What's Good For Us

Of all the things that routinely attack my brain, one of the most frequent questions I ask is, "How do people know what is good for them?" and following that, "If they know what's good for them, why don't they go for it?" I'm wondering specifically about efficacy. So for example, I know that working out at the gym is good for me. But sometimes I don't do it. Why not? The first answer that comes to mind is lack of motivation. But I know it is good for me; why isn't that motivation enough? Shouldn't I want to do things that are good for me? Then I started thinking that maybe the reason we don't do things that we know are good for us is because we don't know if we will succeed or be good at it. And when we are not good at something, it can be frustrating. Though we are adults, we are still tempted by instant gratification and we want things to come to us more or less automatically. We don't want things to be hard.

But, the interesting thing is that many people believe they can do things, even if they have never tried it before. This belief comes from a lifetime's worth of baggage of trial and error - knowing that they've tried maybe similar things before and have succeeded, or have failed. And in the cases where they failed, they persisted, believed that eventually they could do it, and ultimately succeeded. So when people have that belief in themselves that they can succeed, they are often more resilient, more willing to take (healthy) risks, more willing to make decisions. I suspect they are resilient because failure does not affect them as much; they have learned to survive and thrive by being persistent and maintaining the belief that, no matter what difficulty presents itself, they can succeed. The belief that we can accomplish a specific task before we try to accomplish that task is called self-efficacy.

And this idea of self-efficacy is extremely pervasive and powerful when it comes to living life at a certain standard. I would guess that low self-efficacy throws us into a flaccid inertia where our belief that we can't perform certain tasks successfully keeps us from doing the things that are perhaps good for us. But those who have a strong belief in their ability to succeed - no matter the task - tend to be the active kind who are doing the things that are good for them.

A slight complication arises when we try to think about what is good for us. This is obviously relative, but there are clearly some universals. Eating good, nutritious food is good for us. Some would say getting an education is good for us. Being healthy is good for us. Having friends and some kind of social support is good for us. But what if, just for an instant, we think that smoking a cigarette would be soo good for us, oh so good? What about acting out aggressively - for a moment, we might think that is good for us because it might rid us of an extremely difficult and frustrating situation.

Some of us can make decisions about what is good for us, and what is not good for us. But how those decisions are made is still extremely elusive. Some kids who live on the street seem to know what is "good" for them, while others engage in activities that are somehow not productive, dangerous, and risky yet there is an instant gratification that is quickly associated with that behavior.

I am trying to decide if I should have questions in my survey about deliberation and negotiation. Perhaps if kids have a high self-efficacy when it comes to being able to deliberate, negogiate, and communicate in a way that brings them psychological advantages, we could understand how kids make decisions around what's good for them, and what's not good for them.