Rotman Management — Spring 2017

rotmanmagazine.ca / 45

IN OUR DAILY LIVES we frequently face a tension between what we
want to do and what we believe we should do. After a long week
at work, we may want to share an expensive dinner and a few
drinks with friends — when we know we should go home early
and get a good night’s sleep; similarly, we might be tempted
to get caught up on the current season of Homeland when we
know we should focus on drafting that report we promised our
colleague. For decades, researchers have examined the battle
between highly desirable options that provide immediate grati-
fication (e.g., eating junk food, procrastinating, overspending)
and options that provide more long-term benefits (e.g., eating
healthy food, meeting deadlines and saving for retirement).
Harvard Professor Max Bazerman calls this common
struggle ‘want/should conflict’. In this article, we will summa-
rize the key findings on this pervasive conflict and discuss a se-
ries of interventions that policymakers, organizations, and indi-
viduals can use to promote more future-oriented choices.

A Struggle for the Ages

Individuals often evaluate decisions through two different lenses:

The want self focuses myopically on the here and now, and thus

strongly desires instant gratification; while the should self is more

far-sighted, guided primarily by long-term interests.

Indulging in the wants that we most desire can cause us to feel

wasteful, irresponsible and immoral, and as a result of a distaste

for such feelings, some individuals under-consume want options.

However, it is far more typical for people to feel that they have

made the opposite mistake (i.e., over-indulging in wants at the ex-

pense of shoulds) and to regret this irrational behaviour later on.

Over-indulging in want options typically has a much greater

cost than overindulging in should options. For example, failures

to control one’s desires (e.g., choosing pizza over vegetables,

watching TV instead of exercising, smoking rather than quitting,

buying an unnecessary designer handbag rather than deposit-

ing the money in a savings account) can contribute over time to

DUELING WITH

DESIRE:

How to Confront

Want/Should Conflict

The better we understand want/should conflict, the more successful

we will be at designing effective interventions that shift behaviour.

by T. Bradford Bitterly, Robert Mislavsky, Hengchen Dai and Katherine L. Milkman