Instant or Deferred Gratification

The therapy culture has made many dubious contributions to moral philosophy. Among them is the notion of deferred gratification.

At first, one finds much to praise in the requirement that people defer gratification. The principle seems to promote self-control and to teach people not to indulge in instant gratification.

If those are the terms of the argument, one would have to agree that deferred gratification should win out over grabbing whatever is available in the present.

But, if the theory falsifies human experience by trying to fit it into a narrative, it risks leading us into error.

The struggle between an instinct that is seeking immediate gratification and an ego that believes that it is best to delay is a narrative. Those who traffic in it are trying to impose it on human beings, not to analyze how they really function.

By this narrative, children are instant gratifiers while adults have learned how to constrain and restrain their impulses, the better to find future gratification.

Many believe that the gratification awarded to those who wait is better than the instant gratification they would receive, but that is not necessarily part of the theory. It is a ploy designed to help people to exercise self-control.

It’s nice to see it all in terms of forgoing the Big Mac now and being rewarded with a steak dinner, but life rarely works out that way.

As with any narrative, this one has flaws and gaps. It precludes the possibility that people might feel good about exercising self-control. Reducing human beings to gratification-seeking organisms does them a serious injustice. Humans are also rule-followers. When they learn to follow a rule that prescribes self-control they can feel gratified at their mastery of a social skill.

Moreover,  research psychologists have recently shown that the decision about deferring or not deferring is often a rational calculation. It seems that there is more to the story than the struggle between willpower and instinct.

Maria Konnikova explained the issue in a recent New York Times article:

When we think of self-control, we don’t normally see it in these terms — a reasoned decision to wait or not. In fact, the ability to delay gratification has traditionally been seen in large part as an issue of willpower: Do you have what it takes to wait it out, to choose a later — and, presumably, better — reward over an immediate, though not quite as good one? Can you forgo a brownie in service of the larger reward of losing weight, give up ready cash in favor of a later investment payoff? The immediate option is hot; you can taste it, smell it, feel it. The long-term choice is far cooler; it’s hard to picture it with quite as much color or power.

To add to the complexity, psychologists have tested the deferred gratification hypothesis against real life situations where the future reward, the payoff for deferring gratification was either more or less certain.

Konnikova wrote:

[Professor Joseph] Kable [of the University of Pennsylvania] who has been working on the psychology and neuroscience of decision making for more than a decade, argues that the truth is that in real life, as opposed to the lab, we aren’t nearly as sure we’ll get our promised reward, or if we do, of when it will come.

“The timing of real-world events is not always so predictable,” he and Mr. McGuire write. “Decision makers routinely wait for buses, job offers, weight loss and other outcomes characterized by significant temporal uncertainty.” Sometimes everything comes just when we expect it to, but sometimes even a usually punctual bus breaks down or an all-but-certain job offer falls through.

She continued:

But what happens if our initial estimate is off? The more time passes without the expected reward — it’s been 20 minutes and still nothing; I’ve been dieting for a week and a half now and still weigh the same — the more uncertain the end becomes. Will I ever get my reward? Ever lose weight? Ever get on that stupid train?

In this situation, giving up can be a natural — indeed, a rational — response to a time frame that wasn’t properly framed to begin with, according to a series of new studies conducted by Mr. Kable’s decision neuroscience lab at the University of Pennsylvania and published in Cognition and Psychological Review.

Note well that Kable believes that abandoning the distant reward in favor of the immediate gratification might well be the “rational” choice when one comes to believe that the promised reward is not going to arrive within a reasonable time frame.

When the wait time is extended an individual will increasingly believe that the reward might never come. Then, the correct decision is to seek gratification in the present. It’s easier to forgo the Big Mac if you know you will have a steak dinner in three hours, but as the three hour mark comes and goes, the Big Mac looks more and more appetizing.

If you take a bite, you are not yielding to temptation or showing weak self-control. You are making a rational decision based on the facts as you know them.

 “The basic idea,” [Penn neuroscientist Joseph] McGuire said, “is that while a decision maker is waiting, he is constantly re-evaluating the thing he’s waiting for. You’re waiting for the same reward, but your assessment of it changes as a function of the passage of time.”

This suggests that the ability to exercise self-control depends in good part on the consistency of your daily routines. If a child knows to a certainty that he will have dinner at 6:00 he will find it easier to control his impulse to snack in the afternoon. If the dinner schedule varies, even to the extreme point where he is not sure that he will even have dinner, he will be more inclined to yield to eat what he can when he can.

Thus, an inconsistent reward pattern will induce people to have less impulse control:

The researchers found that while the shoppers seeing the regular intervals looked like the very model of persistence and self-control, those seeing the erratic intervals grew increasingly less persistent over time — even if they had initially been quite patient. The uncertainty of the reward timing was itself enough to push them toward behavior that looked increasingly impulsive.

When You've Lost Frank Rich...

When you’ve lost Frank Rich ….

Here’s Rich’s take on Barack Obama and the Obamacare fiasco:

But the biggest mystery may still remain. How could a president whose signature achievements include the health-care law and two brilliantly tech-centric presidential campaigns screw this up so badly? How could he say evenas late as September 26 that the site would work “the same way you shop for a TV on Amazon”? How could he repeatedly make the false promise that all Americans could keep their insurance plans, and then take so long to recognize that he was wrong and mobilize to correct it? This is hardly Kathleen Sebelius’s fault. It is Barack Obama’s fault — a failure of management for sure, and possibly one of character. There is something rotten in the inner-management cocoon of the White House, and if the president doesn’t move to correct it, his situation will truly be hopeless for the rest of this term.

If this is what your most ardent supporter is saying....

A Knockout Game Victim Speaks

Here’s a very sad coda to yesterday’s post about the urban knockout game.

One victim of such an attack, Phoebe Connolly spoke out on Greta Van Susteren’s show last night.

Yesterday, I hypothesized that this appalling, and obviously criminal behavior was being encouraged, even countenanced by a culture that, instead of condemning it, tries to understand it it.

It’s even worse than I thought. Connolly tells us how she really feels:

I ultimately, I’ve moved past it and I really have no hard feelings about what has happened. And I just see it as another reason why we need to better support our youth with activities and youth programs, which is actually what I do for work, and it’s great to see teenagers do incredible things when they’re supported and empowered.

If the young people who cold cocked Connolly—and who could have killed her, by the way—were trying to knock some sense into her head, they failed.

Patrick Howley offers an opinion on The Daily Caller:

And yet she still holds the kind of liberal guilt that convinces her, against all evidence to the contrary, that she is infinitely more privileged than the vicious teenagers who inexplicably assaulted her in an act of pure evil. She still cannot say something along the lines of, “Put these kids in jail and throw away the key.”

No. Of course not. She has to talk about youth programs, because games of pickup four-square moderated by college resume-padding suburbanites are, like, transformational and will totally prevent kids from engaging in the kinds of random brutality that is tearing apart our inner cities every day in a crisis of unprecedented proportions.

And, while we’re at it, why does Phoebe assume that these kids need more support from “youth” programs? What about them, Phoebe, tells you that these kids are just diamonds-in-the-rough suffering from the consequences of income inequality?

The Knock-Out Game: A War Against Whites

People are beginning to take notice. It’s called “the knock-out game” and it’s spreading across the country.

A black youth, usually accompanied by friends, walks up to a white or Asian stranger and sucker punches him. He will be trying to knock his victim out with one punch.

In certain areas of New York City, the victims have been singled out for being Jewish.

Naturally, the story has been virtually ignored by the media. Even though black-on-white violence is far more prevalent than white-on-black violence the media prefers to cast its withering gaze on whites who commit violence against blacks.

As for the New York Jewish community, it has been AWOL on the subject. It does not want to give offense.

Thomas Sowell offers some perspective:

Attacks of this sort have been rampant in St. Louis. But they have also occurred in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and elsewhere. In Illinois the game has often been called "Polar Bear Hunting" by the young thugs, presumably because the targets are white.

The main reason for many people's surprise is that the mainstream media have usually suppressed news about the "knockout game" or about other and larger forms of similar orchestrated racial violence in dozens of cities in every region of the country. Sometimes the attacks are reported, but only as isolated attacks by unspecified "teens" or "young people" against unspecified victims, without any reference to the racial makeup of the attackers or the victims -- and with no mention of racial epithets by the young hoodlums exulting in their own "achievement."

Those older and wiser are bemoaning it as a sign that certain youths are alienated from society. No one dares say that it has anything to do with race.

Sowell is a bit more tough-minded so he gets closer to the point:

Despite such pious phrases as "troubled youths," the attackers are often in a merry, festive mood. In a sustained mass attack in Milwaukee, going far beyond the dimensions of a passing "knockout game," the attackers were laughing and eating chips, as if it were a picnic. One of them observed casually, "white girl bleed a lot."

That phrase -- "White Girl Bleed A Lot" -- is also the title of a book by Colin Flaherty, which documents both the racial attacks across the nation and the media attempts to cover them up, as well as the local political and police officials who try to say that race had nothing to do with these attacks.

There is no rule that obliges alienated youths to play “the knock out game.” Those who try to explain away the behavior are telling young people that what they are doing is understandable, even acceptable.

Perhaps they have gotten the message that white and especially Jewish Americans owe them something. Perhaps they believe that they must take what is not given. Perhaps they believe that they are setting a score or striking out against injustice.

If young people find this to be a fun thing to do, they must have gotten what they see as a green light from someone.  

Given how empathic everyone is, no one dares to condemn them. Everyone is feeling their pain.

The knock-out game is not, Sowell explains, an innocent bit of amusement:

People have been beaten unconscious, both in this game and in the wider orchestrated racial attacks. Some of these victims have been permanently disabled and some have died from their injuries.

But most of the media see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. In such an atmosphere, the evil not only persists but grows.

Some in the media, as well as in politics, may think that they are trying to avoid provoking a race war by ignoring or playing down these attacks. But the way to prevent a race war is by stopping these attacks, not trying to sanitize them.

If these attacks continue, and continue to grow, more and more people are going to know about them, regardless of the media or the politicians. Responsible people of all races need to support a crackdown on these attacks, which can provoke a white backlash that can escalate into a race war. But political expediency leads in the opposite direction.

At the least, these disaffected youth know that they can get away with whatever they are doing.

They know that the media is not going to call them out. They know that the civil rights leadership will either look the other way or will portray them as victims. And they know that law enforcement, in the hands of Eric Holder will happily ignore them. As for America’s first African-American president, he has nothing to say at all.

Sowell writes:

… Attorney General Eric Holder is [launching] campaigns against schools that discipline a "disproportionate" number of black male students. New York City's newly elected liberal mayor is expected to put a stop to police "stop and frisk" policies that have reduced the murder rate to one-fourth of what it was under liberal mayors of the past.

Apparently, the election of the first African-American president has not brought us an era of racial comity.

Who knew?

When Women Compete Against Women

Two score and a few years ago second wave feminism hit America’s shore. The most sophisticated feminist thinkers of the time based their theories on radical leftist mythology.

If the proletariat was not going to be the vanguard of the Revolution, perhaps another oppressed group, women, could do the job. In place of the class struggle of workers against their capitalist oppressors, feminists created a new story about a the new story where women were struggling against oppressive patriarchal males.

Same story; different characters.

To make women a political force, radical feminists had to make them into a class. To do so they touted the virtues of sisterhood. They saw all women connected by virtue of their chromosomal makeup and promoted solidarity among women. They argued that all women had to join together to fight and defeat the entrenched interests of the patriarchy.

Women were exhorted to see men as the enemy. They were taught that women had to join the fight against those who wanted to oppress them, to abuse them, to crush their dreams, to kill their hopes and to consign them to a life of domestic drudgery.

Obviously, the radical culture warriors did not produce their longed-for Revolution, but they have succeeded to some extent in creating a block of progressive women voters who spring into action the minute they hear that the Republican Party, the party of the patriarchy has declared war on women.

It was, and still is, a fiction. Of course, fictions can be powerful. If you become convinced of their truth you will reconfigure your life in order to live them.

To sell the fiction, feminists were obliged to ignore reality. They were not going to sell the myth of sisterly solidarity if they accepted the simple and basic fact that women compete against other women. It was easier to blame men.

The latest research has borne this out. John Tierney has reported on studies conducted by anthropologist Sarah Hrdy and by researchers Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma. It’s not about male dominance, but about female competition.

Underlying his article is a single theme: much of what today’s culture blames the account of the patriarchy is really a part of female psychology.

One suspects that women would be better able to deal with the problems if they had not been taught that to blame others for their problems.

Tierney summarizes:

The existence of female competition may seem obvious to anyone who has been in a high-school cafeteria or a singles bar, but analyzing it has been difficult because it tends be more subtle and indirect (and a lot less violent) than the male variety. Now that researchers have been looking more closely, they say that this “intrasexual competition” is the most important factor explaining the pressures that young women feel to meet standards of sexual conduct and physical appearance.

Everyone knows that men compete for women. How many people are aware of the extent that women compete against each other for male attention and affection?

In Tierney's words:

The old doubts about female competitiveness derived partly from an evolutionary analysis of the reproductive odds in ancient polygynous societies in which some men were left single because dominant males had multiple wives. So men had to compete to have a chance of reproducing, whereas virtually all women were assured of it.

But even in those societies, women were not passive trophies for victorious males. They had their own incentives to compete with one another for more desirable partners and more resources for their children. And now that most people live in monogamous societies, most women face the same odds as men. In fact, they face tougher odds in some places, like the many college campuses with more women than men.

If women are competing for men they are, intrinsically, more than just passive trophies, the spoils of male gladiatorial combat.

How did the researchers study the question? In one study, an attractive, voluptuous young woman was sent into different rooms, each of which was restricted to women.  Sometimes the voluptuous woman was dressed in jeans; sometimes she wore a short skirt.

If she was dressed in jeans the women in the classroom did not really notice her. But, if she was dressed in a short skirt, looking that she was seeking to attract male attention, the women in the room expressed hostility toward her as soon as she left the room. In particular, they derogated her appearance.

Tierney writes:

Most of the aggression, though, happened after she left the room. Then the students laughed about her and impugned her motives. One student suggested that she dressed that way in order to have sex with a professor. Another said that her breasts “were about to pop out.”

The results of the experiment jibe with evidence that this “mean girl” form of indirect aggression is used more by adolescents and young women than by older women, who have less incentive to handicap rivals once they marry. Other studies have shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl or woman is, the more likely she is to become a target for indirect aggression from her female peers.

It ought not to be a surprise, at least to long time readers of this blog, that slut-shaming is usually is visited by women on other women. Women compete with other women by speaking ill of certain kinds of women, thus to lower their value in the eyes of men.

Tierney reports:

“Women are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially women they perceive as rivals,” said Dr. Vaillancourt, now a psychologist at the University of Ottawa. “The research also shows that suppression of female sexuality is by women, not necessarily by men.”

Stigmatizing female promiscuity — a.k.a. slut-shaming — has often been blamed on men, who have a Darwinian incentive to discourage their spouses from straying. But they also have a Darwinian incentive to encourage other women to be promiscuous. Dr. Vaillancourt said the experiment and other research suggest the stigma is enforced mainly by women.

“Sex is coveted by men,” she said. “Accordingly, women limit access as a way of maintaining advantage in the negotiation of this resource. Women who make sex too readily available compromise the power-holding position of the group, which is why many women are particularly intolerant of women who are, or seem to be, promiscuous.”

Women who offer sexual favors on the cheap disempower other women. Thus, it makes sense that women are especially intolerant of promiscuous women.

A similar dynamic is involved in women’s concern about being thin. It ought to be obvious that men prefer a woman’s natural curves than in her skeletal thinness. Therefore it makes little sense to blame women’s low self-esteem about their bodies on the male gaze. It makes even less sense to blame it all on the media portrayal of the female body.

If men are to blame, then women should not trust what men say and how men feel. If they do they will ignore men's preferences and join a sisterhood that is defined in opposition to men. One should notice that women who suffer eating disorders develop bonds of sisterhood, competing with each other in a race to lose weight. Besides, if you want to blame the media, it is necessary to note that the people who edit the great fashion magazines are almost always women.

On the larger point, Tierney summarizes the research conducted by Christopher Ferguson:

Indirect aggression can take a psychological toll on women who are ostracized or feel pressured to meet impossible standards, like the vogue of thin bodies in many modern societies. Studies have shown that women’s ideal body shape is to be thinner than average — and thinner than what men consider the ideal shape to be. This pressure is frequently blamed on the ultrathin female role models featured in magazines and on television, but Christopher J. Ferguson and other researchers say that it’s mainly the result of competition with their peers, not media images.

“To a large degree the media reflects trends that are going on in society, not creates them,” said Dr. Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University. He found that women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies did not correlate with what they watched on television at home. Nor were they influenced by TV programs shown in laboratory experiments: Watching the svelte actresses on “Scrubs” induced no more feelings of inferiority than watching the not-so-svelte star of “Roseanne.”

But he found that women were more likely to feel worse when they compared themselves with peers in their own social circles, or even if they were in a room with a thin stranger, like the assistant to Dr. Ferguson who ran an experiment with female college students. When she wore makeup and sleek business attire, the students were less satisfied with their own bodies than when she wore baggy sweats and no makeup. And they felt still worse when there was an attractive man in the room with her.

Obamacare: Women in Charge

On yesterday’s Meet the Press Tom Brokaw, Chris Matthews and David Gregory were opining about the failure of the Obamacare rollout.

Strangely enough, for men who are presumably full-throated supporters of feminism, they seemed to be laying the blame at the feet of the women in charge: Kathleen Sebelius, Marilyn Tavenner and Valerie Jarrett.

Worse yet, they seemed to be asking what kind of man feels a need to surround himself with so many women.

Ann Althouse has looked at the evidence and has espied a pattern of unconscious sexism. This puts her into high dudgeon.

To her mind, Tom, Chris and David were intimating, with their sports metaphors and martial images, with their referencing to more competent people named Bobby, Doug or Jim that the Obama administration gave too much power, too much authority, too much responsibility to a bunch of girls.

Althouse is not finished, not by a lot. She believes that these sexist males are really impugning our president’s manliness. Heaven forfend!

By her analysis:

So what does this say about Obama, not wanting to bring in real men, who take charge, who make the play, who exert authority? He's not man enough to work alongside real men? He needs to play with the ladies, ladies who don't know their place — who dither and float? 

Althouse notwithstanding, the Obama administration seems to have gotten the message. It recently put a man in charge of the health care mess: Jeffrey Zients.

If a Republican had said any of what Tom, Chris and David said, media pundits would rise up and smite him for declaring war against women. He would be consigned to whichever circle of Hell contains all the unrepentant sexists.

Apparently, the feminist-sympathizers on NBC get a pass… from everyone but Althouse.

The trouble is: how do you know that these left-leaning men on Meet the Press were not just stating the truth? Given today’s political correctness, no one is really allowed to say that it makes the least bit of difference whether men or women are in charge. Everyone believes that men and women are equal, but most people understand that equal does not mean same. What if the the NBC-men were circumventing censorship to speak the truth?

The truth is, women have been in charge of Obamacare and they have, by all indications, failed. Would men have done better? We do not know. 

Does being a woman compromise someone’s ability to exercise executive leadership in some situations?

Surely, we cannot determine the truth with absolute certainty. Surely, women do not hold a monopoly on incompetence. It is not a very good idea to extrapolate too far from a single example.

After all, the world has known many effective women leaders. Margaret Thatcher comes to mind, though she surrounded herself entirely with men.

To prove Tom, Chris and David wrong one would have to provide examples of effective women or men leaders who have delegated significant authority to a significant number of women?

Althouse is also disputing the implication that there is something wrong with a man who surrounds himself with women because he does not have enough manly self-confidence to hire strong men.

Would it matter if a male coach of a men’s football team hired a large group of female assistant coaches? Would it matter if a commanding general filled his immediate staff with female officers?

You might say that the Obamacare rollout was not at all analogous with fighting a war, but clearly Tom and Chris and David are great supporters of President Obama. They are offering what they consider to be good advice, though they know that if they stated it directly they would be excoriated by feminists. Or perhaps they have developed such well-developed capacity to self-censure that they do not even allow themselves to think such sexist thoughts.

To uncover their real beliefs Althouse had to ferret through their sports and military metaphors.

Yet, for all Althouse or I know, Tom, Chris and David might be right.

An opinion that offends your ideology is not, ipso facto, wrong.

Does True Love Make You Crazy?

Poets have always seen romantic love as a form of madness.

Beginning with Freud, therapists have pronounced romantic love the goal of psychosexual development. They have extolled it and declared that we should all aspire toward it. Being in love has come to be considered the ultimate in mental health.

And yet, ask yourself this question: what are the four most frightening words you can hear from a woman?

I would suggest these: “But I’m in love.”

Researchers in the Netherlands and Maryland have recently discovered that the poets have a better grasp on the truth. They have demonstrated that true love compromises cognitive functioning.

Of course, it all depends on how much you value cognitive functioning.

For the record, the study looked at people who had just fallen in love, who were still in the first few months, the honeymoon stage of a relationship.

The Huffington Post reports the results without too much commentary, and that feels about right to me.

[Researcher] Steenbergen analyzed how 43 participants in new relationships (meaning less than six months) performed specific tasks, including separating relevant and irrelevant information. His results indicated that "high levels of passionate love of individuals in the early stage of a romantic relationship are associated with reduced cognitive control." In other words, participants were so consumed by thoughts of their beloved, their ability to concentrate and perform the tasks was diminished.

Steenbergen says the phenomenon may be attributed to how the brain allocates its limited resources. "It could be that the obsessive nature of passionate love imposes important constraints on performing well in tasks that require self-control." Meaning, if your brain is on overdrive thinking about love, it's less able to focus on other things.

Passionate love is obsessive and consuming. While it might not make you clinically insane, it will certainly preoccupy your mind and distract you from your job.

Perhaps that’s why great lovers never have great careers.