Cohen Doron, Shavit Yael, Teodorescu Kinneret
Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Missionsstrasse 62a, 4055, Basel, Switzerland.
Faculty of Data and Decisions Sciences, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Feb;32(1):363-372. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02537-w. Epub 2024 Jul 23.
Many social challenges stem from individuals' tendency to prefer immediately rewarding but suboptimal behaviors ("Give-Up" options) over more costly endeavors that yield much better outcomes in the long run ("Try" options). For example, many people forgo the long-term benefits of formal education, healthy diets, learning new technologies, and even finding true love. This paper examines various incentivization programs that combine external rewards and punishments to discourage such counterproductive behaviors, which often result in only temporary behavioral change. Our findings suggest that some interventions' limited impact may be due to their focus on only shifting behaviors from "Give-Up" (e.g., dropping out of college, avoiding the gym) to "Try" (e.g., attending college, exercising regularly), without promoting sufficient exploration of these "Try" options. Yet exploration of the long-term benefits of "Trying" may be crucial to increase the chances of long-term learning and commitment. Using a simplified abstraction of this dilemma, our results show a high tendency to choose "Give-Up" options prior to intervention. Examination of four different incentivization strategies suggests that only rewarding exploration of new "Try" options is a straightforward strategy to increase exploration and optimal choice. Punishing both the selection of "Give-Up" options and the choice to exploit suboptimal "Try" options produced similar results. Other common guidance strategies were less effective, as these strategies simply tended to replace one suboptimal behavior with another. Surprisingly, punishments seemed to be a relatively more successful incentive than rewards. We discuss how these insights can help guide policy aiming to improve long-term outcomes through incentivization.
许多社会挑战源于个人倾向于选择即时奖励但次优的行为（“放弃”选项），而非选择那些从长远来看成本更高但能带来更好结果的努力（“尝试”选项）。例如，许多人放弃了正规教育、健康饮食、学习新技术甚至寻找真爱的长期利益。本文研究了各种激励计划，这些计划结合了外部奖励和惩罚措施，以抑制此类适得其反的行为，这些行为往往只会导致暂时的行为改变。我们的研究结果表明，一些干预措施的影响有限，可能是因为它们只专注于将行为从“放弃”（例如，大学辍学、不去健身房）转变为“尝试”（例如，上大学、定期锻炼），而没有促进对这些“尝试”选项进行充分探索。然而，探索“尝试”的长期好处对于增加长期学习和坚持的机会可能至关重要。通过对这一困境进行简化抽象，我们的结果显示在干预之前人们有很高的倾向选择“放弃”选项。对四种不同激励策略的研究表明，只有奖励对新“尝试”选项的探索是增加探索和最优选择的直接策略。惩罚“放弃”选项的选择以及利用次优“尝试”选项的选择产生了类似的结果。其他常见的指导策略效果较差，因为这些策略往往只是用一种次优行为取代另一种次优行为。令人惊讶的是，惩罚似乎是一种比奖励相对更成功的激励方式。我们讨论了这些见解如何有助于指导旨在通过激励来改善长期结果的政策。
