Institute For The Future

Designing for Self-Control

Via the Nudge Blog, I was reminded of a computer program called Self Control that allows a user to block his own access to email, Twitter and Facebook for an hour in order to shut out distractions and become more productive. The application is based on a clear, fairly well-verified premise--we aren't very good at moment-to-moment self-control--but that we can use external tools to restrain our behaviors. As we begin to delve into design thinking for our 2010 research, one of my early questions is how to use these common quirks in our own decision-making patterns to make us healthier. In other words, how do we take the concept of self-control computer programs and move them outside of the computer and away from productivity to improve personal health?

 

First, let's look at the limits of our self-control. A couple months ago, a brain-imaging study seemed to confirm a bit of folk wisdom: That when we're hungry, higher calorie food sounds appealing, and as a result, grocery shopping while hungry will lead to a cabinet full of cookies. Unfortunately, a new series of studies testing the self-restraint processes of college students shows that students who believed they had high levels of self-control often exposed themselves to more tempting, and potentially unhealthy stimuli, leading to unhealthy choices. As BPS research describes it:

 

A second study involved students who were either arriving or leaving the college cafeteria. The students ranked seven snack bars from least favourite to favourite and then had to choose one bar to take away. If they brought it back in a week's time, they'd get to keep the bar and win $4. You guessed it - compared with the hungry students arriving at the cafeteria, the departing students (who'd eaten) rated their self-control more highly, were more likely to choose to take away their first or second favourite snack bar, and were more likely to eat that bar during the following week.

 

It doesn't end there. In a third study, the researchers contrived to influence beliefs about self-control by giving student smokers a bogus implicit test of impulse control. Later, the students were challenged to watch the film "Coffee and Cigarettes" whilst abstaining from smoking. They were promised a greater cash reward the more difficult they made the challenge for themselves. In this case, students given bogus test feedback indicating they had high self-control were more likely to opt for greater temptation - holding the cigarette in their hand rather than having it on the desk - and they were more likely to give in to that temptation.

 

Finally, Nordgren's team tested the idea that "restraint bias" could explain why drug addicts are so prone to relapse. They recruited 55 participants through a smoking-cessation programme, all of whom had been smoke free for at least three weeks. Those who said they had more impulse control also tended to say they wouldn't be trying so hard to avoid temptation, such as the company of other smokers. Four months' later, those with the inflated sense of impulse control were more likely to have relapsed.

 

 

Taken together, these various studies show that we shouldn't buy groceries when we're hungry because we're too tempted by unhealthy foods, but we should be careful about buying food when we're not hungry because we might buy unhealthy food because we have too much confidence in our ability to restrain ourselves.

 

We are not masters of our impulses, in other words.

 

So how do you design for this problem? I think applications like the computer program Self-Control offer a good model, by enabling the individual user to place pre-defined limits on his own behavior and impulses. Think about household appliances like refrigerators or cabinets that cannot be opened after a certain time, say, to prevent late-night snacking.

 

But more importantly, I think these problems of self-control highlight a critical challenge in the coming decade: How do we design products and services that first recognize our mental limits, and then offer us the tools to overcome them?