First off, I want to say that I'm really thrilled about how many people have already mentioned reading the previous post to me. Facebook advertising does work, after all! Thanks for your support--you're great people with valuable time, so it's flattering to know you'd spend any small quantity of it reading my ramblings.
And speaking of ramblings, I had a rather random thought today: does any other species, apart from humans, contrive situations of delayed gratification for themselves? I mean, the concept of reaching some success to get a reward makes sense--working for food is pretty ubiquitous, from what I've gathered from the Discovery Channel. But creating one's own rewards and determining what is required to "earn" them--why on earth would any other creature do that? It must be one of the least intuitive things to do in the world, and yet we train ourselves to do it--or put up with others doing it for us--from a very early age. Click here to watch kids squirm in fantastic ways.
Let's take a prime example: dessert. Apart from pets who are trained to respond to treats, humans are basically the only creatures I can think of who have this philosophy of treating oneself to a reward of tasty, though probably not nutritious, food. I mean, how many times have you thought of doing something like the following?
I have three cookies, so instead of eating them now, I'm going to let myself have one cookie each time I do something on this list of things to do.
We have the cookies sitting in our hand, and yet we contrive our own set of rules, making them theoretically inaccessible even though we could just as easily eat them quickly and then just do the stuff on the list merely out of wanting or needing to do it.
This set of ideas may have been brought to my attention indirectly by the pie in the fridge, the brownies on the counter, and the most-likely-stale 2-bite chocolate cupcakes behind me, all completely unguarded but somehow not completely devoured already. We'll see how long that lasts.
Thoughts?
I'm pretty sure that delayed gratification is purely human, because it's definitely a matter of conscious thought defeating basic instinct. Though as far as the reward thing goes, that's learned behavior. When a little kid has a candy, he or she doesn't think of it as a reward unless the parent treats it as a reward. I could cite a bunch of psychological experiences and pretentious terms, but basically there's no difference between us and the pets, as far as learning to see food as a reward goes. However, pets are about as likely as little kids sit around and think "maybe I would enjoy it more later." That's really just humans.
ReplyDelete(Also, it may have something to do with our tendency to associate happiness with food that isn't very good for us, leading us to want to feel that we earned it instead of feeling that we're just being unhealthy, but that's just a possibility.)
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