Bias Against the Long-term

An increased emphasis on the long-term, in relation to the effects of current systems of production and consumption, implies sacrifice, or at least significant change, in the now. In James March's A Primer on Decision Making, he writes, "The immediacy and clarity of the present and nearby tend systematically to disadvantage the spatially and temporally distant." Also, "Correcting the bias is, however, complicated by the fact that favoring the clear and the close is sometimes necessary to survive. In that sense, at least, concerns about long-term and global intelligence must always be subordinated to valid concerns about short-term and local intelligence."

I think the key phrase is valid concerns. How is that judgment made, where is the line drawn between need/concern and want/desire, and how can people be persuaded to deem long-term effects 'valid' that will very likely not personally affect them?

Along the same lines, according to Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness, when people think of distant past or future events they think abstractly about why; when thinking of events in the near past or future, people think concretely about how. For example, in a study, "when volunteers are asked to imagine themselves locking a door the next day, they describe their mental images with detailed phrases such as 'putting a key in the lock,' but when volunteers are asked to imagine themselves locking a door next year, they describe their mental images with vague phrases such as 'securing the house'." If so, even if people intend to change the way they behave for a long-term abstracted purpose, taking the concrete steps toward it each day could be a somewhat separate mental process requiring different motivation, feedback, or incentives.

"A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future."
-Ecologist Garrett Hardin

An appeal beyond the rational will very likely be necessary.

In Search of Authenticity

In the Regina Bendix book, In Search of Authenticity, she writes, "Authenticity is generated not from the bounded classification of an other, but from the probing comparison between self and other, as well as between external and internal states of being."

According to her, authenticity isn't an objective characteristic, but a judgment made by each consumer if a product aligns with their belief system and identity.

How simple is too simple?

Don Norman makes the claim, in this essay, that simplicity is overrated. According to his research, people will often buy products with more features, even if they are more complicated. Consumers feel like they are getting more for their money, even though these features will probably never be used. Fewer features imply less control and less value to many users.

I should also read Don Norman's Emotional Design.

The Futile Pursuit of Happiness

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert's book, Stumbling on Happiness, discusses the circumstances and conditions in which people incorrectly predict their future emotional states. Although our ability to imagine the future - which guides us in our decision making between multiple possibilities - is what defines our humanness, we are actually very poor forecasters. Our imagination fails us in three ways: it fills in and leaves out details without telling us, it projects the present onto the future, and it fails to recognize that things will look different once they happen.

I will describe the most compelling ideas in this book in future posts.