Lecture Discussion 3: Incentives
It seems like the topic of incentives is always talked about in psychology classes, which makes sense since it seems to vital to many human behaviors. In fact, positive and negative incentives feel like the root of all human behaviors. We keep going for the stuff that makes us feel good and we stay away from what makes us feel bad. I thought the idea of “losses loom larger than gains” is super interesting. The idea of losing something is way more dissatisfying than the idea of gaining something. In my own life, an example I can think of is that losing an hour of sleep sounds way more terrible than gaining an hour of sleep feels good. The information about delay discounting and preference reversal was fascinating to learn about. It is true that the longer you have to wait for something, the less it is preferred to something now.
I also related to the information about procrastination. It is interesting that the definition of procrastination is that we know we will be worse off delaying something but still do it. I find that in my experience, I am not more worse off. I think a lot of students keep procrastinating because we end up still seeing high grades, so doing the assignments more in advanced would not have made much of a difference. If anything, I feel like the amount of eustress we feel when we wait makes us more motivated and invested in the assignment and we produce better work. Of course, waiting too long can mean not being able to finish the assignment. In that case, I can see how procrastination would need to be stopped. I feel like there is a good balance of how much procrastination you can pull off. Procrastinating enough so that we feel eustress during an assignment but not waiting too long so that we cannot finish it seems to work well enough for a lot of students.
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