Ulysses contracts: time traveling to precommit

Ulysses contracts: time traveling to precommit

The most famous traveler of antiquity, the Homeric hero Odysseus, was also a mental time traveler. One of the legendary trials on his journey home involved the island of the Sirens. Sailors passing the island became so entranced by the Sirens’ song that they would steer toward the shore, crashing to their deaths on the rocky shoal around the island. Aware of the fate that befell any sailor who heard the song, Odysseus told his crew to tie his hands to the mast and fill their ears with beeswax as they approached the island. They could then steer safely, unaffected by the song they could not hear, while he would get to hear the Sirens’ song without imperiling the ship.

The plan worked perfectly. This action—past-us preventing present-us from doing something stupid—has become known as a Ulysses contract. (Most translations of Homer use the hero’s ancient Greek name, Odysseus. The time-travel strategy uses the hero’s ancient Roman name, Ulysses.)

It’s the perfect interaction between past-you, present-you, and future-you. Ulysses recognized that his future-self (along with his crew) would become entranced by the Sirens and steer toward the rocks. So he had his crew fill their ears with wax and tie his hands to the mast, literally binding his future-self to better behavior. One of the simplest examples of this kind of contract is using a ride-sharing service when you go to a bar. A past version of you, who anticipated that you might decide irrationally about whether you are okay to drive, has bound your hands by taking the car keys out of them.

Most illustrations of Ulysses contracts, like the original, involve raising a barrier against irrationality. But these kinds of precommitment contracts can also be designed to lower barriers that interfere with rational action. For example, if we are trying to eat healthier, we might identify that an irrational decision point occurs when we go to the mall with someone, agree to meet them in a couple hours, and spend idle time in the food court. A barrier-inducing Ulysses contract could involve us not going to the mall at all or budgeting our time tightly so we have just enough time to accomplish our intended purpose. A barrier-reducing contract would be to precommit to carry healthy snacks in our bag, so we can increase the probability, if we’re doing any idle eating, that we can make a better choice since we have drastically reduced the effort it takes to grab a healthier snack.

Ulysses contracts can come in varying levels of how much your hands are bound, ranging from physically preventing acting on a decision to just committing in advance to certain actions without any barriers save the commitment itself. Regardless of the level of binding, precommitment contracts trigger a decision-interrupt. At the moment when we consider breaking the contract, when we want to cut the binding, we are much more likely to stop and think.

When you are physically prohibited from deciding, you are interrupted in the sense that you are prevented from acting on an irrational impulse; the option simply isn’t there. That’s the brute-force way to do this kind of time traveling. Past-Ulysses interrupted present-Ulysses’s decision by taking the decision, literally, out of his hands.

In most situations, you can’t make a precommitment that’s 100% tamper-proof. The hurdles aren’t necessarily high, but they nevertheless create a decision-interrupt that may prompt us to do the bit of time travel necessary to reduce emotion and encourage perspective and rationality in the decision. A lawyer attending a settlement negotiation can make a precommitment, with the client or other lawyers on their team, as to the lowest amount they would accept in a settlement (or the highest amount they would agree to pay to settle). Home buyers, understanding that in the moment they might get emotionally attached to a home, can commit in advance to their budget. Once they decide on a house they want to buy, they can decide in advance what the maximum amount they’d be willing to pay for it is so that they don’t get caught up in the moment of the bidding.

Throwing out all the junk food in our house makes it impossible for midnight-us to easily, mindlessly, down a pint of ice cream. But as long as we have a car or food delivery services, that kind of food is still available somewhere. It just takes a lot more effort to get it. The same is true if we ask the waiter not to put the bread basket on the table at the restaurant. We can still, obviously, get bread, but now we have to ask the waiter to bring it. In fact, even Ulysses had to rely on his crew to ignore him if, upon hearing the Sirens’ song, he signaled them to free him.

Ulysses contracts can help us in several ways to be more rational investors. When we set up an automatic allocation from our pay into a retirement account, that’s a Ulysses contract. We could go through the trouble of changing the allocation, but setting it up initially gives our goal-setting, System 2–self a chance to precommit to what we know is best for our long-term future. And if we want to change the allocation, we have to take some specific steps to do so, creating a decision-interrupt.

Investment advisors do this with clients, determining in advance, as they are discussing the client’s goals, the conditions under which they would buy, sell, hold, or press their positions on particular stocks. If the client later wants to make an emotional decision in the moment (involving, for example, a sudden rise or drop in the value of an investment), the advisor can remind the client of the discussion and the agreement.

In all these instances, the precommitment or predecision doesn’t completely bind our hands to the mast. An emotional, reactive, irrational decision is still physically possible (though, to various degrees, more difficult). The precommitments, however, provide a stop-and-think moment before acting, triggering the potential for deliberative thought. Will that prevent an emotional, irrational decision every time? No. Will we sometimes still decide in a reflexive or mindless way? Of course. But it will happen less often.