INKMAGGOT

Here is "Regret and Counterfactuals” from the Behavioral Economics for Dogs concepts comic series. From the blog post:

Regret and Counterfactuals: Our happiness depends not just on where we are, but on where we imagine we could have been. In a clever study demonstrating this phenomenon, participants watched videos from the 1992 Olympics right after athletes won a medal. And, without knowing which medal the athletes had won, participants rated how happy they looked. Bronze winners turned out to look much happier than silver winners. Why?

Poster for the recycling & trash sorting at my job. 

Here is #13 from the Behavioral Economics for Dogs concepts comic series. From the blog post:

Affective Forecasting: We make predictions about how events will make us feel all the time – and many of these predictions guide our life decisions. (This dog, for example, imagines how a new puppy will make him feel — and that a puppy is the wrong decision.) Yet, many of our initial predictions are inaccurate, especially when it comes to predicting the intensity and duration of our feelings.

Here is #12 from the Behavioral Economics for Dogs concepts comic series (apparently I mixed up the numbering on here, whatevs). From the blog post:

I work with QORDS, an overnight summer camp in NC for queer & trans youth. I recently finished up the flyer for 2018! 

Here is #10 from the Behavioral Economics for Dogs concepts comic series. From the blog post:

Goal Gradient: Have you ever been in a race? Do you find yourself giving a little extra push as the finish line approaches? If so, you’ve seen the goal gradient theory in action. Goal gradient theory suggests that people will work harder to achieve a goal as they get closer to reaching it. In the illustration above, the dog runs faster as the distance to the human shrinks.

This principle was illustrated in a study using coffee punch cards. When customers got a punch card specifying that they could get a free cup of coffee after buying 10 cups, they bought coffee more frequently as they got closer to the free cup. In a follow up study, researchers compared customers who were given a 12-punch coffee card with two “free” punches and customers who got a 10-punch coffee card with no free punches. The group with free punches bought coffee fastest (presumably because they felt they were closer to the free coffee), even though both groups technically had to buy 10 cups to get a free one.

Here is #9 from the Behavioral Economics for Dogs concepts comic series. From the blog post:

Lack of Self-Control: Why do people (and pups!) give in to temptation? Lack of self-control. It’s extremely difficult to pass up on something that’s tempting in the moment when the benefit of delayed gratification is not immediately apparent. The classic self-control study started in a nursery school in the 1960s. Walter Mischel and his researchers placed a marshmallow in front of each child. The child was told that they could eat the marshmallow right now or that they could wait 15 minutes and get two marshmallows. The researchers kept track of the children in the original study and found that those who were able to resist the marshmallow performed better in a number of areas including academic success. The children with high self-control were also less likely to have negative outcomes such as jail time or certain health conditions.

Mischel found that people are able to delay gratification when they change how they think about the object or action they want to resist. For example, during the marshmallow test, one child said that he imagined the marshmallow was a cloud instead of a tasty treat. This approach might not work as well for a dog, since some dogs would probably try to eat a cloud.