Ulysses and the Sirens

Elster, J. (1979). Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality. Cambridge University Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1979

Link

https://philpapers.org/rec/ELSUAT-6

Cited from

behavioral_economics

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Commitment Device
  • It separates two temporal positions of a single agent (the foresighted present self and the tempted future self) and names the work the present self does to bind the future self, an asymmetry Elster (1979) analyzed under the figure of Ulysses ordering his crew to lash him to the mast and stop his ears so that he could hear the Sirens without steering toward them.

    This sourcePhilosophical analysis of pre-commitment and weakness of will built around Ulysses binding himself to the mast and stopping the rowers' ears; supports the structural-signature claim about the present self doing work to bind the tempted future self.

• Temporal Inconsistency and Preference Reversals
  • This matters because it redirects intervention: for akrasia, we might focus on willpower, commitment, or internal motivation; for temporal inconsistency, we focus on the structural drivers of preference reversal—salience, temporal distance, concrete versus abstract framing, present-bias mechanisms.

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