Weinbeck: Looking at liminality and hyperbolic discounting

Liminality refers to the space that’s neither here nor there. It’s the in-between space. It can be a developmental space, such as adolescence (neither childhood nor adulthood). It can be a physical space, such as a border between two spaces like a doorway. It can be an emotional space, a space where we are not committing to one path or another, one life choice or another, or even one mundane decision or another.

In my previous article on liminality, I wrote about anxiety and the potential anxiety reduction or at least mitigation in avoiding a decision — i.e. staying in a liminal state. The downside of avoiding a decision is the default outcome, usually not the most desirable. Are there cognitive tools to nudge us over the threshold to the other side, particularly when critical decisions hang in the balance?

Here’s where the bias of hyperbolic discounting comes in. It’s a fancy name for our propensity to choose short term rewards of lesser value than longer term rewards of greater value. In other words, we regularly fail the marshmallow test (young children taking one marshmallow in the moment versus two marshmallows if they can wait longer — google Stanford marshmallow experiment led by psychologist Walter Mischel). This behavioral economics theory describes why we take today’s smaller gain versus tomorrow’s greater gain and may offer insight into procrastination or hanging out in the liminal zone.

Here’s a real-world example. Suppose you want to age in place but your house has stairs and other obstacles which can present a future (or current) challenge. Rather than planning for our future selves and moving to a community that can support us as our aging journey unfolds, we opt instead to move to a one-level condo. That achieves a short term no-stairs goal, but it still leaves us without a solution for the long term. Stay with me: in this sense a condo move is staying in the liminal space through hyperbolic discounting – favoring a short-term reward at the loss of a more valuable long-term gain. It keeps us in the liminal state because we don’t commit to moving across the threshold to the next part of our journey. Where are you seeing this bias (or discounting future value) play out in your life? Once you can identify it, you can more clearly assess short term vs long term value. Food for thought. And now can someone please pass the marshmallows?

Nancy Weinbeck is the CEO of Bayview in Queen Anne.