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=PLMTCsY
2CLsf3BnYRIWmSofx3P5MXjn_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
freedom
How 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 selfregulation.
• 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