My method in completing this task was to make a list of my desires, and then rate them on several different dimensions. I wanted to list as many desires as possible, in order to give my statistical analysis power, but I had a lot of difficulty coming up with more than about 20. So be it.

A brief run-down of the listed desires:

Finish task
Water
Sleep
Decision on grad school
Harpsichord
Healing of thumb
Have dinner with Marvin
[Insert specific woman's name]
Success as musician
Success as psychologist
Knowledge
Relaxing weekend
New comics
Warm weather
More money
More female friends
Album art
Functional headphones
Solution to headaches
End to anxieties
End of pride

These desires were then rates on the following dimensions:

Strength (this was the key variable)
Year Began
Urgency
Importance
Career Relevancy
Relationship Relevancy
Emotional effect
Social acceptability
Specificity vs. Pervasiveness

Ratings were made using seven-point likert scales.


My first interest was to look into what other variables best predicted the "Strength" of each desire. I performed a step-wide regression using all the other variables as predictors, and found the "Strength" was best predicted by the variables of "Year Began", "Urgency", "Emotional Effect", and "Social Acceptability".

Here's the equation: Strength = - 193 + 0.0949 Year began + 0.762 Urgency + 0.550 Emotional effect
+ 0.362 Social acceptability


So, the recency with which a desire began is positively correlated with the strength of the desire, as is the degree of social acceptability. Urgency and Emotional effect appear to have the strongest affect on "Strength", however.


I must say I was very surprised to find that my desires are stronger when they're more socially acceptable. I know that might almost seem obvious, that finding that others approve of my desires makes me want them all the more, but something about "desire" seems so illicit by nature that I was quite surprised to find the correlation. Potentially, however, the causal connection may be that the strength of desire affects to degree to which I find it socially acceptable-- that is, the more strongly I desire something, the more motivated I am to see it as a socially acceptable desire, and thus I alter my perception of what is socially acceptable to make that desire acceptable. Given the relationship between social acceptability and morality, I think John Haidt's work on how emotional response contributes more to moral judgment and decision-making than does moral reasoning, and in fact, influences moral reasoning, is pretty applicable.

In any case, here's my prettiest scatter plot:

I'd like to point out that although Urgency appeared to be the strongest single predictor of strength, the correlation isn't perfect. I think it's important to note this because I think the differentiation of Strength and Urgency is important. I had intended Urgency to indicate the time frame in which I required the desire to be fulfilled, but I wonder if some other variable might have been better at getting at that. I worry that I may have in fact confounded "time frame desired" with "strength" in creating the Urgency dimension. I worry, however, that ratings of "time frame desired" would make me sound like Veruca Salt-- "But I want it now!!!"


Here are side-by-side boxplots of the various variables used to rate the desires:


My desires, it seems, tend to be pretty socially acceptable, not particularly urgent, and oddly, not very career relevant (with one significant outlier--"Success in Psychology", no doubt) but most other variables seem to have a range of distribution.

I couldn't plot "year began" on this same plot, since it has a different scale, but here's a histogram of that distribution:



While a lot of my desires are from more recent years, and in fact, as we've seen, recency is one of the predictors of strength, a few desires (namely, water and sleep) date back to my birth, and a few others have been around for some years.