith said in the most famous passage in all of economics, it’s not by their benevolence “that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”10 If she’s drawn to work in the private sector, that’s what she should do.

  But I recognized the dangers of going beyond that to address which career would be best. If Alice chose out of a desire to please me and it turned out badly, she might resent my interference. Plus, she was more likely to excel if she followed an independent desire. Both of these reasons can be understood as purposeful—by staying out of it, I avoid the risk of harming our relationship and actually help Alice achieve a better career outcome. But there’s more. It would be a mistake to subordinate the act of choosing to the outcome. The choice is personal, and she must make it on her own if the challenges she faces are to feel authentic.

  For-itself choice must be free, but this is not to say that we pick challenges at random or that for-itself choice operates completely outside of rationality. While I was playing the football game described earlier, I chose continuously, trying to overcome obstacles by running the most effective plays. The game was for-itself, but my tactics in pursuit of victory were rational.

  Whether the challenges we face are important or trivial, the experience of freely and actively choosing is fundamental to for-itself action over time. This contrasts with the purposeful realm where choice is like digestion—reflexive and only noticed when it appears to be malfunctioning. This limited view of choice has unfairly loaded it with negative baggage, creating a false impression of paradox and cognitive bias, as the following puzzles demonstrate.

  Two Puzzles

  Consider, first, the view that too much choice is unsettling to consumers, as Barry Schwartz argues in The Paradox of Choice.

  Eating out can be a minefield of choice. A survey of 830 American menus posted online found an average of 114 items offered at each restaurant. Although voluminous menus aren’t new (an 1899 Delmonico’s menu listed thirty-five dishes in the vegetable category alone), it is sometimes criticized as a curse of modern life, a pathology of free markets.11

  But if the average consumer dislikes excessive variety, why does it exist? The profit motive should drive it out, since the market has every incentive to meet our needs subject to cost. Consumers who find lengthy menus overwhelming should be willing to pay for a simpler experience, allowing restaurateurs to earn an above-market profit by limiting options. A half-dozen items on a menu should satisfy customers’ appetites and food tolerances, and shrinking the menu would allow a restaurant to increase turnover and hence freshness while holding down costs. But this must not be what the average consumer demands. Perhaps customers are happy to sacrifice price and quality and engage with a confusing menu in order to exercise their ability to choose. Rather than a nuisance, choice is crucial to enjoying the meal.

  At large drugstores, consumers encounter an even greater abundance of options, and some complain about having to contend with a hundred brands of toothpaste. But perhaps some consumers actually enjoy engaging with dizzying choice and complain mostly to preserve their self-image as rational. It would be a big deal to many people if a store offered only one brand of toothpaste, even if in a blind taste test no one could tell the difference. If a store failed to provide sufficient options, they would shop elsewhere.

  But what, then, of all the research “proving” that people dislike too much choice? In one well-known study, disguised research assistants set up two types of tasting stands in grocery stores. At one stand, shoppers were invited to sample six kinds of jam, while at the second, they were invited to sample twenty-four. Shoppers who were exposed to fewer choices were more likely to purchase a jar of jam.12 But an aversion to excessive jam options doesn’t necessarily mean that people dislike choice. They just don’t want to engage with too many options or waste too much time relative to the matter at hand—after all, it’s only jam. In any case, this experiment tells us little about the real world where merchants learn to offer only as many options as consumers want to analyze.

  I trust my belief that profit-maximizing merchants know what they are doing over an intuition that consumers truly prefer less variety. While anxiety may accompany choice, consumers evidently want to experience this anxiety and its subsequent release once the choice is made. Are we drawn to movies in which only good fortune befalls the protagonist? Of course not. Enjoying a dramatic plot with a buildup of tension is no more paradoxical than the paradox of choice.

  The second puzzle is called the “disjunction effect.” It occurs when someone can’t act until he determines his motive, even if all possible motives justify the same action. It is supposed to represent a deviation from rationality.

  Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir coined “disjunction effect” after conducting the following experiment: undergraduates are told to imagine that they have just taken a grueling qualifying exam. They will learn the next day, before the winter holiday, whether they passed or failed. They can buy a five-day vacation to Hawaii at an exceptionally low price today, pay a small nonrefundable fee for the option of buying the trip in two days when they know the exam results, or pass up the opportunity altogether.

  A student could decide to buy the vacation out of two very different motives. If she passes the exam, she might want to go to Hawaii to celebrate. If she fails, she might want to go to console herself.

  Out of sixty-six students, 32 percent said they would buy the vacation, 7 percent would not, and 61 percent would pay the fee to wait. In a second version of the experiment, students were asked whether they would buy the trip if they passed the exam and whether they would buy the trip if they failed. Two-thirds of the students made the same decision regardless of the exam outcome.13

  Under rational choice, in which students care about only the costs and benefits of the vacation, too many in the first version of the experiment paid to wait to discover their motives. They paid for information they did not need, since passing and failing both lead to the same choice. Were they behaving irrationally? If we accept that the choice for-itself matters, then the answer is no. The students wanted to be able to make their own choice of whether to celebrate or console themselves.

  While paying to wait is, in a sense, a waste of money, students suffering the disjunction effect have my sympathy. I’d probably behave the same way. The choice to celebrate feels substantively different than the choice to restore my spirits. I’d like to leave the version of myself who passes the exam free to celebrate and the version who fails free to go to Hawaii to plot his comeback. The act of choosing could be as important as the outcome.

  It would be interesting to conduct a less emotionally charged version of this experiment, subjecting students to uncertainty of a more mundane sort. For example, they could be presented with the same options and learn tomorrow whether or not a family reunion is taking place in Hawaii.
They are waiting not for exam results but for relatives to sort out their schedules. I would bet that fewer students who are going to Hawaii one way or another—whether to join a family reunion or on their own—would pay to postpone that decision.

  The Art of Crafting Meaningful Challenges

  There is an art to seizing a goal and giving it meaning, suppressing any recognition that overcoming today’s seemingly critical challenge won’t matter in the long run. We let alternative challenges percolate in the background, ready when needed. If none are pressing (or tempting), the current task expands to the time allotted. When we start to reach our goal, well that’s fine, but we quickly discover that what we really want is whatever comes next. Ideally, we transition to the next pursuit without feeling like a horse chasing a carrot suspended in front of its nose. So long as the challenges meet certain standards, we can remain engaged in the chase.

  Challenges Must Be (or Feel) Authentic

  In the for-itself framework, people navigate through time by choosing challenges consciously or unconsciously and struggling to overcome them. Obstacles may be physical or mental, daunting or relatively easy. Regardless of its specific characteristics, the challenge must arise authentically for people to willingly engage. To feel authentic, hurdles must have a natural meaning in our lives. They cannot feel entirely concocted or externally imposed.

  Sometimes, when genuine obstacles are scarce, we gamify our lives to allow for a struggle that feels meaningful—100 percent authenticity is not the standard. At these times, we make things harder for ourselves to combat potential tedium.

  Procrastination is a handy technique for upping the stakes. To those who don’t engage in it, procrastination looks like a character flaw. From a rational choice perspective, it should not exist. If people continuously reevaluated their activities to maximize gratification from consumption, there could be no procrastination. We would lay out all our tasks and perform each at the optimal time. We wouldn’t postpone health care until the symptoms of disease flared up, since no rational calculation could justify skipping routine checkups. My students wouldn’t be up late cramming the night before the exam, and I wouldn’t be up late writing the questions.