(willpower is a muscle, you exercise it by using it
Willpower is a battery—you drain it by using it.
Making choices led to reduced self-control (i.e., less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations). A field study then found that reduced self-control was predicted by shoppers’ self-reported degree of previous active decision making. Further studies suggested that choosing is more depleting than merely deliberating and forming preferences about options and more depleting than implementing choices made by someone else and that anticipating the choice task as enjoyable can reduce the depleting effect for the first choices but not for many choices.
Source: “Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative.” from Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Vohs, Kathleen D.; Baumeister, Roy F.; Schmeichel, Brandon J.; Twenge, Jean M.; Nelson, Noelle M.; Tice, Dianne M.
However, I’m not arguing against pushing ourselves to work when our innate motivation falls a little short.
I would expect exercising willpower to train my self-image as a stronger person. That might be helpful (although often it seems to have the opposite effect, locally, of giving me license to relax)
Also, in my personal experience, it’s easier to start caring more about a goal after investing sufficient work in it (recently, or total). Specific work is habit-forming if it offers rewards and validations along the way.
I try to begin some useful work the moment I begin to feel unhappy (this is most practical when you’re alone). This often makes me feel better.
Muscles are muscles, and you drain them by using them too- it’s just that they come back stronger.
I think willpower is actually like this, but my only data for strengthening willpower is personal/anecdotal.
This seems to be similar to how people behave morally- there’s the consistency effect that reinforces itself (“I am someone who gives to charity (clearly, since I gave to charity last week) so I’ll give again”), but there’s also the feeling that you’ve given enough so you become less charitable shortly afterwards (wasn’t there a study that found that people coming straight from church tipped less?)
Yvain’s Doing Your Good Deed For The Day included a related study that actually got through peer review and connected it to a pastor who wrote about how it helped him understand his flock better.
Also, this works for me as an example of the kind of thing that I think LW excels at: processing criticism into reparative impulses that might work, while keeping more factors in mind than a single person’s criticism/action/outcome cycle is likely to handle well. I think its easy to think “I’m doing something bad, I must change!” and then you leap into something not so well considered and it still doesn’t work so well. Having this sort of content in our “canon” probably helps avoid some of the dumber things we might otherwise have done in an attempt to self-improve.
I don’t wish to engage “willpower is X” metaphors any further.
Every experience I’ve had where I’m tempted to think “you sure have trained your willpower muscle lately” is also entirely explainable by altered self-image, consistency, and habit.
[charity is (habit-forming / refractory)]
Yes. You really have your work cut out if you want to show some sort of generalized morality or willpower training effect (as opposed to a task specific one).
I suspect that the strength of the rebound effect has a lot to do with the motivations for an action—is a person supporting something they have an emotional attachment to, or are they fulfilling a virtue checklist?
Somewhere on LW/OB, we have discussed a study or two specifically about strengthening willpower, said studies explicitly invoking the muscle analogy and IIRC one of the willpower tests being a grip fatigue one.
Not everyone in “The Thief of Time” approves of the reliance on the extended will. Mark D. White advances an idealist argument rooted in Kantian ethics: recognizing procrastination as a failure of will, we should seek to strengthen the will rather than relying on external controls that will allow it to atrophy further. This isn’t a completely fruitless task: much recent research suggests that will power is, in some ways, like a muscle and can be made stronger. The same research, though, also suggests that most of us have a limited amount of will power and that it’s easily exhausted. In one famous study, people who had been asked to restrain themselves from readily available temptation—in this case, a pile of chocolate-chip cookies that they weren’t allowed to touch—had a harder time persisting in a difficult task than people who were allowed to eat the cookies.
This is relevant but disappointing. What research? The article is well written but poorly sourced. Everything I’ve seen demonstrates a short-term “drained battery” effect, and nothing I’ve seen indicates a long-term “trained muscle” effect. Perhaps this is because the studies simply aren’t long-term or large enough.
I say “large enough” because I expect most people to consistently fail to do things which are difficult; we want to know what happens to people who really can try (subjectively) hard over a long stretch, and not only when especially aroused. I’d be interested to see a study design that can cause a significant portion of its subjects to enter and maintain this state.
If willpower training really can happen, but most people aren’t going to reach it, then showing the exact mechanism by which it works in the small minority who can effectively train it would also satisfy me.
Here’s a paper that reviews some of the evidence for the muscle hypothesis, pdf. The relevant section starts on p. 1779. The citation is:
Baumeister, R.F., Gailliot, M., DeWall, C.N., & Oaten, M. (2006). Self-regulation and personality: How interventions increase regulatory success, and how depletion moderates the effects of traits on behavior. Journal of Personality, 74, 1773–1801.
Another relevant study, which I can’t find free online (except for the abstract), is:
Gailliot, M. T., Plant, E. A., Butz, D. A., & Baumeister, R. F. (2007). Increasing self-regulatory strength can reduce the depleting effect of suppressing stereotypes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 281–294.
I finally got around to reading this. You’re right, there is some evidence that willpower-poor individuals can be easily trained to do better (assuming they can actually implement for a long period of time some habit which involves self-regulation). Amusingly, there’s also evidence that consuming more glucose also helps ward off ego depletion.
The argument has been made that blood glucose essentially is the resource that gets depleted when you’re low on willpower. Using willpower is an energy-intensive brain activity, so it’s hard to do when your blood sugar is low. Some of the studies that have shown this have given people a sugary drink to restore their willpower, but that’s probably not the way to go in real life since it’ll cause a temporary spike in blood sugar followed by a crash. But it’s possible that fixing your diet to avoid low blood sugar could improve your willpower.
There have also been several studies looking at immediate interventions that can counteract the drained battery effect. In other words, people come into the lab, they do one task that drains their willpower, then they get some intervention that might restore their willpower, then they do another task that requires willpower. This review by Baumeister, Vohs, and Tice (pdf) lists a few that have worked and gives citations:
Humor and laughter
Other positive emotions
Cash incentives
Implementation intentions (‘‘if … then’’ plans)
Social goals (e.g., wanting to help people; wanting to be a good
relationship partner)
Willpower is a battery—you drain it by using it.
However, I’m not arguing against pushing ourselves to work when our innate motivation falls a little short.
I would expect exercising willpower to train my self-image as a stronger person. That might be helpful (although often it seems to have the opposite effect, locally, of giving me license to relax)
Also, in my personal experience, it’s easier to start caring more about a goal after investing sufficient work in it (recently, or total). Specific work is habit-forming if it offers rewards and validations along the way.
I try to begin some useful work the moment I begin to feel unhappy (this is most practical when you’re alone). This often makes me feel better.
Muscles are muscles, and you drain them by using them too- it’s just that they come back stronger.
I think willpower is actually like this, but my only data for strengthening willpower is personal/anecdotal.
This seems to be similar to how people behave morally- there’s the consistency effect that reinforces itself (“I am someone who gives to charity (clearly, since I gave to charity last week) so I’ll give again”), but there’s also the feeling that you’ve given enough so you become less charitable shortly afterwards (wasn’t there a study that found that people coming straight from church tipped less?)
Yvain’s Doing Your Good Deed For The Day included a related study that actually got through peer review and connected it to a pastor who wrote about how it helped him understand his flock better.
Also, this works for me as an example of the kind of thing that I think LW excels at: processing criticism into reparative impulses that might work, while keeping more factors in mind than a single person’s criticism/action/outcome cycle is likely to handle well. I think its easy to think “I’m doing something bad, I must change!” and then you leap into something not so well considered and it still doesn’t work so well. Having this sort of content in our “canon” probably helps avoid some of the dumber things we might otherwise have done in an attempt to self-improve.
I don’t wish to engage “willpower is X” metaphors any further.
Every experience I’ve had where I’m tempted to think “you sure have trained your willpower muscle lately” is also entirely explainable by altered self-image, consistency, and habit.
Yes. You really have your work cut out if you want to show some sort of generalized morality or willpower training effect (as opposed to a task specific one).
I suspect that the strength of the rebound effect has a lot to do with the motivations for an action—is a person supporting something they have an emotional attachment to, or are they fulfilling a virtue checklist?
Somewhere on LW/OB, we have discussed a study or two specifically about strengthening willpower, said studies explicitly invoking the muscle analogy and IIRC one of the willpower tests being a grip fatigue one.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/101011crbo_books_surowiecki?currentPage=all
This is relevant but disappointing. What research? The article is well written but poorly sourced. Everything I’ve seen demonstrates a short-term “drained battery” effect, and nothing I’ve seen indicates a long-term “trained muscle” effect. Perhaps this is because the studies simply aren’t long-term or large enough.
Edit: thanks to Unnamed: I see that I was wrong. http://graehl.posterous.com/evidence-that-self-control-can-be-trained-lik
I say “large enough” because I expect most people to consistently fail to do things which are difficult; we want to know what happens to people who really can try (subjectively) hard over a long stretch, and not only when especially aroused. I’d be interested to see a study design that can cause a significant portion of its subjects to enter and maintain this state.
If willpower training really can happen, but most people aren’t going to reach it, then showing the exact mechanism by which it works in the small minority who can effectively train it would also satisfy me.
Here’s a paper that reviews some of the evidence for the muscle hypothesis, pdf. The relevant section starts on p. 1779. The citation is:
Baumeister, R.F., Gailliot, M., DeWall, C.N., & Oaten, M. (2006). Self-regulation and personality: How interventions increase regulatory success, and how depletion moderates the effects of traits on behavior. Journal of Personality, 74, 1773–1801.
Another relevant study, which I can’t find free online (except for the abstract), is:
Gailliot, M. T., Plant, E. A., Butz, D. A., & Baumeister, R. F. (2007). Increasing self-regulatory strength can reduce the depleting effect of suppressing stereotypes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 281–294.
I finally got around to reading this. You’re right, there is some evidence that willpower-poor individuals can be easily trained to do better (assuming they can actually implement for a long period of time some habit which involves self-regulation). Amusingly, there’s also evidence that consuming more glucose also helps ward off ego depletion.
My detailed response is here: http://graehl.posterous.com/evidence-that-self-control-can-be-trained-lik
The argument has been made that blood glucose essentially is the resource that gets depleted when you’re low on willpower. Using willpower is an energy-intensive brain activity, so it’s hard to do when your blood sugar is low. Some of the studies that have shown this have given people a sugary drink to restore their willpower, but that’s probably not the way to go in real life since it’ll cause a temporary spike in blood sugar followed by a crash. But it’s possible that fixing your diet to avoid low blood sugar could improve your willpower.
There have also been several studies looking at immediate interventions that can counteract the drained battery effect. In other words, people come into the lab, they do one task that drains their willpower, then they get some intervention that might restore their willpower, then they do another task that requires willpower. This review by Baumeister, Vohs, and Tice (pdf) lists a few that have worked and gives citations:
Thanks. I like this line of research also. Are you (or did you) study this area for your college degree or profession? You seem quite well read.
Any chance you could remove all the newlines in the quotes? They’re pretty unreadable
with random
newlines.
sure. paste from pdf artifact.
Thanks. I’ll recant as needed after reading.
Presumably the sourcing is in the book being reviewed which presents ‘much’ research about the muscle paradigm.
Yeah, I considered this—perhaps my library can get me the book.