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Is resolve mainly about resisting hyperbolic discounting?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2021

Don Ross*
Affiliation:
School of Society, Politics, and Ethics, University College Cork, CorkT12 AW89, Ireland School of Economics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch7701, South [email protected]; http://uct.academia.edu/DonRoss Center for Economic Analysis of Risk, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA30303.

Abstract

Ainslie insightfully refines the concept of willpower by emphasizing low-effort applications of resolve. However, he gives undue weight to intertemporal discounting as the problem that willpower is needed to overcome. Nonhumans typically don't encounter choices that differ only in the time of consumption. Humans learn to transform uncertainty into problems they can solve using culturally evolved mechanisms for quantifying risk.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Creative Commons
The target article and response article are works of the U.S. Government and are not subject to copyright protection in the United States.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Kable, J., & Glimcher, P. (2007). The neural correlates of subjective value during intertemporal choice. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 16251633.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed