Thanks Giving

I love Thanksgiving.  I love that it's family-centre holiday, even if this year my family consists of only me and my better half.  I love the opening of the Christmas season. I love the break from work, which I'll have to imagine this year, as there is none at our school (Come on, Chinese Near Year!). I am fortunate enough to have seasons and seasons of great memories of our family going to my sister's house for days of fun-filled together time.  I still miss making the gingerbread houses, but everyone knows it's mostly because of the incredible variety of candy.
I think it's a healthy exercise to list what's going right in your life, what you're grateful for, and now I have some scientific evidence to back up that gut feeling.  Below is an article from my paper of record, the NY Times, in which we get to read once again what we already know, count your blessings, and relish in your good fortune.  It was in the same edition of the paper that featured a picture of a man who is living in a tent this week outside of Best Buy in anticipation of Black Friday..... Could they not have focused on the most positive message below, I ask you?
BTW, I am very grateful for everyone in my life, whether you read this blog or not, although I have a special place in my heart for those who do, a gesture of love if ever there was one. I am particularly grateful this year for the access to medical care that we in America enjoy, as it is helping to heal 2 very special people in my life.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.  Crank up that Christmas music and sing a tune for me as well. We'll be attending a Thanksgiving dinner at our school, on Wednesday evening for some reason, but the effort is what counts.

AS Thanksgiving approaches, so does the holiday shopping season. Once again, a day traditionally meant to celebrate gratitude will inaugurate a month of rampant consumerism.

As a psychologist who studies decision making, I’m acutely aware that marketers know how the mind works, and they aren’t hesitant to use that knowledge to stoke consumers’ desires and lessen their self-control. Tactics emphasizing scarcity (“only 10 televisions at this price in stock”) and delayed cost (“0 percent interest until 2016”) are employed to great effect.

Such tactics prey on one of the mind’s greatest vulnerabilities: the innate human preference for rapid reward, or immediate gratification. Most people, for example, would opt to receive $20 today rather than $100 in a year, even though, logically speaking, an investment guaranteed to quintuple your money in 12 months is hard to beat.

This phenomenon, known as temporal discounting, often plays a central role in impulse-buying decisions. To the extent that retailers can increase your impatience for reward or otherwise evoke a sense of urgency in you, your belief that a pleasurable expenditure is worthwhile increases, while the rewards of saving and investing that money appear more and more distant.

Can we, as shoppers, resist?

Of course we can. We all have a proclivity for immediate gratification, but we are also all capable of self-control. The real question is: How do we ensure that we exercise that control?

A natural suggestion is to rely on willpower. But when it comes to holiday shopping, that is likely to fail. Research has shown that willpower tends to be limited. Each successful exercise of it actually increases the likelihood of subsequent failure if temptations come in quick succession (as they do, for instance, in shopping malls).

So rather than trying to override your decision-making impulses, a better strategy might be to try to change them. And recent research suggests that an effective way to do that is by cultivating the emotion of gratitude.

That’s right: As hokey as it sounds, the solution to the shopping season’s excesses may lie in the very message of Thanksgiving itself.

Psychologists have long known that negative emotions like anger and fear can alter decisions (often for the worse), but until recently, we haven’t focused on the effects of positive emotions on decision making. The emotion of gratitude, viewed from a cost-benefit perspective, stresses the long-term value of short-term sacrifice (e.g., If I’m grateful to you for a favor, I’ll work hard to repay it and thereby ensure you’ll help me again in the future). Consequently, my colleagues and I suspected that gratitude might also enhance patience and self-control.

To find out, we asked 75 people to recall and describe in writing one of three events: a time they felt grateful, a time they felt amused or a typical day. We next asked them 27 questions of the form “Would you rather have $X now or $Y in Z days?” where Y was always greater than X, and Z varied from days to months.

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To make the stakes palpable, we sometimes paid actual money. For example, if someone said he’d rather have $55 now as opposed to $75 in 61 days, we handed him the cash.

Answers to these questions allowed us to calculate how financially patient people were. As we reported in an article in Psychological Science earlier this year, those feeling neutral (the ones who described their daily routine) demonstrated the usual preference for immediate reward: On average, they viewed receiving $17 now as equivalent to getting $100 in a year. Those feeling happy and amused were similar: On average, they would sacrifice $100 in a year for $18 in the moment.

But those feeling grateful showed almost double the financial patience. They required $30 in the moment to forgo the $100 reward a year from now. What’s more, the amount of patience people possessed was directly tied to how grateful they felt.

What these findings show is that certain emotions can temporarily enhance self-control by decreasing desires for immediate gratification. While feeling happy doesn’t do much to increase patience, feeling grateful does.

So if you’re looking to avoid impulse-buying this year, take time not only to celebrate with your friends and family, but also to count your blessings. You may find that the easiest way to thwart retailers’ enticements as you peruse the shopping aisle isn’t to try to resist what you want; it’s to be thankful for what you have.

David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, is the author of “The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More.”