briefly share your personal view on each article..

I want to share with you two related articles for Socratic debate..  The first one is about using certain
incentives to form a good habit or change a bad one while the second one covers the findings of a
new study regarding our sleep habit and health. Please engage in debate by addressing the
following questions through examples from personal experience after reading both articles:
 briefly share your personal view on each article..
 According to the rational choice theory, as a rational being we choose what is best for us. do you
agree that we are almost always rational in our choices? or are we predictably (or rationally)
irrational?  ( meaning that we can't help rationalize our irrational choices)
 According to a study by researchers at Duke University, over 40% of our daily choices are
habitual.. have nothing to do with rational decision making..  if that is true, habits control our life..
how can we control our habits?
 As it is implemented by stickk.com, do you think it would help to use financial reward or penalty
to install a good habit or give up a bad habit by strengthening our willpower?
 how can you justify "personal commitment contract" approach from an Islamic point of view?
 do we need to sleep more than seven hours? or is it just a habit? why do we have conflicting
scientific findings on this issue?

How to Make Yourself Go to the Gym

Josh Barro

If you’re like a lot of Americans, one of your New Year’s resolutions is to work out more. If you’re like
a lot of Americans, you’ll join a gym this January as part of that plan. And if you’re like a lot of
Americans, you won’t go very much.
Our overoptimism about how much we will work out has been the subject of academic research.
Nearly a decade ago, the economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier published “Paying
Not to Go to the Gym,” a paper in which they found that members at three Boston gyms went an
average of 4.3 times a month. With monthly membership fees of just over $70, that meant an
average of $17 per visit — well above the $10 charge to work out as a nonmember.

So why didn’t they just pay per visit? Because they overestimated how often they would go. The
authors surveyed gym members who, on average, said they would work out about 9.5 times a
month, more than twice the actual attendance observed in the study. People remained in denial
about their gym attendance even after they’d stopped going entirely: On average, nonattending gym
members did not cancel until 2.3 months after their last visit, paying for $187 worth of completely
unused gym access.