 Greetings. I want to talk today about the forces of evil and the forces of good. I want to talk about the problem of self-control. And self-control is a problem of now versus later, and it's a problem that infects us deeply in modern society. So think about the following. How many of you in the last month have eaten more than you think you should? Parents, you can raise your hands too. How many of you in the last month have exercised less than you think you should? For how many of you raising your hand has been the most amount of exercise you got recently? How many of you have ever texted while driving? Come on. Okay. By the way, texting and driving is incredibly interesting because nobody ever said, you know what, I thought about it. I thought about how much I don't want to kill other people, how much I want to stay alive, how important is this text message, and I decided I should take it. No, we recognize it's incredibly stupid, but nevertheless, we do it over and over. And last question, how many of you have ever had unplanned, unprotected sex? Nobody, nobody really. Wow. We can talk about honesty another time. Now, if you think about these questions in a very general way, think about the following. Imagine I gave you a choice, and I said, what would you rather have? A half a box of chocolate right now or a full box of chocolate in a week? Half now or full in a week? And I passed the chocolate around so you could see it and you could smell it. It's so close. With this question in mind, how many of you would wait another week for another half a box of chocolate? A few people are raising their hands, but I'm willing to bet that if the chocolate was actually close by, you might be less willing. Now, imagine we pushed the choices to the future, and I said, what would you rather have? A half a box of chocolate in a year or a full box of chocolate in a year and a week? Now, how many people are willing to wait? All of us, right? Because in the future, we are wonderful people. We will exercise, we will diet, we will save money, everything will be fantastic in the future. The problem, of course, is we never get to live in that future. We get to live in the moment and in the moment we're tempted time after time after time falling prey to these decisions. So not only do we have lots of self-control problems, we're getting more of those as society is moving forward. Think about it. The next version of the donut, donut 2.0, is it going to be more tempting or less tempting? Probably more tempting. Is the next version of Facebook going to be more tempting or less tempting to check it multiple times a day? Probably more tempting. Is the next version of the smartphone going to be more tempting or less tempting? And if you think about it from this perspective, it means that the future is going to be ever more tempting as it tries to, as commercial entities try to get our time, money and attention right now. Now, there was a very sad analysis that looked at the question of what is the percentage of human mortality that is either aided by or caused by bad decision making? And about a hundred years ago, it was about 10%. Think about a hundred years ago, how could a bad decision lead to mortality? Now it's slightly more than 40%. How come? As we invent new technologies, we also invent ways to kill ourselves. Think about obesity, diabetes, think about texting and driving, smoking. These are not decisions where one-time decision could kill you necessarily, but making a sequence of bad decisions can be incredibly dangerous and devastating. So given this problem, what can we do about it? And I want to propose a couple of solutions. The first one is something we call reward substitution. I want to tell you a little personal story. I was badly burned many, many years ago and I spent about three years in hospital. And one of the things I got in the burn department, I got a bad blood transfusion. And I got a blood transfusion with a liver disease. And it was bad enough to be in the burn department, it is slightly worse to have also a liver disease and nobody really knew what this liver disease was. And I kept on having inflammation and problems and rejection of transplant and so on and this disease kept on going for quite a few years. And about five years after I left hospital, I had another flare up, I checked myself into hospital and they told me I had hepatitis C and this was the disease, by that time they could recognize the virus. And the FDA was doing a test to see whether interferon, which was a medication that was approved for heresalochemia, is going to also be effective for hepatitis C. And they asked me if I want to join this trial. And I said, what happened if I don't join this trial? And they described to me what it would feel like to die from liver cirrhosis. So I didn't think for a long time, I joined the trial. And the problem was that every one of those injections I had to take was incredibly miserable. It would get me sick for about the whole night, vomiting, headache, shaking, high fever, stuff like that. Not as bad as liver cirrhosis, but for sure and now. Now imagine you got back from the university who had your injections in your refrigerator and if you inject yourself right now, three times a week for a year and a half, you might not get liver cirrhosis in 30 years. Would you do it? This is a very tough self-control problem. A year and a half later, I stopped the medication. I had a liver biopsy. They told me I beat the disease. The FDA later I proved interferon, which was also good news. And my doctor, Dr. Kellenberg, told me I was the only patient in the protocol who took their medication on time. And the question is, how come? Do I like my liver more than other people? Do I care more about the future? The answer is no. The answer was that I re-engineered my environment to facilitate better decision-making. I love movies. If I had time, I would watch lots and lots of movies. I don't have that much time, so I don't watch that many. But on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which were injection days, I had to deal with myself. Every morning, I would go first thing to a video store. I would rent two or three videos I really wanted to watch. I would carry them in my backpack the whole day, looking forward to watching them. I would get home, put the video in, inject myself, and press play. I did not wait for the side effects to start. I connected something I wanted, the movies with something I did not want, which the injection. We call this idea reward substitution. And the notion is that there are some things in life that we are just not designed to care about. And we can think about maybe we could just tell people about it, or maybe we could just communicate. That might not work out. Something that will happen 30 years from now is unlikely to drive lots of motivational force on human behavior. But instead, maybe we can use reward substitution. Maybe we could find something else, like movie, that people would work toward, and by doing that would behave as if they care about the long term, as if they care about their livers. So I want us to think about this idea in a couple of domains. First of all, let's think for a second about global warming. Imagine you wanted to figure out how to get people to care about global warming. You could say, let's just teach people about global warming. And by knowing about global warming, people would start caring. Really tough to imagine. In fact, if you went about it the other way around, and you say, let's search the world over for the one problem that would maximize human apathy, you would come up with global warming. Why? Think about it. Long in the future would happen to other people first. We don't see it progressing. We don't see anybody suffering. And anything we would do as individuals is a drop in the bucket. Can people under those conditions care? Most likely not. Can we get people to wake up in the morning and feel that today they want to do something good for the environment? Hard to imagine. But can we use reward substitution? Can we get people to care about something else and through that behave as if they care about global warming? So you're a bright, intelligent group. Give me some suggestions. What kind of things would you create that would get people to behave as if they care about global warming? Just raise your hand and shout. Pay them. Give people money. They don't do it for the right reason. Give them money. Very good. What else? Give them cake. Cake is good for lots of things. Very good. Some other motivations. Tax them if they want. So somebody wants to pay. Somebody wants to charge people. And then the annoyance of having to pay might be higher. Very good. What else? What was this? Okay. Other things? Make fuel-fusion car less expensive. You could say it's again economic incentive. Make them attractive, maybe sexy or prestigious. What else? Give them compliments. Yeah, very good. Compliments. It turns out there's lots of research in psychology. People love compliments even if they know the compliments are not sincere. What else? Yeah. Okay. Make environmentally friendly product that are also appealing for other reasons. Lots of things. Okay. Let's talk about one other problem. There's a medication called cumidin. And cumidin is a medication against strokes. When people have a stroke, they put them on cumidin often. And cumidin reduces the chances of a second stroke from about 24% to about 4%. And under those conditions, you would think that people would take cumidin on time. People don't. Compliance rate is very low. So let's think about reward substitution. For reward substitution, you need two things. You need to measure what people are doing, and then you need to either reward them or punish them. So imagine that we have this new technology called Internet-enabled pillboxes. These are pillboxes that every time people take their medication, we know about it. It registers online. So you can start rewarding people if they take their medication on time or punish them if they don't. So again, give me some suggestions. What would you do to get people to take their medication on time? Sorry? Pay them? Pay them. Very good. So we can pay people. By the way, we tried that. We paid people $3 a day to take their medication on time. What do you think happened? Absolutely nothing. What do you think would happen if we paid people $1,000 a day? Probably would work, but we don't have the money for that. What else? Yeah. You have to take it before you eat. Oh, so you don't allow people to eat until they take it. Very, very clever. Very clever. You might say, let's block the refrigerator until you take your medication. I like this. Yeah. Okay, charge them. Yeah, so I told you that we tried to pay people $3 a day to take the medication on time. That doesn't work. The next thing we did was we used a principle called loss aversion. Loss aversion is the idea that people hate losing much more than they enjoy gaining. So we said, what if we took away money from people? Every time they don't take the medication, that works much, much nicer. There's other things you can think about. You could say, what if we posted it on people's Facebook page? What if we tried to use regret, public humiliation, social pressure? There's lots of things that you can imagine doing, but the two nicest things were a combination of lotteries and regret. So first of all, let's think about lotteries. If we gave people $3 a day, that doesn't work. What do you think would happen if we gave people 10% chance of making $30? That's much, much better. People love lotteries. Economists call lotteries taxation on stupidity, but people love lotteries. But the nicest experiment combined lotteries and regret. So what is regret? Regret is the notion that our happiness is not determined by where we are. It's determined by a comparison between where we are and where we think we could have been. And if we think we could have been somewhere nicer, we are miserable. And if we think we could have been somewhere worse, we are happy. So for example, when do you think you'll be more miserable? If you missed a flight by two minutes or by two hours? By two minutes, why? You're stuck in the same bad airport with the same bad food. Why is the two minutes more annoying? Because you can imagine the alternative reality. You say, if the light just changed a little faster, I would have made it. If the person in line in front of me understood what taking your shoes off meant. If the TSA agent had one more IQ point. And because of that, this other reality is incredibly salient. You're comparing yourself to it and you're incredibly miserable. If the other reality is two hours, hard to compare. Similarly, a couple of Olympics ago, they took pictures of people who won medals. And they looked at how big was their smile. And what would you expect? Gold, silver, bronze. What do they find? Gold, bronze, silver. Why? Because imagine you practiced for the last four years, for this one race. And a minute and a half ago, you got the silver medal. What are you thinking? This close, this close. And if you got the bronze, what are you thinking? At least I'm here. Look at everybody else. And actually, if you think about your own life, you can probably think about many cases in which your happiness is not driven by where you are, but what you're comparing yourself to. So how do we bring regret into the experiment? Imagine all of you are in this experiment and all of you are in Comedine. The people on my right are taking the medication. The people on my left are not. If we just give lottery to the people on my right, I sample 10% of you and give you the lottery ticket. If we try to use regret, we give the lottery ticket to everybody, whether you took the medication or not. And I call you up and I say, congratulations, you're the winner of the coveted lottery. The stars are smiling on you. It's your lucky day. Sadly, I see you did not take your pill today, so you're not getting the money. This is the essence of regret. This is the essence of the idea that you could have done one small thing earlier in the day that would have put you on the other side of these fence. And when you add lotteries and you add regret, now compliance rate becomes almost perfect. So the sad news is that we have lots of problems with self-control. The good news is we can create some solutions. I want to talk to you about one more solution. This is called Ulysses contracts. If you remember the story from the Greek mythology, Ulysses knew that if the sirens will come, he will be tempted to follow them. So he asked the sellers to tie him to the mast so he could hear the call of the sirens but he could not follow them. And he asked the sellers to put wax in their ears so they were not even able to listen and hear the temptation of the sirens. And if you think about that, this is a very different solution for self-control. This is saying, I know that in the future I will be tempted and therefore I want to eliminate my ability to act on my temptation. Now, I'm sure you've tried all kinds of things like that in your life. How many of you, for example, in the last week of exam, gave your Facebook account to one of your friends, asked them to change the password so that you could not check Facebook too often? A few? Very good. You had the speech to write. A lot of my undergrads do that. For the adults, we tried once a study, again in medical adherence. It turns out in the history of the world, nobody has ever woken up and said, today I feel like colonoscopy. So when we schedule for people colonoscopy, we said, would you like to give us a check for $500? And if you show up on time, you'll get your money, but if you are late or you don't show up, you'll give up your money. Now, it's a strange suggestion because you can either stay the same or use money, you can't make anything, aside from gaining self-control. And more than 50% of the people wanted this deal. Why? Because they knew that their future self would not want to wake up and go for colonoscopy, but they also knew that their future self would be too stingy to give up $500. One of our students designed a clock called clocky. And clocky is an alarm clock with two big wheels that run in slightly different speeds. Now, when you set up your clock at night, you think to yourself that you're the kind of person who wakes up at six o'clock in the morning and go for a run. But then six o'clock in the morning comes around and you are no longer that person. You're a slightly different person, you're a person who tries to hit the snooze button, but if you have clocky, you can't because clocky is now running around the room in a slightly unpredictable way and you have to get up and chase it and dive under furniture and hunt for it. And by the time you find clocky and shut it off, you're awake. The major design flaw of clocky, by the way, is that by the time you find it, you're also pissed off. So there's lots of images of clocky with the wheels turned off and now there's a new version that looks like an egg that runs around and no parts that you can break off. The next version I think will have clocky fight back. There's one more clock idea that came out that I really like. It's a clock called snooze and lose. And it's an alarm clock that is connected to your checking account and to a charity you hate. Now think about snoozing when every second money goes to somebody you really, really hate. So if you think about it, there's lots of self-control problems and there's a chance there'll be more of them. But the bright side is that we are the people who are designing the environment. In fact, I look at you and I think that you are the people who are going to design our next environment. There's a question of what are we going to do in terms of food and how are we going to design supermarket and how are we going to design kitchens and refrigerators? What kind of policies are we going to design? What kind of smartphones are we going to decide? What's going to be the future of our computer interfaces? And if I look at you and I think that all of you are the people who are going to design this world, I ask myself what kind of world are you going to design? Are you going to design a world that makes it harder for us to live with our problems with self-control or are you going to create a world that would make it better for us and will allow us to overcome some of our temptation? And I'm certain you'll make the right choices and I'm certain that you'll build a world that is better for us to deal with, that is more compatible with the limited human ability we have and that will only give us better choices. And I want to thank you in advance and may the force be with you.