He is chief Psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Coatesville, Pennsylvania and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine.
Unusual for a psychiatrist, Ainslie undertook experimental animal research in operant conditioning, under the guidance of Howard Rachlin.
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 (1992) 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 (where he rose to become chief psychiatrist),[1] by supposing that different parts or aspects of the personality are in conflict with one another.