45 found
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  1. Picoeconomics.George Ainslie - 1992 - Behavior and Philosophy 20:89-94.
     
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  2. Willpower with and without effort.George Ainslie - 2021 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44:e30.
    Most authors who discuss willpower assume that everyone knows what it is, but our assumptions differ to such an extent that we talk past each other. We agree that willpower is the psychological function that resists temptations – variously known as impulses, addictions, or bad habits; that it operates simultaneously with temptations, without prior commitment; and that use of it is limited by its cost, commonly called effort, as well as by the person's skill at executive functioning. However, accounts are (...)
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  3. Pure hyperbolic discount curves predict “eyes open” self-control.George Ainslie - 2012 - Theory and Decision 73 (1):3-34.
    The models of internal self-control that have recently been proposed by behavioral economists do not depict motivational interaction that occurs while temptation is present. Those models that include willpower at all either envision a faculty with a motivation (“strength”) different from the motives that are weighed in the marketplace of choice, or rely on incompatible goals among diverse brain centers. Both assumptions are questionable, but these models’ biggest problem is that they do not let resolutions withstand re-examination while being challenged (...)
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  4.  39
    Grasping the Impalpable: The Role of Endogenous Reward in Choices, Including Process Addictions.George Ainslie - 2013 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 56 (5):446 - 469.
    ABSTRACT The list of proposed addictions has recently grown to include television, videogames, shopping, day trading, kleptomania, and use of the Internet. These activities share with a more established entry, gambling, the property that they require no delivery of a biological stimulus that might be thought to unlock a hardwired brain process. I propose a framework for analyzing that class of incentives that do not depend on the prediction of physically privileged environmental events: people have a great capacity to coin (...)
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  5.  92
    A research-based theory of addictive motivation.George Ainslie - 2000 - Law and Philosophy 19 (1):77-115.
  6.  63
    Intertemporal Bargaining in Habit.George Ainslie - 2016 - Neuroethics 10 (1):143-153.
    Lewis ascribes the stubborn persistence of addictions to habit, itself a normal process that does not imply lack of responsiveness to motivation. However, he suggests that more dynamic processes may be involved, for instance that “our recurrently focused brains inevitably self-organize.” Given hyperbolic delay discounting, a reward-seeking internal marketplace model describes two processes, also normal in themselves, that may give rise to the “deep attachment” to addictive activities that he describes: People learn to interpret current choices as test cases for (...)
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  7.  92
    Procrastination, the basic impulse.George Ainslie - 2010 - In Chrisoula Andreou & Mark D. White (eds.), The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination. New York, US: Oxford University Press. pp. 11--27.
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  8. Specious reward: a behavioral theory of impulsiveness and impulse control.George Ainslie - 1975 - Psychological Bulletin 82 (4):463.
     
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  9. Can thought experiments prove anything about the will.George Ainslie - 2007 - In David Spurrett, Don Ross, Harold Kincaid & Lynn Stephens (eds.), Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context. MIT Press.
     
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  10. Pleasure and aversion: Challenging the conventional dichotomy.George Ainslie - 2009 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 52 (4):357 – 377.
    Philosophy and its descendents in the behavioral sciences have traditionally divided incentives into those that are sought and those that are avoided. Positive incentives are held to be both attractive and memorable because of the direct effects of pleasure. Negative incentives are held to be unattractive but still memorable (the problem of pain) because they force unpleasant emotions on an individual by an unmotivated process, either a hardwired response (unconditioned response) or one substituted by association (conditioned response). Negative incentives are (...)
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  11.  60
    Reply to commentaries to willpower with and without effort.George Ainslie - 2021 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44:e57.
    Twenty-six commentators from several disciplines have written on the assumption that choice is determined by comparative valuation in a common denominator of reward, the “competitive marketplace.” There was no apparent disagreement that prospective rewards are discounted hyperbolically, although some found that the resulting predictions could come just as well from other models, including the interpretation of delay as risk and analysis in terms of hot versus cold valuation systems. Several novel ideas emerged.
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  12.  87
    The self is virtual, the will is not illusory.George Ainslie - 2004 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5):659-660.
    Wegner makes an excellent case that our sense of ownership of our actions depends on multiple factors, to such an extent that it could be called virtual or even illusory. However, two other core functions of will are initiation of movement and maintenance of resolution, which depend on our accurate monitoring of them. This book shows that will is not an imponderable black box but, rather, an increasingly accessible set of specific functions.
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  13.  23
    Psychopathology arises from intertemporal bargaining as well as from emotional trauma.George Ainslie - 2015 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38.
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  14. You can't give permission to be a bastard: Empathy and self-signaling as uncontrollable independent variables in bargaining games.George Ainslie - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (6):815-816.
    Canonical utility theory may have adopted its selfishness postulate because it lacked theoretical rationales for two major kinds of incentive: empathic utility and self-signaling. Empathy – using vicarious experiences to occasion your emotions – gives these experiences market value as a means of avoiding the staleness of self-generated emotion. Self-signaling is inevitable in anyone trying to overcome a perceived character flaw. Hyperbolic discounting of future reward supplies incentive mechanisms for both empathic utility and self-signaling. Neither can be effectively suppressed for (...)
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  15.  58
    Cold climates demand more intertemporal self-control than warm climates.George Ainslie - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (5):481-482.
    A climate that is too cold to grow crops for part of the year demands foresight and self-control skills. To the extent that a culture has developed intertemporal bargaining, its members will have more autonomy, but pay the cost of being more compulsive, than members of societies that have not. Monetary resources will be a consequence but will also be fed back as a cause.
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  16.  26
    Monotonous tasks require self-control because they interfere with endogenous reward.George Ainslie - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (6):679-680.
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  17. What good are facts? The “drug” value of money as an exemplar of all non-instrumental value.George Ainslie - 2006 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2):176-177.
    An emotional value for money is clearly demonstrable beyond its value for getting goods, but this value need not be ascribed to human preparedness for altruism or play. Emotion is a motivated process, and our temptation to “overgraze” positive emotions selects for emotional patterns that are paced by adequately rare occasions. As a much-competed-for tool, money makes an excellent occasion for emotional reward – a prize with value beyond its tool value – but this is true also of the other (...)
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  18.  29
    Positivity versus negativity is a matter of timing.George Ainslie - 2017 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40.
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  19. Foresight has to pay off in the present moment.George Ainslie - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (3):313-314.
    Foresight requires not only scenarios constructed from memories, but also adequate incentive to let these scenarios compete with current rewards. This incentive probably comes from the efficacy of the scenarios in occasioning present emotions, which depends not on their accuracy per se but on their uniqueness as compared with other possible occasions for emotion.
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  20.  99
    Cruelty may be a self-control device against sympathy.George Ainslie - 2006 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (3):224-225.
    Dispassionate cruelty and the euphoria of hunting or battle should be distinguished from the emotional savoring of victims' suffering. Such savoring, best called negative empathy, is what puzzles motivational theory. Hyperbolic discounting theory suggests that sympathy with people who have unwanted but seductive traits creates a threat to self-control. Cruelty to those people may often be the least effortful way of countering this threat.
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  21.  17
    “Switching” between fast and slow processes is just reward-based branching.George Ainslie - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e113.
    Shortcuts to goals are rewarded by faster attainment and punished by more frequent failure, so selection of the various kinds – heuristics, cached sequences (habits or macros), gut instincts – depends on reward history just like other kinds of choice. The speeds of shortcuts lie on continua along with speeds of deliberation, and these continua have no obvious separation points.
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  22. Game theory can build higher mental processes from lower ones.George Ainslie - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (1):16-18.
    The question of reductionism is an obstacle to unification. Many behavioral scientists who study the more complex or higher mental functions avoid regarding them as selected by motivation. Game-theoretic models in which complex processes grow from the strategic interaction of elementary reward-seeking processes can overcome the mechanical feel of earlier reward-based models. Three examples are briefly described. (Published Online April 27 2007).
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  23.  52
    Intertemporal bargaining predicts moral behavior, even in anonymous, one-shot economic games.George Ainslie - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (1):78 - 79.
    To the extent that acting fairly is in an individual's long-term interest, short-term impulses to cheat present a self-control problem. The only effective solution is to interpret the problem as a variant of repeated prisoner's dilemma, with each choice as a test case predicting future choices. Moral choice appears to be the product of a contract because it comes from self-enforcing intertemporal cooperation.
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  24.  60
    A bazaar of opinions mostly fit within picoeconomics.George Ainslie - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (5):664-670.
    The will has generated a wider range of opinions than most phenomena, lacking as it does both an animal model and consistent behavioral correlates. It has even been held not to exist. The commentators approached my intertemporal bargaining (picoeconomic) model from many angles. Doubts about the existence of the underlying phenomenon, hyperbolic discounting, were still raised by some, but other commentators added to the evidence for it, which I regard now as overwhelming. Where mechanisms of self-control were specified, I found (...)
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  25.  29
    A “cohesive moral community” is already patrolling behavioral science.George Ainslie - 2015 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38.
    Authors of non-liberal proposals experience more collegial objections than others do. These objections are often couched as criticism of determinism, reductionism, or methodological individualism, but from a scientific viewpoint such criticism could be easily answered. Underneath it is a wish to harness scientific belief in service of positive social values, at the cost of reducing objectivity.
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  26.  84
    Altruism is a primary impulse, not a discipline.George Ainslie & Nick Haslam - 2002 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2):251-251.
    Intertemporal bargaining theory based on the hyperbolic discounting of expected rewards accounts for how choosing in categories increases self-control, without postulating, as Rachlin does, the additional rewardingness of patterns per se. However, altruism does not seem to be based on self-control, but on the primary rewardingness of vicarious experience. We describe a mechanism that integrates vicarious experience with other goods of limited availability.
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  27.  51
    A Picoeconomic Rationale for Social Constructionism.George Ainslie - 1993 - Behavior and Philosophy 21 (2):63 - 75.
  28.  34
    Behavior is what can be reinforced.George Ainslie - 1985 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8 (1):53-54.
  29.  83
    Drugs' rapid payoffs distort evaluation of their instrumental uses.George Ainslie, Christian P. Müller & Gunter Schumann - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (6):311-312.
    Science has needed a dispassionate valuation of psychoactive drugs, but a motivational analysis should be conducted with respect to long-term reward rather than reproductive fitness. Because of hyperbolic overvaluation of short-term rewards, an individual's valuation depends on the time she forms it and the times she will revisit it, sometimes making her best long-term interest lie in total abstinence.
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  30. Emotion: the gaping hole in economic theory.George Ainslie - 2007 - In Barbara Montero & Mark D. White (eds.), Economics and the mind. New York: Routledge.
  31.  55
    (1 other version)Freud and picoeconomics.George Ainslie - 1989 - Behaviorism 17 (1):11-19.
    Freud was the first author to conceive internal motivational conflict in economic terms. Although behaviorists have often rejected his concepts because the findings that gave rise to them were based on subjective methods, they are largely compatible with behavioral data on motivation, and indeed predicted by Herrnstein's matching law. Psychoanalysis is much closer to behavioral than to cognitive psychology, which does not conceive self-contraditory behavior as a motivational problem.
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  32.  17
    Framing is a motivated process.George Ainslie - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e221.
    Frames group choices into categories, thus modifying the incentives for them. This effect makes framing itself a motivated choice rather than a neutral cognition. In particular, framing an inferior choice with a high short-term payoff as part of a broad category of choices recruits incentive to reject it; but this must be motivated by its being a test case.
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  33. Gods are more flexible than resolutions.George Ainslie - 2004 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (6):730-731.
    The target article proposes that “counterintuitive beliefs in supernatural agents” are shaped by cognitive factors and survive because they foster empathic concern and counteract existential dread. I argue that they are shaped by motivational forces similar to those that shape our beliefs about other people; that empathic concern is rewarded in a more elementary fashion; and that a major function of these supernatural beliefs may be to provide a more flexible alternative to autonomous willpower in controlling not only dread but (...)
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  34.  65
    Hyperbolic discounting lets empathy be a motivated process.George Ainslie & John Monterosso - 2001 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (1):20-21.
    The Perception-Action Model (PAM) is a cogent theory of how organisms get information about others' experiences. However, such a stimulus-driven mechanism does not handle well the complex choices that humans face about how to respond to this information. Hyperbolic reward discounting permits a reward-driven mechanism for both how aversive empathic experiences can compete for attention and how pleasurable empathic experiences are constrained.
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  35.  49
    How do people choose between local and global bookkeeping?George Ainslie - 1996 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (4):574-575.
    The matching law accounts for both addictive behavior and the usefulness of a person's evaluating choices in overall categories. To explain why overall bookkeeping, once learned, does not easily win out over local bookkeeping, another implication of matching is needed: intertemporal bargaining. The role of melioration, though probably important for new addiction is separate.
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  36.  68
    If belief is a behavior, what controls it?George Ainslie - 1997 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1):103-104.
    “Self-deception” usually occurs when a false belief would be more rewarding than an objective belief in the short run, but less rewarding in the long run. Given hyperbolic discounting of delayed events, people will be motivated in their long-range interest to create self-enforcing rules for testing reality, and in their long-range interest to evade these rules. Self-deception, then, resembles interpersonal deception in being an evasion of rules, but differs in being a product of intertemporal conflict.
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  37.  52
    Intention isn't indivisible.George Ainslie & Barbara Gault - 1997 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (2):365-366.
    An intertemporal bargaining model of commitment does not entail the interaction of parts within the person as Rachlin claims, and is needed to explain properties of self-control that his molar generalization model does not predict.
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  38.  38
    Matching is the integrating framework.George Ainslie - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (4):679-680.
  39.  94
    Non-instrumental belief is largely founded on singularity 1.George Ainslie, Ryan T. McKay & Daniel C. Dennett - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):511.
    The radical evolutionary step that divides human decision-making from that of nonhumans is the ability to excite the reward process for its own sake, in imagination. Combined with hyperbolic over-valuation of the present, this ability is a potential threat to both the individual's long term survival and the natural selection of high intelligence. Human belief is intrinsically or under-founded, which may or may not be adaptive.
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  40. Picoeconomics.George Ainslie - 1992 - Cambridge University Press.
    Dr. Ainslie examines an elementary human paradox: that we are endangered by our own wishes.
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  41. Précis of Breakdown of Will.George Ainslie - 2005 - Behavioural and Brain Sciences 28 (5):635–73.
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  42.  24
    Selfish goals must compete for the common currency of reward.George Ainslie - 2014 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (2):135-136.
    Selfish Goal Theory is compatible with a behaviorally based theory that recognizes mental processes as behaviors. Both envision choices as made by the competition of purposive processes, which are autonomous in that they are not coordinated by an agentic “self.” However, the survival of mental processes – termed “goals” or “interests,” respectively – depends on a well-documented active mechanism: reward.
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  43. Vulnerabilities to addiction must have their impact through the common currency of discounted reward.George Ainslie - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (4):438-439.
    The ten vulnerabilities discussed in the target article vary in their likelihood of producing temporary preference for addictive activities automatic” habits discussed here.
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  44. Why not emotions as motivated behaviors?George Ainslie & John Monterosso - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2):194-195.
    Lewis's dynamic systems approach is a refreshing change from the reflexology of most neuroscience, but it could go a step further: It could include the expected rewardingness of an emotion in the recursive feedback loop that determines whether the emotion will occur. Two possible objections to such a model are discussed: that emotions are not deliberate, and that negative emotions should lose out as instrumental choices.
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  45.  32
    Game theory need not abandon individual maximization.John Monterosso & George Ainslie - 2003 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (2):171-171.
    Colman proposes that the domain of interpersonal choice requires an alternative and nonindividualistic conception of rationality. However, the anomalies he catalogues can be accounted for with less radical departures from orthodox rational choice theory. In particular, we emphasize the need for descriptive and prescriptive rationality to incorporate recursive interplay between one's own choices and one's expectation regarding others' choices.
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