MR: The culture has truncated its focus and attention span, it's all about high speed and instant gratification, where thinking long term is just not in the culture now.
The stronger incentive, says Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher who specializes in the economics of privacy, may be needed to offset the bias toward immediate gratification in human decision-making — thinking only of the emotionally satisfying birthday greeting next week instead of the privacy risks down the road.
This is partly because, Mr. Letterman said, he regards Mr. McCall's satirical writing and illustrations as if they were sacred documents — "This guy is Mount Olympus," he said of Mr. McCall — and partly because he was not thinking of anyone's gratification but his own in pursuing the project.
Those instant gratification decisions are WAY easier than thinking how your new car payments could impact your ability to afford your home when you are 82 years old.
More importantly, it has fueled the need for instant gratification, something not possible while you are thinking Levin's winding thoughts in Anna Karenina.
Four-year-old children display the least effective strategies for delaying gratification, such as looking at the reward and thinking about its arousing features.
I'll go ahead and raise my hand here, I'm terrible with instant gratification -- but not how you may be thinking.
In contrast, when the choice was to delay gratification in exchange for a bigger reward, brain activity was concentrated in the "thinking" regions, such as the prefrontal cortex.
We are addicted to immediate gratification, removed from the necessity to take time for decision making, for rumination and contemplation, thinking things through.
A subject's impulsiveness - his or her ability to delay gratification in exchange for a slightly increased reward - was measured another way too: by a standard psychological questionnaire that asked the subject to rate, say, how often he or she bought something on impulse or spoke before thinking things out.
