Thoughts, by Ariely, Pinker, and Kahneman

Dan discussed depletion concerning temptation: how, when we are cognitively occupied or exhausted, we succumb to temptation easier than if we are alert and attentive.

If you spend time solving a tricky puzzle, you will have less self-control when you pass the donuts in the break room.

At the beginning of the day, your energy reserves are refilled, which makes it easier to resist temptation (bad habits: IG, doomscrolling) and as the day progresses you wear yourself out, making it easier to fall for temptation towards the end of the day.

A hard, zero-tolerance avoidance of temptation tends to backfire, as we use our energy trying to resist temptation, ending up feeling depleted of self-control and more susceptible to bingeing on bad habits.

A good way to manage temptation is through moderation. Allow yourself to have some, but be strategic, and do it in moderation.

Or completely remove temptation from your environment. If you’re try to eat less candy, don’t have candy in your house. If you want to quit smoking, don’t buy weed. If you can’t see it, it makes it easier to resist. You won’t have to invest energy on avoiding the temptation.

The brain can use the same piece of information in a multitude of ways, with many parts of the mind acting on it. If shown a ruler, you can immediately describe it, reach for it, deduce it can prop up a window, and count the markings.

But, while the mind can instantly make dozens of calculations about the object and its environment, the information processing of the brain must be limited because of the cost associated with too much information.

For example, in a chess game, there are about thirty  moves you could make, to which your partner could make thirty moves in response, going back and forth, resulting in about forty different turns and something on the scale of 10^120 different possible games. Now many of those games are absolute nonsense and you will immediately lose given the combination. Instead of calculating and storing googols of data, an information processor needs to rely on algorithms and rules to operate on a specific subset of the data at a time, only recalling information when it is useful for the task at hand.

The ending often defines the character.

Is that true?

A character redeems themselves in the final act, despite a lifetime of sketchy behavior.

A person can change over the course of their story.

When the quality of life can be summed up by the last moments: the peak end effect.

A character, Jen, is described to participants as having a happy life and a sudden, immediate death. In one case, Jen lived to be 30, in another, Jen lived to be 60. There was no difference in the participant’s ratings of her quality of life. It was not about a total sum of happiness over the course of her life, but rather a feeling of the general quality of the experience.

In another story, Jen has 30 (or 60) years of a happy life, then 5 years of average life before the end. The participants rated the overall quality of her life as much lower than the first scenario. Despite living longer and experiencing the same “happy years”, the relative change in quality toward the end played a major factor in people’s evaluation.

What really makes a situation memorable is not a good experience, through-and-through, but rather an unusual peak of emotion (good or bad), deviating from the standard, even if the standard is “really good.”

Our memories are representative and remember the final result, or significant peaks, more strongly than the cumulative experience.

Daniel Kahneman ran an experiment where participants did two tests: they put their hand in a bucket of cold water and registered their pain level simultaneously with their other hand. In the first test, they waited 60 seconds, then withdrew their hands. In the second, they went 60 seconds, then warmer water was poured into the bucket for another 30 seconds, lessening the pain level at the end. Then the participants were asked to do a third test, but they got to choose which of the first two to repeat.

Oddly, 80% of the participants opted for the longer treatment. Their memory of the second test was overall less intense since it ended slightly better than the first, so they chose not only to do the regular 60 seconds, but then tack on more time of a less intense experience.

Experimenters reported that an angry face pops out of a crowd of happy faces, but a happy face does not stand out in a crowd of angry faces.

The brain contains a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.

This historically has been good for detecting predators or threats, improving the odds of living.

When flashed an angry face for 2/100 of a second, embedded in other visual noise, the subconscious brain reacts (amygdala), but the observer doesn’t realize what they saw.

System 1 is activated. System 2 is none the wiser.

Whether it not you find something pleasant depends on your current reference point.

On a beautiful, sunny day, you pass an overhang and continue going, seeking the sun. The overhang is too shady.

On a rainy, miserable day, you pass the same overhang and find welcome relief.

The overhang is unchanged, but the circumstances are different.