New York Times's Tierney on Self-Control

We all want to be in control, but self-control can make us weak-willed. New York Times journalist John Tierney presented a talk at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management on March 19, 2012, which I'm happy to say I attended and would like to (quite belatedly) recapitulate. The talk emerged from Tierney’s collaboration with Florida State University psychologist Roy F. Baumeister on a book length treatment of willpower and the science underpinning it, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.   His basic claim was twofold: self-control can be a predictor of success, and that gaining self-control is trainable – if done correctly. Lucky for us ambitious procrastinators.

What does it mean to say that self-control is trainable? Well, for one, it works much like a muscle does. Work it out and it’ll grow. But work it and it’ll tire. This latter phenomenon, when it comes to self-control, is termed ego depletion: Human willpower depletes by the act of exercising self-control – a phenomenon replicated by hundreds of scientific experiments.

A familiar instantiation of ego depletion is decision fatigue; simply making decisions depletes the same mental resource as that which is needed for willpower. In a word, making too many decisions robs one of the wherewithal to make more decisions.

Decision fatigue can lead a decision-maker to wade into the fervent world of superstition. Used as substitutes for the heavy-lifting behind considered decisions, superstitious habits and practices can be effective painkillers. Other mental shortcuts resorted to as a result of decision fatigue include following intuitions, norms, and rules or – the laziest of all shortcuts – succumbing to indecision.      

An obstacle for one is an opportunity for another. A German car company has used the phenomenon of decision fatigue as a way to drive more revenue. In the course of purchasing a car, customers were shown cheaper car options at first and were at the end presented with, as the default package, a more expensive option. The tendency was, of course, to choose the more expensive default when decision fatigue kicked in.

Somewhat unintuitively, those unsuspecting customers may have walked away with a less expensive option had they been munching on a chocolate bar. One of the best ways of reviving self-control, as Tierney noted, is eating. Studies have shown over and over again that glucose helps restore self-control. Indeed of the purchasers who did not fall prey to the German auto manufacturer’s deft gambit many are likely to be carriers of excess glucose turned into fat. This is the Oprah Paradox: the inability to control weight despite otherwise healthy and even superior self-control. Weight-control correlates weakly with self-control, despite common perceptions to the contrary.

One of the first rules of maintaining effective self-control is that you must pick your battle(s), because there is only a finite amount of willpower residing in you. Another important rule, bordering as it does on a tired cliché, is set realistic goals. (Tierney, and the book, defer to the “whole field in science on ‘the to-do list’”, which is closely linked to, though is distinct from, strong willpower.)

Roy Baumeister’s research may shed light on why the to-do list can’t by itself impart discipline and self-control. Unfinished tasks tend to linger on the mind. What Baumeister has found is that to turn off the nagging, one does not have to actually do the task, but merely make a plan to complete it later on.

Willpower can be trained. It does get fatigued in the short-term, such as when used throughout a day. But it improves given long-term training.  One study that shows this had students maintain proper posture throughout the entire day over a period of time which yielded positive self-control results in other areas of their life, notably in school.

Willpower matters. Studies confirm the commonplace that people with less self-control are less likely to stay married, less likely to be successful, and less likely to experience career advancement.

And it is never too late to start training. Tierney’s encouraging revelation was that until this book, he had never handed in a college paper or a newspaper column on time. Importantly, the new strength in willpower he implied he had gained was not accompanied by a gain in weight, so far as I could tell.