Decide & Conquer: Make Winning Decisions and Take Control of Your Life

65

Fourteen

Chapter

1

I Want It, and I Want it

NOW!

The Immediate

Gratification Bias

Patience doesn’t always help,

but impatience never does.

—Anonymous

Sheri Weiner grew up in relative affluence. She got a car when she

turned 16. Her dad gave her a credit card for her 17th birthday. Her folks

paid her college tuition and sent her a check each month to cover her

additional college expenses. Sheri never really grasped concepts like

budgets, saving money, or delaying immediate gratification. When she saw

something she wanted, she bought it.

Sheri is now 25. She has a full-time job, a nicely furnished apartment, a

well-stocked wardrobe closet, and a huge stack of bills. A week doesn’t go

by that she doesn’t get a call from one of her creditors asking for money.

When I asked Sheri how much she owed, she thought for a moment and

then said, “I have to admit, I’m not really sure. If you count all my credit

cards, I’d guess about $15,000.” Sheri guessed wrong! Finally fed up with

the constant hassles from collection agencies, she went to a bill-

consolidation service. They carefully tallied up her credit card debts—all

$37,000 of them! Moreover, they showed Sheri that her $400 minimum

monthly payment on those cards wasn’t even covering the $550 a month

DECIDE & CONQUER

66

she was accumulating in interest. Sheri was dumbfounded. How did she

get herself into this mess?

Sheri is not unique. More than 65 percent of U.S. households pay interest

on credit card balances.

1

And, in 2001, that average balance was $7,034.

2

“Buy now. Pay later!” has become the mantra of consumers in much of

the industrialized world. For many people, it’s very hard to delay immediate

gratification. Interestingly, this behavior is essentially the opposite of

procrastination. Both are self-control problems, but one relates to the

preference for inertia while the other reflects a present-biased preference.

In addition, both behaviors are one-part personality and one-part

situational. Look back at your results for impulsiveness in Chapter 8. If

you scored more than 70 on that test, you are likely to have difficulty in

postponing immediate gratification. As you’ll see, there are rewards and

costs that lead all of us toward preferring the immediate over the long-

term. Yet some people have become quite proficient at learning how to

control the immediate gratification bias.

As human beings, we suffer from

the tendency to want to grab for

immediate rewards and to avoid

immediate costs.

3

If it feels good,

we want to do it now. If it implies

pain, we want to postpone it.

Why is it hard to diet, quit

smoking, or avoid credit card

debt? Each comes with an

immediate reward—tasty food,

an enjoyable cigarette, or an

immediate purchase—and each

delays its costs to some nebulous future.

In recent years, the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has gotten a great

deal of attention.

4

The evidence indicates that people with strong EI have

Why is it so hard to diet,

quit smoking, or avoid

credit card debt? Each

comes with an immediate

reward, and each delays

its costs to some nebulous

future.