POINT OF VIEW Erika Kirgios

at a A DIETER IS OFFERED CHOCOLATE CAKE party. Someone trying to save money stares longingly at a fancy new smartphone. A student trying to improve her grades considers skipping her studies to watch a binge-worthy TV show instead. These are all examples of want-should conflicts, in which people are forced to choose between instant gratification and long-term benefits.

Wants are defined as actions that provide short-term pleasure but no long-term benefits, while shoulds provide long-term benefits but often involve short-term pain. Due to ‘present bias’ — ‘the tendency to dramatically overweight immediate rewards relative to delayed rewards’ — people often choose wants over shoulds in the heat of the moment, only to regret their decisions later.

Unfortunately, evidence shows that over time, repeatedly selecting wants over shoulds takes a toll on our health, financial and professional outcomes. An estimated 40 per cent of premature deaths can be attributed to repeated decisions that favour wants over shoulds related to eating, drinking, smoking, exercise, and vehicle safety.

In light of the large social and personal costs of involved, policymakers and behavioural scientists have tested a wide range of interventions designed to encourage people to overcome their present bias and make more should choices. Such interventions have encouraged people to pre-commit to should choices such as saving money, to self-impose penalties if they fail to engage in should activities such as exercise, or to avoid situations that might make it particularly tempting to choose want activities such as screen time over should activities such as studying.

These kinds of interventions prioritize helping people engage in should activities at the expense of wants. But choosing wants versus shoulds need not always be mutually exclusive.

In recent research, my colleagues and I taught participants to pair wants with shoulds to increase their followthrough on should behaviours. First, we examined whether encouraging people to pair indulgent entertainment with exercise could durably increase gym attendance using a technique called ‘temptation bundling’ (more on that to come). Second, we explored whether giving people free

entertainment as part of a program to encourage exercise could implicitly suggest temptation bundling and therefore boost exercise. In both cases, we tested the extent of individuals’ sophistication in overcoming their present bias.

Research shows that some people recognize their struggle to follow-through on should activities and to resist desirable want activities, and those people are often interested in finding strategies to prevent such self-control failures. We call these individuals have been dubbed ‘sophisticates,’ and many behaviour change interventions lean on their ability to anticipate future temptations and willingness to adopt strategies that help them resist those temptations.

Existing work has focused on sophisticates’ taste for ‘commitment devices’ — technologies and tools that help them avoid future temptations, such as smaller plates, bank accounts that are inaccessible until a pre-determined date, or fines that arise when they fail to achieve their goals. We felt sophisticates could also benefit from behavioural tricks or techniques they can try on their own, without external reinforcement.

Indeed, a growing literature suggests some sophisticates can successfully self-impose behaviour-change strategies and that teaching people new skills or practical tricks can empower them to make better choices on their own. Evidence also suggests people can craft and successfully follow personal guidelines that help them exert self-control. For instance, they can self-impose constraints on purchases of ‘vice items’ such as cigarettes, assign activities to categories and restrict spending to implicit category-level budgets on their own initiative, and reward themselves for the successful completion of should activities to encourage their own goal-oriented behaviours.

‘Temptation bundling’ is one form of personal rule that research suggests may appeal to sophisticates hoping to reign in want behaviours and pursue more should behaviours. As conceived by my co-author Katherine Milkman and her colleagues, it pairs wants (e.g., getting a pedicure, watching low-brow TV, eating chocolate) with shoulds (e.g., paying taxes, exercising, getting an eye exam). This pairing makes should activities more enticing and therefore more likely to be readily executed; it also makes want activities less wasteful and guilt-inducing.

In our new research, my colleagues and I felt that sophisticates may like the idea of only allowing themselves to enjoy wants, like low-brow audio-novels or other forms of entertainment, while simultaneously engaging in a should behaviour, like exercise. Katherine and her colleagues completed a prior study on temptation bundling, where they showed that when access to a want (a tempting audio novel) was denied to people unless they engaged in a should behavior (visiting the gym), they exercised more often. In this same study, a survey determined that the majority of participants would be interested in paying for gym-only access to wants because they thought this restriction might help them boost their physical activity. In short, people interested in behaviour change expressed a desire for a commitment device to help them temptation bundle. But, we wondered, would they be sophisticated enough to implement temptation bundling on their own, without a gym, coach, or technology to restrict their access to tempting wants?

Our Research

We set out to test the hypothesis that merely teaching people about temptation bundling can have durable benefits. We also ran the first well-powered test of the hypothesis that both teaching people about temptation bundling and providing them with free access to a want that can be used to temptation bundle — without restricting their access to that want — has benefits. We made four hypotheses.

1. That people introduced to the idea of temptation bundling will engage in more of the should behaviour they are seeking to boost (in this case, exercise);

2. That people introduced to the idea of temptation bundling and provided with a want (in this case, a free audiobook) to bundle with the should behaviour they are seeking

Repeatedly selecting wants over shoulds takes a toll on our health, financial and professional outcomes.

to boost (in this case, exercise) will engage in more of that should behaviour;

3. That providing people with a want (in this case, a free audiobook) that can be easily bundled with a should behaviour they are seeking to boost (in this case, exercise) leaks information that the want ought to be paired with the should to make the should more attractive; and

4. That people who receive a want (in this case, a free audiobook) that can easily be bundled with a should behaviour they are seeking to boost (in this case exercise) will engage in more of that should behaviour.

Across four experiments, we found evidence that people can successfully self-impose temptation bundling as a behaviour-change strategy, bundling wants with shoulds to increase their adherence to should behaviours.

In one of the largest-ever field experiments studying exercise frequency, we found that teaching people about temptation bundling and providing them with unrestricted access to tempting content durably increased their gym visits. Specifically, pairing a free audiobook with encouragement to temptation bundle increased the likelihood of a weekly gym visit by 10 to 14 per cent and average weekly gym visits by 10 to 12 per cent for up to 17 weeks after a fourweek intervention period. Our field experiment suggests that people can infer and apply behaviour change strategies on their own.

Our findings suggest both that people can be highly sophisticated in pursuing behaviour change and that extremely low-touch interventions can successfully promote positive change. In fact, a well-timed gift can often be enough to help people improve their habits.

In closing

Our findings suggest that practitioners who wish to encourage the adoption of should behaviours may be able to effect change by providing bundle-ready wants in the right context and encouraging temptation bundling. Importantly, the effectiveness of this strategy seems to be remarkably robust across various sub-populations, suggesting that many people can benefit from learning how to temptation bundle and receiving a bundle-ready want. The more accessible practitioners can make bundle-ready wants to participants, the better.

Among our most intriguing findings is the suggestive evidence that explicit instructions about how temptation bundling works may not be necessary when the technique is suggested implicitly. Our results indicate that providing a tempting want in the context of a program designed to increase a should (i.e., a gym handing out free audiobooks) may be sufficient to inspire temptation bundling — and more sustainable behaviour.

Erika L. Kirgios is a Doctoral Candidate in Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-author of “Teaching Temptation Bundling to Boost Exercise”, along with Graelin H. Mandel, Katherine L. Milkman and Angela L. Duckworth (Wharton), Yeji Park (Princeton University), and Dena M. Gromet and Joseph S. Kay (University of Pennsylvania). This paper was published in the November 2020 edition of the Journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, which was co-edited by Rotman Professor Dilip Soman.

Merely teaching people about temptation bundling can be beneficial.