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The Want-Can-Will Test for Akrasia

Sunday, October 23, 2011
By dreeves

Woman on scale with gun

Failing to live a healthy lifestyle is or would be, for most of us, a classic failure of rationality — not acting in our own overall best interests. There certainly are people (including the terminally ill, but others as well) who are exceptions, for whom an unhealthy lifestyle is rational. For example, if you derive enough pleasure from smoking cigarettes that it’s worth the probable lost years of life, then that’s totally fine. We’re quite serious. It’s up to the individual to decide these trade-offs. We’re just talking about those people who explicitly say (and mean) that some of their behavior is not in their own best interest yet continue to engage in that behavior.

“Suppose that behavioral economists are wrong and orthodox economists are right: actions reveal preferences.”

Not everyone suffers this common failure of rationality. Those lucky people often suspect that the rest of us are actually just deluding ourselves. What we really want is revealed by our actions. A perfectly logically coherent stance! But there’s a mountain of evidence (particularly in the behavioral economics literature) that it’s not true. Suppose, though, that the behavioral economists are wrong and the orthodox economists are right: actions reveal preferences and protestations otherwise are self-delusion. Then tools like Beeminder or StickK are letting you force yourself to do what you only think you want to. Such tools will only serve to disabuse us rational-all-along-and-never-knew-it types of our delusions.

Or we might cling to our delusions, making ourselves miserable indefinitely, you might argue. Ha! Nice try. By the doctrine of revealed preferences, if we persist in using Beeminder to force ourselves to do something then we must genuinely prefer to do so. Since February of 2008, when Beeminder started (under the name “Kibotzer”) as a side project to help friends and family (and ourselves), people have persisted in using Beeminder. So we can conclude that this failure of rationality, called akrasia, is real. It may just be a failure of self-perception in many cases, but for some us, for at least some aspects of our lives, it’s a genuine failure of rationality.

So how can we tell the self-delusion from the failure to do what we genuinely want to do?

The Want-Can-Will Test

Consider some goal you have, such as losing a certain amount of weight or spending a certain minimum amount of time playing music. Now consider three questions about it.

  1. How certain are you that you want to do this?
  2. How certain are you that you can do this?
  3. How certain are you that you will do this?

If your answers are “absolutely”, “definitely”, and “given historical evidence, not entirely” then you have your answer. You’re an akratic. And you should beemind it (or stickk to it, if it’s not the kind of goal that can be tracked daily).

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  • Josh Jordan

    Locke and Mises said it well when they wrote, respectively, “the actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts,” [1] and “the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action.” [2]

    Using a commitment device is itself an action. If Odysseus had sailed within range of the Sirens while ignoring Circe’s advice to tie himself to the mast, we could’ve reasonably inferred that he wanted to die.

    [1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Locke
    [2] http://mises.org/humanaction/chap4sec2.asp

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    Thanks Josh; nice! I can’t decide if you’ve rendered my wordy attack on Revealed Preferences moot or if you’re just highlighting the paradox.Here’s economist Tyler Cowen essentially saying that there’s no such thing as akrasia, only self-delusion: “All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else.”But maybe the counterargument is as simple as “using commitment devices is an action”. The whole Revealed Preferences / self-delusion argument falls on its face there. My use of a commitment device proves (by the orthodox economists’ own criterion) that I really do wish to be doing something else.

  • Pingback: Beeminder is S.M.A.R.T., Overcomes Bias | Beeminder Blog()

  • Ellen Dee

    I think it mostly comes down to a conflict between short-term and long-term wants. It can be very hard to give adequate priority to a long-term goal (like losing weight) when a short-term goal (like a yummy cookie) is right in front of us.

    This is where things like Beeminder help – they keep our long-term goals visible, and also help show us short-term steps to reach larger goals.

  • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

    Wow, beautifully said. That in fact is the core idea motivating all of Beeminder! You’ll probably like these posts: http://blog.beeminder.com/akrasia and http://blog.beeminder.com/flexbind

  • Babak Golshahi

    One has to pre-commit using the pre-frontal cortex, but as you point out different parts of the brain can override our best commitments… for example a yummy cookie… the striatum is triggered (habits), and the amygdala may have an emotional response… in addition, your dopmaine levels spike after a while in mere anticipation of reward…I find that beeminding is brilliant in design because it accounts for the fact that we are not our whole minds all the time.. at least not in conscious awareness. I don’t make my blood cells that just happens.. the trigger for temptation is a complex process in the brain… like a constant focus on habit change, only by continually using our prefrontal cortex can we override and keep getting back on track onto the yellow brick road… becase failures are inevitable, I find the yellow brick road and other beeminder concepts help me to gauge… rather than losing progress, I see it all as progress.