George Ainslie

Who is George Ainslie?

George W. Ainslie is an American psychiatrist, psychologist and behavioral economist.

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 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, by supposing that different parts or aspects of the personality are in conflict with one another.