Ainslie/Breakdown of Will: BBS Multiple Book Review

Dear Dr. Qwerty, Below is a link to the forthcoming précis of a book accepted for Multiple Book Review in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS). "Breakdown of Will" by George Ainslie Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. IMPORTANT: Please note that it is the *BOOK*, not the précis, that is to be reviewed. Reviewers must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a reviewer for this book, to suggest other appropriate reviewers, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to nominate someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate reviewer for this book, an electronic draft of the precis (only) is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract below. ======================================================================= *** MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW - PROPOSAL INSTRUCTIONS *** ======================================================================= Please DO NOT prepare a review unless you are formally invited. To help us put together a balanced list of reviewers, it would be most helpful if you would send us as specific as possible an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the subject, and what aspect of the book you would anticipate commenting upon. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. (Please do not simply indicate that we have your expertise information in our records. We request this information in order to simplify and thus, speed up the selection process.) As noted earlier, it is the *BOOK*, not the précis, that is to be reviewed. IMPORTANT: Please indicate whether you already have the book or would require a review copy to be sent to you. Please include your full mailing address if you would need a copy of the book. ======================================================================= *** MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW - INFORMATION *** ======================================================================= BOOK: Breakdown of Will AUTHOR: George Ainslie PRECIS ABSTRACT: Behavioral science has long been puzzled by the experience of temptation, the resulting impulsiveness, and the variably successful control of this impulsiveness. In conventional theories a governing faculty like the ego evaluates future choices consistently over time, discounting their value for delay exponentially, that is, by a constant rate; impulses arise when this ego is confronted by a conditioned appetite. Breakdown of Will (Ainslie, 2001) presents evidence that contradicts this model. Both people and nonhuman animals discount the value of expected events in a curve where value is divided approximately by expected delay, a hyperbolic form that is much more bowed than the rational, exponential curve. With hyperbolic discounting, options that pay off quickly will be temporarily preferred to richer but slower-paying alternatives, a phenomenon that, over times on the order of days, can account for impulsive behaviors, and over periods of fractional seconds can account for involuntary behaviors. Contradictory reward-getting processes can in effect bargain with each other, and stable preferences can be established by the perception of recurrent choices as test cases (precedents) in recurrent intertemporal prisoner's dilemmas. The resulting motivational pattern resembles traditional descriptions of the will, as well as of compulsive phenomena that can now be seen as side-effects of will: overconcern with precedent, intractable but circumscribed failures of self-control, a motivated ("dynamic") unconscious, and an inability to exploit emotional rewards. Hyperbolic curves also suggest a means of reducing classical conditioning to motivated choice, the last necessary step for modeling many involuntary processes like emotion and appetite as reward-seeking behaviors, which in turn provide a rationale for empathic reward and the "construction" of reality. PRECIS KEYWORDS: Altruism; appetite; behavioral economics; compulsions; conditioning; dynamic inconsistency; emotions; empathy; freedom of will, impulsiveness; intertemporal bargaining; self-control; social construction; volition; weakness of will PRECIS: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Ainslie-09072004/Referees/ ======================================================================= ======================================================================= *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT *** (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the subject line. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Ralph BBS ------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph DeMarco Editorial Coordinator Behavioral and Brain Sciences Journals Department Cambridge University Press 40 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011-4211 UNITED STATES bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org Tel: +001 212 924 3900 ext.374 Fax: +001 212 645 5960 -------------------------------------------------------------------