George Ainslie

George W. Ainslie is an American psychiatrist, psychologist and behavioral economist. He is chief Psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Coatesville, Pennsylvania and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine.

Unusual for a psychiatrist, Ainslie undertook experimental animal research in operant conditioning, under the guidance of Howard Rachlin. He investigated inter-temporal choice in pigeons, and was the first to demonstrate experimentally the phenomenon of preference reversal in favor of the more immediate outcomes as the choice point between two options, one delivered sooner than the other, is moved forward in time. He explained this in terms of hyperbolic discounting of future rewards, derived from ideas that Rachlin and others had developed from Richard Herrnstein's matching law.

Ainslie then integrated these ideas with earlier experimental and theoretical work on inter-temporal choice, for example the studies of Walter Mischel on delay of gratification in children. In his book Picoeconomics (1992) he attempted to account for these ideas, and also facts about addiction that he was concerned with from his clinical work at the Veteran Administration Medical Center, Coatesville, Pennsylvania (where he rose to become chief psychiatrist), by supposing that different parts or aspects of the personality are in conflict with one another. He grounded this idea in the Freudian theory of id, ego and superego; it became important in behavioral economics in the form of Richard Thaler's "multiple selves" theory of saving behavior.

Many of Ainslie's ideas have proved to be foundational within behavioral economics, and his work (along with that of Drazen Prelec) formed a key conduit by which ideas and data from operant conditioning joined the current of work on decision making to challenge the rational choice theory that had dominated economic thinking. He was once a Clinical Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia For instance, when offered the choice between $50 now and $100 a year from now, many people will choose the immediate $50, whereas, given the choice between $50 in five years or $100 in six years, almost everyone will choose $100 in six years, even though that reduces to the same choice seen at five years' greater distance, as unconditioned by the initial five-year delay.

Works

Ainslie, G. (1992). Picoeconomics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ainslie, G. (2001). Breakdown of will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ainslie, G. (2006) "A selectionist model of the ego: Implications for self-control". In N. Sebanz & W. Prinz (Eds.) Disorders of Volition (pp. 119–149). MIT Press.

Ainslie, G. (2010) "The core process in addictions and other impulses: Hyperbolic discounting versus conditioning and framing". In D. Ross, H. Kincaid, D. Spurrett & P. Collins (Eds.) What is Addiction? (pp. 211–245). MIT Press. Ainslie, G. (2011) "'Free will' as recursive self-prediction: Does a deterministic mechanism reduce responsibility?". In G. Graham & J. Poland (Eds.) Addiction and Responsibility (pp. 55–87).