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11– When I wait, I get what I want... behavioral economics with, Dr. Gregory Madden | Day 33

April 13, 2020 Utah State University Office of Research Episode 11
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11– When I wait, I get what I want... behavioral economics with, Dr. Gregory Madden | Day 33
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Dr. Gregory Madden Studies Impulse control and Behavioral economics. Sometimes this involves getting rats hooked on drugs. He also has developed a successful method of getting a cafeteria of kids to eat more of their lunch.

Here's a link to more informations about Madden's Award
https://www.usu.edu/today/story/gregory-madden-awarded-the-2020-d-wynne-thorne-award

More information about D. Wynne Thorne
https://research.usu.edu/awards/d-wynne-thorne/about/

Dr. Gregory Madden studies behavioral economics in the psychology department at USU. In this episode, we'll talk about getting rats hooked on drugs, techniques adults can use to prevent shameful Taco Bell lunch breaks, and how to get a school full of kids to eat better when you run out of bribe money. My name is Wyatt Trotter. You could be playing pickleball in the driveway, but you are listening to this instead.

Today is Monday, April 12. D. Wynne Thorne Career Award at USU is named after Dr. D Wynne Thorne. He was USU's first VP of research. Before his time supporting the research of others, he wrote a book called "Irrigated Soils, Their Fertility and Management." He pretty much changed the game for farming in Utah, and his work also helped agriculture across the globe. His full bio is in the description. Dr. Thorne has helped shape agriculture as well as USU's research enterprise. USU's current president, Noel Cockett, received the award in 2002. Here's my conversation with this year's awardee, Dr. Gregory Madden.

I've done a little poking my nose in. How do you describe what you do?

So the one line of research is the impulsivity research. And so if the students are interested in addictions or in decision making in humans, then that's what we talk about. And if the students are interested in kind of helping people now, then we talk about the research that we've done in the school setting where we try to get kids to make more appropriate choices at lunchtime with respect to what they eat.

I get that those relate to each other because they're about decision making. How are those different?

The the impulsivity research; The main difference is that right now the vast majority of what I'm doing is in non-human animals is where the research is conducted. Our understanding of the impulsive decision making, although we've made great strides. And when I say we, it's the royal we, the field as a whole has made some pretty considerable strides in understanding impulsive decision making. But we're really in our infancy in really understanding that. The work is really not ready for use on humans, if you will. The kinds of questions that we're trying to to answer it would be quasi unethical to do these kinds of things with humans, because if it goes south, then you've given unusual experiences to young children that could haunt them for the rest of their lives. And so we test them off with non humans. And if they look like they're working good and we can think of a completely benign way to do this in humans, then we give it a shot.

What research questions are you asking with the non-human?

So the main research question in the non-human lab is: is there a way to reduce impulsive decision making? In the literature, we know quite well at this point that there's a very strong correlation between this type of impulsive decision making that I study and all kinds of addictions. So there's a lot there that I can unpack. So the kind of impulsivity that I study, it's the kind of impulsivity that's about patience, the ability or the inability to wait. And we know from a lot of human research, and a handful of animal studies as well, that the inability to wait to get something better correlates really strongly with substance abuse in humans. And so the way that we can do those experiments with humans is we can ask them a series of questions and we do this all the time in the (inaudible) environment and in person. It's those kinds of things.

Which one of these two things would you rather have? Would you rather have five hundred dollars right now or a thousand dollars in a year? And so if they say, well, I'll take the five hundred dollars right now, then I say, OK, well how about two hundred and fifty dollars right now? Would you take that? And if they say yes and I keep going down, I keep asking those questions like that until I can get the participant to the point where they say, I don't care. The money right now or the money later, those are worth the same to me.

And that point at which their indifferent between those two outcomes, that tells us how much do they devalue the one thousand dollar monetary reward since it's delayed by a year. And so if they say two hundred dollars is worth the same as a thousand dollars in a year, then that tells me they devalued the thousand dollar reward by 80%. And so we can look at individual differences in that. And so one person might say it's worth two hundred bucks. Another person might say it's worth nine hundred and seventy five dollars. And there's massive individual differences. What holds up pretty well in the literature, there's been lots of meta analyses on this, is that those who say it's not worth very much to me at all, the delayed outcome isn't worth very much to me at all. Those are the individuals who have had problems with substance abuse. They're prone to pathological gambling. As an emerging literature over the last 10 years that shows obesity is strongly correlated with this type of impulsivity as well.

We know that those two are correlated, but what we don't know is, is there a causal relation between those two? A lot of people have written about it and suggested that, "Yeah, if you have a tendency to not be very patient and aren't willing to wait for better outcomes to arise, then you're probably going to be a live for today kind of person." And that's going to put you in a position where you're susceptible to pathological gambling, eating foods that you really ought not be eating and taking drugs that you ought not be taking. And we see the same thing now in humans as well. So I did some research back in the mid 2000s where we looked at this type of impulsive decision-making in rats. The way that you do this with rats, you can't ask them, do you want a thousand dollars in the year? But what you can ask them is, do you want three food pellets in 30 seconds or would you rather have one food pellet now? And so it's essentially the same question.

And the way that the animal answers that the rats come into the chamber, that operant conditioning chamber, and these two levers come out. And if the rat presses this lever, then it gets the three pellets after a 30 second delay. If it uses this pellet, then it gets one pellet right now. After he eats his reward, then the next opportunity to choose happens a minute later and then we can evaluate how many impulsive choices did the rat make.

And when you do that, it turns out that the rats that make a lot of impulsive choices, they want the one food pellet now. They also are more susceptible to cocaine abuse. We stick a third lever into the chamber and we say, hey, if you press that, you can give yourself an injection of cocaine. In our study was like a relatively small amount of cocaine. And so they'd really have to press it and sample it for a while before they got high on the cocaine. Mind you, we give them enough sampling of the cocaine so that they could see what it was like. The impulsive rats or the ones that acquired the lever pressing and regularly took cocaine on a regular basis.

What percentage of rats had those tendencies?

So the rats that were the group of rats that was classified as impulsive, I think it was like 89% of those rats ended up meeting the the cocaine acquisition criterion. And of the rats that were in the low, impulsive group, I think it was like 32% of those rats. So it was a pretty big difference.

That's interesting to me because I guess in my head I think of rats as just kind of all being the same. And if they were on robots, they were all given the same programming.

They're just like us. There's huge differences between the rats. There are some rat strains that like these inbred strains of rats you may have heard of, like alcohol preferring rats. So they'll be bred for "they really dig alcohol." Well, it turns out when you test that strand of rats, they're more impulsive than the rats that don't prefer alcohol. And then there's another strain of rats that we've worked with. It's like a hyperactive strain of rats called Lewis rats. And these hyperactive rats, they're more impulsive and they'll take just about every drug in higher doses or higher amounts of drug taking than the outbreed strain from which they were derived.

What advantages do people who have better long term perspective and their decision making have over people who are a bit more impulsive?

So the longitudinal studies that have been done on this, they'll test the human children with these kinds of questionnaires that I was talking about with "do you want the money now or do you want the money later?" I'll give them questionnaires like that when they are 12 years old and they haven't taken any drugs yet. And then they'll track them over time and see if, in fact, that impulsive decision making pattern that they demonstrated before is predictive of experimenting with drug use, escalating their drug use, things like that. And the longitudinal studies have been done show that, yeah, the impulsive kids, the ones who want it now, they're more likely to experiment with cigarettes and alcohol and marijuana at an earlier age, and they're more likely to escalate their intake of those drugs as well.

 And I've heard mixed things about the results. How does how do you view that?

So the marshmallow test is not exactly the same as what it is that we study. There's a lot of stuff going on in the marshmallow test that haven't been sussed out very well, in my opinion. So there is a weight that's involved in it, but there's a lot of other things that are going on there, too. So, for example, in the way that they do the experiment, they'll have the child sit there and they'll say, "OK, if you can wait until I come back, then you can have twice as many marshmallows here. And so I'm leaving now. And if you can't wait, just ring this bell and I'll come back." I think one of the things that's different is, you know, while they're waiting, the kids are trying to not only deal with the delay itself, but they're also trying to figure out if that guy will ever coming back... Did they forget about me? And so, you know, a lot of experiences that kids could have that teach them that, yeah, people forget about you all the time. That could make them very impulsive. That's different than the kind of impulsivity we study, because in our studies, we always give them the reward, after the delay. The rats have tons of experience. There's no question about whether this is a probabilistic outcome. It's just a delayed outcome.

I remember hearing something about just like comparing the different communities the marshmallow test happened did or similar tests. And just like inner city kids other groups who are had less trust in the people around them because they were just less trusting, like they took the marshmallow they were given because they didn't know they were going to get more.

That's that's exactly right. If you wanted to teach somebody how to be impulsive, that's one of the ways in which you would do it, is you would make sure that delay not only means delay, it also means low probability.

How do you teach people how NOT to be impulsive then?

The main way that we've done it thus far is, it's very simple minded. We just give the rats lots of experience with delays. We give them some training. We've done a different range of durations of the training. We have a paper that we just submitted yesterday, actually, that looks at the shortest duration of training that works and produces reasonably large effects. And so about a month's worth of training seems to do the trick for a rat. Basically what they do is they just press a lever and then they get a delay. And then at the end of the delay, they always get the the two food pellets. And then after they complete that training, we give them the test. Do you want one food pellet now versus three food pellets after a delay? And the rats that go through that training, they're much more likely to choose the larger amount of food later than rats who either get no training or they always got the food immediately.

So let's move over into the other side of your research. You're helping people now. Yeah, that's my impulsivity. How do how does that research happen?

So the research that's really just beginning, which is still on the impulsivity research, is we are trying to take some of the things that we've learned from the non-human lab and trying to do it with preschool children. So what we do is we arrange some strategic learning sessions for the children to help them to learn to wait and also to give them just lots of experience with waiting and finding out that when, in fact, you wait, you do get the better outcome. The last time I looked at the data we had, I think it was three children that have been through the training in all three cases, their ability to wait at least doubled from pre to post training. And one of the ways that we test that, so we do the training in the lab and we test their weighting ability within the lab. But the real important test happens in the preschool setting. And so we set up a situation which is going to challenge the child and they don't know that they're being challenged.

And so, for example, one of the things that we do is we bring a new toy to the preschool. And the teacher, they don't even know they're being watched by us, the the preschoolers don't. But the teacher brings in this new toy, says, "oh, I got this new toy, who wants to play with it?" And so, of course, every child wants to play with it. But the child who has been through this training doesn't get it. And essentially what we're doing is we're watching the child very carefully to find out how long can they go without exhibiting some kind of a problem behavior. That's where we see the kids at least doubling and in some cases tripling or more the amount of time before they have any kind of, you know, even a mild instance of a problem behavior. That impulsive response, problematic responses, the kinds of things that get kids in trouble, obviously, but it also gets them in trouble and reputations then end up hurting them and hurting their academic progress over time. And so we're hopeful that we'll set them on a better course for the long run.

If I were a parent, I would want to know what those techniques you used with those kids. And how maybe I could implement them in my home?

So, again, what we've learned with the rats is that just giving them lots of opportunities to wait is one of the things that we do. So we arrange opportunities for the children to wait. So we arrange some edible foods that they would like to eat and then we help them to choose the larger amount. And then when they choose that, we will give them some strategies that they can do during the delay. And so one of the strategies that we've been working with lately is the kids will repeat something to themselves. Like when I wait, I get what I want. And we actually saw one of the kids who during the the test with the brand new toy in the classroom, the one of the kids who had been through this training, they saw one of their friends was starting to engage in problem behavior. They were complaining about it and they were getting very emotionally upset that they didn't get to play with the toy. And they went over to their friend and said, you just need to say, when I wait, I get what I want.

Tell me about that work you've done in the preschool.

So that work really began as a collaboration with Heidi Wendgreen and she's in the Department of Dietetics and Food Sciences. I was at the University of Kansas before I came here and I had accepted the position here. But before I got here, Heidi sent an email to the department chair in psychology and said, "Do you know anybody who knows anything about behavioral economics?" And they said, well, we don't have anybody now, but we just hired this guy that said something about behavioral economics. So Heidi reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to work on a project that she wanted to do with dietary choices and schools. And frankly, I hadn't done anything like that. And so my first reaction was, no, I am not really interested, but she just kept asking and she kept sending me articles and it became more and more interesting. And so then we started thinking about things that we might try. And the thing that we came up with was we worked with some researchers in Wales who had developed a pretty clever incentive based program, which was designed to get kids to try foods and try them for like a three week period. And then there is a literature that shows that the more kids try certain foods that they don't like, the more they come to to like them. And so they incentivize the trying and the consuming of of fruits and vegetables. So we tried that and it worked in the U.S. also. And we did it a couple different times and published papers on it and everything.

And so it worked. But the problem was that the schools didn't really like the intervention very much because, number one, they didn't have any money to buy the incentives. And so we knew that there was just no way that this was ever going to get widely adopted. And some of the teachers and some of the parents objected to you to incentivizing eating fruits and vegetables, because from their perspective, they thought, you know, you really shouldn't incentivize kids to do things that are good for them because they should just want to do it for themselves. And we're teaching them something bad here. So that was another objection. And then there was cheating. Some of the kids were cheating to get the rewards.

We decided to kind of scrap the reward based program, but we wanted to keep the idea of incentivizing the rewards. But to do it in a way that would be much more acceptable to parents and much more acceptable to school administrators and to do it in a way that was basically free. How to do that? I'd to give credit to my son, who you wanted to be a game designer about 6 or 7 years ago. And he showed me this video about game design and how it was related to Skinner and Skinner boxes and stuff like that. And so I watched it. And as I was watching it, I started thinking about, well, maybe we could design a game that the kids at the school could play.

And instead of using real rewards that cost money, maybe we could incentivize with virtual rewards within this game. Obviously, we didn't have any budget to develop a game that kids would play like a video game. And so we just came up with the lowest tech version of a game that we could possibly think of. And that was just a narrative game in which the way you play is you help these heroes in this narrative story to defeat these bad guys. The way that you help is you meet these fruit and vegetable consumption goals in the cafeteria. If you meet the goal, then that helps the characters and so the way that we set the goals is we take a look at their consumption over the last 10 days to find out what is their baseline level of consumption. We determine that and then we say, OK, the goal for tomorrow is just eat one more bite. That's it. If you can eat one more bite. And the way that we measured this is we weighed how much fruit and vegetable waste there was at the end of the cafeteria at the end of the lunch period. And so by weighing the waste, we could figure out, did they take the one more bite. And if the average child took one more bite than they met their goal.

So the whole school is playing? It's not just one kid?

The whole school is basically on the same team. That was how we got rid of the cheating, was that no one individual gets anything. It's a collective effort. And so nobody is going to try to cheat because why would I cheat for everybody else's gain? And indeed, we've just never seen kids cheating like we saw with the individualized incentive programs. So we set the goal very, very low and we ask very little of them and we offer in return very little also, basically these virtual rewards. And so the virtual rewards are like money within the game. But the whole thing exists in PowerPoint slides. It's like a slide show that appears in the cafeteria. The heroes appear as these comic book drawn characters. There's voice bubbles like in comic books, and the whole narrative plays out through these slides. And so each day, if they met their goal, they get another episode within the story. The story always has like a cliffhanger ending. They always need the help of the school. The way they help is to meet their fruit and vegetable consumption goal and to earn a little bit of virtual money so that the characters can buy things that they need to fight the bad guys, just all kinds of things like that. So all the rewards are virtual. And the good news is it seems to work.

You're studying impulsivity and in kids and in rats. And how does that relate to adults?w. 

We're all faced with these, you know, choices every day of our lives. I mean, the chocolate cake is a temptation. You're going to enjoy it. Now, when you choose to have that, you're also choosing to give up, at least for the moment, on the goals that you might have for healthy eating. But all of those goals for healthy eating, the rewards that are associated with those, those are not to be realized for quite some time, if ever, frankly, if you live that long. And so those immediate rewards, they definitely tempt us. These are just instances of it, but then strategies that we can use. There's some time honored strategies that we can use to reduce our impulsive decision making. And one of them is the commitment strategy. The commitment strategy is you make your choice about what you're going to have. So, for example, for lunch, you know, I know that the healthy choice for lunch is to have a salad. When I'm at work, what I'll do is I'll make my choice hours before it's lunchtime. And so when I was going to work each day, I would pack a lunch and I would pack it with something like a salad and an apple and something else healthy.

And then when I'm at work, I could override my commitment. But it would cost me if I did that, it would cost me the labor that it would take to walk over to taco time and get a taco. And it would cost me that I'm going to have to throw away that food as well. But it was an easy choice for me to make because I wasn't making a choice about something that I was going to eat right now. And so it was easy to make the self-control choice. Now, the interesting thing that I've noticed since I've been home is how effective that is, because today for lunch I had a big giant pulled pork sandwich and my eating habits have been so much worse since I've been home because I'm making those choices at the moment when I can have the reward. And that's the worst time for you to make choices. Don't make your choices at the moment where you're going to have the reward, make them hours in advance.

So how has this research affected the way you live your own personal life?

That's a good question. I think that, you know, I gave my children opportunities to wait as a parent. I think good parents probably do that is that they don't give their kids what they want when they want it all the time. And you can deploy some skills to help your children to deal with the waiting. Distracting yourself, saying things like, when I wait I get what I want, those kinds of things. I think that commitment thing that I was talking about, that's one that I use a fair amount is trying to make my choices well in advance and so commit myself to, you know, courses of self-control. So, you know, if somebody asked me, will you give a talk tomorrow or will you give a talk in a week? My answer is going to be no, in part because I know it's so soon and I don't want that, you know, all that work to get dumped on me immediately. But if somebody says, hey, will you give a talk three months from now, I would say "sure, no problem!" Because not only do we devalue rewards, but we also devalue how bad something is going to be because it's delayed as well. So if we devalue the prospect of cancer in 10 years, if we steeply devalue that, then yeah, we're probably more likely to not worry about cancer, become a cigarette smoker or chew tobacco or those kinds of things.

So final question. How are you trying to make the best of this pandemic shut down that we're in?

So my wife and I take a lot of walks. I always walk to work. Being able to take walks with her has been really nice. But really, from a scientific perspective, one of the things that I'm fascinated with about change, nobody would choose this to happen. They're terrible things that are happening right now. But with change also comes behavior change. I'm just fascinated to watch behavior change and to see when we change our actions. One of the things that we do, we're not going to like them. It's almost like an evolving species. There's mutations, these changes and most of them are bad. And the organism that has a mutation dies because that was a bad mutation. But some of them turn out to be really good and they kind of advanced the species forward. In the same respect I'm looking for and in fact, where my wife and I are being quite conscious of, let's try something new. We're trying to make or break the monotony on the one hand, but also looking for "let's try something new and maybe we'll contact something that we like a whole lot more." Just looking to explore new things and finding out are my old assumptions about how best to live my life, correct?

Yeah, that makes me think of...I can't remember the exact when it happened. But like in London, they had a big transit and roads project.

I know that story. That's an awesome story.

Yeah, I'm going to finish it out anyway. But just they had to shut down a big train or a tube (subway). And so a whole bunch of people had to find a new way to get to work. And then after the tube was finished, twenty five percent of those people continued on their alternate commutes because it was more efficient or more pleasant for them.

That's exactly right. So, again, in that that case of the London underground, nobody chose that. It was forced upon them. They complained about it, I'm sure, much like we are. But yeah, let's be conscious about the possibility that we will chance upon something that works better and you think about like environmentalism also. Wouldn't it be wonderful if people discovered that, you know, I don't really need to go out as much as I thought? Maybe I don't need to drive as much? I mean, and Logan, the air has been clearer over the last three weeks than it's ever been in the history of the times that I've lived here. It's been really wonderful. And I think one of the things that I've also discovered is that I like working from home a lot, because when I hit these moments where I'm not really productive, I can get up and I can go outside and do some things, especially now that the weather's better. And then the greatest example of variability, my wife took duct tape and she made a pickleball court in our driveway. So every time I look like I'm not productive, she'll say, "You look like you need to play some pickleball."

I've worked from home probably about 50% at a time before this happened. But it's a lot easier now that everybody's working from home, right?

And so I think that's interesting as well. Thank you so much for talking to me. This has been really nice and I've learned a lot.

Congratulations, Dr. Madden, thank you for your time and thank you for giving us the silver lining to put around all this happening. This episode of Instead was edited by Nick Vázquez and me, Wyatt Traughber, as part of our work in the Office of Research at Utah State University. Please subscribe to Instead, share it with a friend, and keep listening.


Is there a way to reduce impulsive decision making?
Drug and alcohol addicted rats
The marshmallow test and advantages of low impulse
Impulse, toys, and school lunch
When I wait, I get what I want
How to conquer temptation!
Trying something new