The Problem Of Artificial Willpower
Rivi Schulman
Many people believe they could improve their lives if only they had more of that mysterious thing called willpower. With more self-control we would all eat right, exercise regularly, avoid drugs and alcohol, save for retirement, stop procrastinating, and achieve all sorts of noble goals.
So how can individuals resist in the face of temptation? In recent years, scientists have made some compelling discoveries about the ways that willpower works. This report will explore our current understanding of self-control.
The benefits of willpower seem to extend well beyond the college years. Terrie Moffitt, PhD, of Duke University, and colleagues studied self-control in a group of 1,000 individuals who were tracked from birth to age 32 as part of a long-term health study in Dunedin, New Zealand. Moffitt and her colleagues found that individuals with high self-control in childhood (as reported by teachers, parents and the children themselves) grew into adults with greater physical and mental health, fewer substance-abuse problems and criminal convictions, and better savings behavior and financial security.
We have many common names for willpower: determination, drive, resolve, self-discipline, self-control. But psychologists characterize willpower, or self-control, in more specific ways. According to most psychological scientists, willpower can be defined as:
In children as well as adults, willpower can be thought of as a basic ability to delay gratification. Preschoolers with good self-control sacrifice the immediate pleasure of a chewy marshmallow in order to indulge in two marshmallows at some later point. Ex-smokers forfeit the enjoyment of a cigarette in order to experience good health and avoid an increased risk of lung cancer in the future. Shoppers resist splurging at the mall so they can save for a comfortable retirement. And so on.
Since that work was published in 1998, numerous studies have built a case for willpower depletion, or ego depletion, as some experts call it. In one example, volunteers asked to suppress their feelings as they viewed an emotional movie gave up sooner on a test of physical stamina than did volunteers who watched the film and reacted normally. In another, people who actively suppressed certain thoughts were less able to stifle their laughter in a follow-up test designed to make them giggle.
Other evidence suggests that willpower-depleted individuals might literally be low on fuel. The brain is a high-energy organ, powered by a steady supply of glucose (blood sugar). Some researchers have proposed that brain cells working hard to maintain self-control consume glucose faster than it can be replenished. In a study lending support to this idea, obedient dogs made to resist temptation had lower blood-glucose levels than dogs who did not exert self-control.
Yet evidence also suggests that willpower depletion can be kept in check by your beliefs and attitudes. Mark Muraven, PhD, of the University at Albany, and colleagues found that people who felt compelled to exert self-control (in order to please others, for example) were more easily depleted than people who were driven by their own internal goals and desires. When it comes to willpower, those who are in touch with themselves may be better off than their people-pleasing counterparts.
Limited willpower is often cited as a primary roadblock to maintaining a healthy weight, and research supports this idea. A study by Eli Tsukayama at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues found, for example, that children with better self-control were less likely to become overweight as they transitioned to adolescence, thanks to their ability to control impulses and delay gratification.
Still, both willpower and the environment play a role in food-related choices. Better understanding of both elements will improve options for individuals and health practitioners wrestling with obesity.
Willpower plays a role in other healthy lifestyle choices as well, including the use and abuse of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs. Developing good self-control as children may prevent substance abuse problems in teenagers and adults, according to Kevin King, PhD, of the University of Washington.
In another study, he found that on days when underage social drinkers found themselves having to exert more self-control than usual, they were more likely to violate their own self-imposed drinking limits. This finding provides more evidence that exerting willpower in one sphere can undermine your capacity to resist temptations in other, unrelated areas of life.
Understanding the role of willpower is likely to be important for developing effective treatments for addiction and in helping guide people toward making healthy choices, such as eating well, exercising, and avoiding illicit substances. Research on willpower already offers suggestions for sticking with healthy behaviors. Strategies for managing willpower will be discussed in the final section of this report.
Financial decision-making may be even more challenging for people living in poverty. Princeton University doctoral candidate Dean Spears conducted a series of experiments in rural India to explore the link between willpower strength and poverty. In one, he visited two villages, one richer and one poorer, and offered people a chance to purchase a popular brand of body soap at a significantly discounted price. The soap was a good deal, but it still represented a potentially difficult financial decision for individuals living in poverty.
Before and after offering the soap was offered, the experimenters asked the participants to squeeze an exercise handgrip, a common test of self-control strength. Spears found that richer participants squeezed the handgrip for about the same amount of time before and after the soap-purchasing opportunity. Poorer participants, though, squeezed for a significantly shorter duration the second time around. Their willpower strength, he concluded, had been run down by their difficult financial decision-making.
A large body of research has been developed in recent years to explain many facets of willpower. Most of the researchers exploring self-control do so with an obvious goal in mind: How can willpower be strengthened? If willpower is truly a limited resource, as the research suggests, what can be done to conserve it?
Research among adolescents and adults has found that implementation intentions improve self-control, even among people whose willpower has been depleted by laboratory tasks. Having a plan in place ahead of time may allow you to make decisions in the moment without having to draw on your willpower.
Willpower may also be made less vulnerable to being depleted in the first place. Researchers who study self-control often describe it as being like a muscle that gets fatigued with heavy use. But there is another aspect to the muscle analogy, they say. While muscles become exhausted by exercise in the short term, they are strengthened by regular exercise in the long term. Similarly, regularly exerting self-control may improve willpower strength.
In one of the first demonstrations of this idea, Muraven and his colleagues asked volunteers to follow a two-week regimen to track their food intake, improve their moods or improve their posture. Compared to a control group, the participants who had exerted self-control by performing the assigned exercises were less vulnerable to willpower depletion in follow-up lab tests.
Many questions about the nature of self-control remain to be answered by further research. Yet it seems likely that with clear goals, good self-monitoring, and a little practice, you can train your willpower to stay strong in the face of temptation.
A growing body of research suggests that repeatedly resisting temptation may deplete your stores of willpower, similar to the way overuse can tire out your muscles.3 But you can learn to use your willpower more effectively and, as with your muscles, you may even be able to strengthen your willpower. Try these strategies:
If you need help building your willpower, consult with a psychologist or other licensed mental health professional. He or she can help you identify problem areas and then develop an action plan for changing them.
But many of the answers the industry seeks can indeed be provided by human ingenuity and technology predicated on upscaling emerging solutions furthered by big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced robotics and cleantech research.
If you already have the non-limited mindset about willpower, these findings might be a cause for self-satisfaction. But what can we do if we have been living under the assumption that our reserves of self-control are easily depleted?
For more than 15 years, psychologists believed the answer to that question was clearly yes. Indeed, a whole line of research, based on a seminal study published in 1998, suggested that not only is human willpower a depletable resource, but it's also drawn from a singular source in the brain. Hold back from scarfing down a chocolate chip cookie, and you'll be less persistent at logic puzzles. Refrain from expressing your emotions, and math problems will seem so much more painful.
"Self-control is an important construct within psychology," said Martin Hagger, a psychologist at Curtin University in Australia. "I just think the way in which it's been tested, and this paradigm we've been using, is somewhat limited and therefore causes problems."
Prior to that finding, ego depletion seemed on relatively steady ground. The original study, led by psychologist Roy Baumeister, who was then a researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, tackled the question in multiple ways. First, participants had to do a task involving willpower (eating radishes instead of cookies, making a persuasive speech that ran counter to their own beliefs or suppressing their emotions during a clip of the film "Terms of Endearment"). Then, participants had to do an unrelated but also challenging task, like working on unsolvable puzzles or unscrambling words.
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