POWER OF THE DEADLINE

dari ChangkatNingkeBTP

Everybody knows the power of deadlines — and we all hate them. But their effectiveness is undeniable.

People procrastinate. Deadlines help. They speed up performance and, paradoxically, reduce the anxiety of uncertainty.

So when United States President Barack Obama announced on Tuesday night a strict timetable of 18 months before the US would begin to draw down its troops in Afghanistan, how did that affect the psychology of the nation? The emotional effect of the pronouncement depends on the party involved.

For the military brass, 18 months is a blink of an eye, so the deadline could motivate them to perform at their peak, or it might paralyse them with fear.

For the troops and their loved ones, 18 months is an eternity.

But for all those with an immediate stake in the war, a clear timetable reduces uncertainty — at least along the “when” dimension, if not the “what” dimension. After all, no one likes to wait. And the only thing worse than waiting is waiting with uncertainty.

A team at Emory University examined what happened when people waited for an impending electrical shock. Some people dreaded the shock so deeply that they chose to receive a more powerful shock earlier rather than wait for a lesser shock to arrive at a later, random time.

One of the key jobs of the human brain is to simulate the future, and the less information it has to work with, the more anxious it becomes.

Pinning things down in time makes waiting less troubling. With a clear idea about the order and timescale of events, people are more patient and less anxious. And that is the hope implicit in Obama's declaration of a timeline. But what about those people with a less immediate stake in the war? Here, the President's task becomes more complicated.

Some years ago, psychologists posed a deceptively simple question: If I were to offer you US$100 (RM340) right now, or US$110 a week from now, which would you choose? Most subjects chose to take US$100 right then. It didn't seem worthwhile to wait an entire week for only US$10 more. And the further an event lies in the future, the less people care about it. So, if offered US$100 now or US$500 18 months from now, many people still take the US$100. The consequence is that there's little difference between Obama promising 18 months from now versus 18 years from now. In the human ken, both are obscured in the mists of the distant future.

So, for his timetable to have emotional power, Obama would do well to define and adhere to intermediate goals. A year and a half offers little in the way of reassurance, but everyone can value action month by month.

I don't want to imply that people care only about the short term — after all, people do build college saving funds and retirement plans. It's simply that the present holds more sway than the future. Recently, researchers used brain imaging to monitor people making money-now-or-more-later decisions, and they discovered that the neural networks involved in short- and long-term decision-making are fundamentally separate. In situations of choice, the two systems are often locked in battle against each other.

Sub-prime mortgage offers are perfectly optimised to take advantage of the I-want-it-now system, as are chocolate cookies, temptations for marital infidelity and all manner of things that people choose now and regret later.

People manage the influence of the short-term systems by proactively binding their future options. We see this when a person in good health signs an advance medical directive to pull the plug in the event of a coma, when an alcoholic rids the house of drink to avoid future temptation, or when a person socks money into a Christmas account to keep himself from spending it before December.

Such deals with oneself are what philosophers call “Ulysses contracts”, named after the hero who decided in advance to lash himself to a mast to resist the sirens' song. The present, calm Ulysses was negotiating with his future, more emotional self.

In the same way, by drawing a line on the calendar, Obama hopes to favour his administration's long-term strategy over the unknown siren songs that will be heard over the next year and a half. Nations, like people, are continually buffeted by the winds of short-term events. In deference to a long-term strategy, the President hopes to bind the US to the mast to ensure it sticks to the plan. — The Straits Times