Is Discounting the Future Due to a Defect in Impulse Control, Or a Rational Adaptation?

Many people are familiar with the Mischel marshmallow experiment. Kids who delayed gratification had better life outcomes.* The concept of varying ability to delay gratification is quite critical to discussions of public policy, since clearly we do not all have identical agency in every situation, by reason of variation of our nervous systems.

The received wisdom in the informed public is that not delaying gratification - that is, discounting the future - is a negative, a deficit in impulse control. The experiment has been run in multiple settings with the discount rate quantified: do you accept a ten dollar payment at the conclusion of your participation, or $11 a month later? (If you take the $10 right now, your future discounting rate is 10% per month.) It's been pointed out repeatedly since then that there are many other plausibly influential factors, including the predictability of the environment. Run this study in Singapore, and you can count on the experimenter being in their office when you go back. In Somalia, after a month, who knows if the building will be there anymore? Whether it's war or just low trust that makes it less likely you'll actually get your payoff, the direction of the impact on your discount rate is going to be the same.

Celeste Kidd created a model of this in children, and sure enough, kids who were disappointed by not receiving a promised reward, later on discounted the future significantly more. This relates to future discount rates in politically unstable parts of the world, as well as in children raised by inconsistent parents. It's a vicious cycle, because increasing your discounting is actual the rational choice.

I would have expected this result to be much better known, so I'm doing my small part in making that happen.

Kidd C, Palmeri H, Aslin RN. Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition. Volume 126, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 109-114.


*It's worth pointing out that, so far as I know, there's no research showing that low future discounting increases happiness - in fact, there's research strongly suggesting that the curve is U-shaped, and beyond a certain point, good impulse control makes us less happy! Isn't that why we care? Essentially longitudinal studies here and here; writeup of both in Washington Post. Of course, your country is affected by the level of impulse control of your countrymen, so the ideal situation might be to be a person with low impulse control in a country of people with high impulse control, a classic free-rider problem.

Classifying Humans Is Not Inherently Bad. In Fact It's Often Good.

When I was a psychiatry resident one of my supervisors told me her classification scheme for her fellow psychiatrists: there are fuzzies, and there are techies. Fuzzies are more the stereotype you might hold of people in the mental health field - people who are innate nurturers and speak in a soothing voice, and enjoy a holistic instinctual approach to helping people. They might have ethnic vases in their office. In contrast, techies are psychiatrists who like to think about neurotransmitters and circuits and diagnostic classifications, and use explicit reasoning processes about those to help patients. They read science fiction and dress like engineers.

I think there is indeed a spectrum of this sort, and I think it exists not just in humans, but in the world at large. And I see an increasing moral disgust on the part of fuzzies against techies.

Classifying humans is not bad. Humans are fascinating. Why wouldn't you pay attention to the endless ways in which they vary? (Have I given myself away as a techie yet?) But to fuzzies, an urge to assign humans to abstract categories of any sort can seem bad - creepy, even - a gateway to dehumanizing and harming them. "You should just care about about people!", they say. "Why is that so hard?"

These two urges - to care and to classify - are not mutually exclusive. In fact are mutually reinforcing to the important outcome, namely, people getting better. They should both be present in any healthy cognitively diverse group of humans. They're just not usually present to the same degree within each individual brain.

There are a lot of us who want to help people, but don't have that innate nurturing instinct. So we make an end run around that, and we think in explicit categories: person #1 has trait A, and might benefit from X (and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about psychiatric treatment, public policy, or understanding why someone is feeling a certain emotion right now.) To a nurturer, this might sound abhorrent. But if it helps, does it matter what cognitive process we use to accomplish it?

Because we humans do vary in this dimension, this ironically means we vary in our ability to understand people at the other end of the spectrum. To us techies, when we encounter fuzzies' offense, it's surprising and baffling. "No no no, you've got it all wrong. I like this person! I find her interesting! She is the first native speaker of a Nilotic language I've met and that makes her cognitively unique among people I know and capable of contributing uniquely!" From many fuzzies' perspectives, this kind of classification seems almost "racism-adjacent" - indeed, a stone's throw from phrenology.

A fair criticism of techies is that classification can be wrong, and can be used for bad purposes, e.g. phrenology (a dead horse which has been dead for a long time but which people love to bring up - until someone can find us a living phrenologist, let's all retire this cliche.) And yes, it is possible that thinking of people only in terms of their abstract traits and membership in various groups can dehumanize them, if it is done with no real interest in the individual, by reducing their identity to membership in collectives.* It can feel intrusive and "script"-reinforcing. On the other hand, a defense of techies is that their interest is a genuine interest in humans, their makeup is generally such that this is the most natural way of relating, and this is all an effort to connect and understand other people. The very abstractness of these categories means that they are universal - to a techie, the fact we can all be classified in along the same dimensions actually feels quite equalizing!

An also-fair criticism of fuzzies is that often, the self-image and need to signal tribal identity with certain kinds of statements overwhelms consideration of others' actual needs. ("Did you actually measure the outcome of your caring act?") And nurturing does not always help. Some people, for example, are indifferent to (or even enjoy) the suffering of others (i.e., antisocial personality disorder) and no amount of nurturing will change that; thus, the blind eye often turned to this population in mental health care, because the cognitive dissonance their existence causes to nurturers is extreme. It should also be pointed out that the neurochemical basis of nurturers' behavior, oxytocin, is not a love hormone so much as an ingroup hormone. All that nurturing ultimately requires an outgroup, and many a techie can tell stories of deliberate censure and exclusion by fuzzies for some poorly understood offense. A defense of fuzzies is that they are more genuinely motivated by the positive affect of the recipients of their caring attention, and therefore, probably better at taking care of people in the short-run.


*Speaking as a techie: intersectionality seems quite deliberately dehumanizing, in that it explicitly argues the most important thing about each of us the various racial and gender groups we're part of - and since our membership in these groups is involuntary, this strips identity of any aspect of agency.

Physical Topography (of the American West) Associated with Human Personality

You can find the paper here. I have only read the abstract since there's a paywall. Questions: how does this correlate with the settlement patterns discussed in Albion's Seed, in this genetic analysis, or the Bad Stripe? (The Bad Stripe roughly correlates with Greater Appalachia in the former article, or the Border Reavers in Albion's Seed.)

Götz, F.M., Stieger, S., Gosling, S.D. et al. Physical topography is associated with human personality. Nat Hum Behav (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0930-x