For the record, you do have a limited supply of willpower. I’m guessing those monks either had extraordinary willpower reserves or nonstandard worldviews that made abstinence actually easier than sin.
It seems they practice that willpower muscle very explicitly for hours every day. Abstinence should actually be pretty easy considering you have very little else to drain your willpower with.
Looking into your link now, but it was my understanding that the effect was weaker if the participant didn’t believe in it, not nonexistent (i.e. disbelieving in ego depletion has a placebo effect.)
Wikipedia, Font Of All Knowledge concurrs:
An individual’s perceived level of fatigue has been shown to influence their subsequent performance on a task requiring self-regulation, independent of their actual state of depletion.[14] This effect is known as illusory fatigue. This was shown in an experiment in which participants engaged in a task that was either depleting or non-depleting, which determined each individual’s true state of depletion. Ultimately, when participants were led to believe their level of depletion was lower than their true state of depletion, they performed much better on a difficult working memory task. This indicates that an increased perceived level of fatigue can hinder self-regulatory performance independent of the actual state of depletion.
[...]
An experiment by Carol Dweck and subsequent work by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs has shown that beliefs in unlimited self-control helps mitigate ego depletion for a short while, but not for long. Participants that were led to believe that they will not get fatigued performed well on a second task but were fully depleted on a third task.[16]
ETA: It seems the Wikipedia citation is to a replication attempt of your link. They found the effect was real, but it only lessened ego depletion—subjects who were told they had unlimited willpower still suffered suffered ego depletion, just less strongly. So yup, placebo.
They found the effect was real, but it only lessened ego depletion—subjects who were told they had unlimited willpower still suffered suffered ego depletion, just less strongly. So yup, placebo.
I’m not sure the word “placebo” makes sense when you are discussing purely psychological phenomena. Obviously any effects will be related to psychology- its not like they gave them a pill.
I … think it’s supposed to be regulated at least partially by glucose levels? So in some of the experiments, they were giving them sugar pills, or sugar water or something? I’m afraid this isn’t actually my field :(
But of course, no phenomenon is purely psychological (unless the patient is a ghost.) For example, I expect antidepressant medication is susceptible to the placebo effect.
Take, for example, the reaction to our claim that the glucose version of the resource argument is false (Kurzban 2010a ). Inzlicht & Schmeichel, scholars who have published widely in the willpower-as-resource literature, more or less casually bury the model with the remark in their commentary that the “mounting evidence points to the conclusion that blood glucose is not the proximate mechanism of depletion.” ( Malecek & Poldrack express a similar view.) Not a single voice has been raised to defend the glucose model, and, given the evidence that we advanced to support our view that this model is unlikely to be correct, we hope that researchers will take the fact that none of the impressive array of scholars submitting comments defended the view to be a good indication that perhaps the model is, in fact, indefensible. Even if the opportunity cost account of effort turns out not to be correct, we are pleased that the evidence from the commentaries – or the absence of evidence – will stand as an indication to audiences that it might be time to move to more profitable explanations of subjective effort.
While the silence on the glucose model is perhaps most obvious, we are similarly surprised by the remarkably light defense of the resource view more generally. As Kool & Botvinick put it, quite correctly in our perception: “Research on the dynamics of cognitive effort have been dominated, over recent decades, by accounts centering on the notion of a limited and depletable ‘resource’” (italics ours). It would seem to be quite surprising, then, that in the context of our critique of the dominant view, arguably the strongest pertinent remarks come from Carter & McCullough, who imply that the strength of the key phenomenon that underlies the resource model – two-task “ego-depletion” studies – might be considerably less than previously thought or perhaps even nonexistent. Despite the confidence voiced by Inzlicht & Schmeichel about the two-task findings, the strongest voices surrounding the model, then, are raised against it, rather than for it. (See also Monterosso & Luo , who are similarly skeptical of the resource account.)
Indeed, what defenses there are of the resource account are not nearly as adamant as we had expected. Hagger wonders if there is “still room for a ‘resource’ account,” given the evidence that cuts against it, conceding that “[t]he ego-depletion literature is problematic.” Further, he relies largely on the argument that the opportunity cost model we offer might be incomplete, thus “leaving room” for other ideas.
For the record, you do have a limited supply of willpower. I’m guessing those monks either had extraordinary willpower reserves or nonstandard worldviews that made abstinence actually easier than sin.
It seems they practice that willpower muscle very explicitly for hours every day. Abstinence should actually be pretty easy considering you have very little else to drain your willpower with.
If you think so.
Looking into your link now, but it was my understanding that the effect was weaker if the participant didn’t believe in it, not nonexistent (i.e. disbelieving in ego depletion has a placebo effect.)
Wikipedia, Font Of All Knowledge concurrs:
ETA: It seems the Wikipedia citation is to a replication attempt of your link. They found the effect was real, but it only lessened ego depletion—subjects who were told they had unlimited willpower still suffered suffered ego depletion, just less strongly. So yup, placebo.
I’m not sure the word “placebo” makes sense when you are discussing purely psychological phenomena. Obviously any effects will be related to psychology- its not like they gave them a pill.
I … think it’s supposed to be regulated at least partially by glucose levels? So in some of the experiments, they were giving them sugar pills, or sugar water or something? I’m afraid this isn’t actually my field :(
But of course, no phenomenon is purely psychological (unless the patient is a ghost.) For example, I expect antidepressant medication is susceptible to the placebo effect.
See here.
If it isn’t, you’re doing something wrong.
ETA: By which I don’t mean that it is easy to do it right. Practicing anything involves a lot of doing it wrong while learning to do it right.