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&li
st=PLMTCsY2CLsf3BnYRIWmSofx3P5MXjn_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
• 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 self-regulation.
• 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