Is willpower, in the short-term at least, a limited and depletable resource?
I felt that Robert Kurzban presented a pretty good argument against the “willpower as a resource” model in Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite:
[After criticizing studies trying to show that willpower is a resource that depends on glucose]
What about the more general notion that “willpower” is a “resource” that gets consumed or expended when one exerts self-control? First and foremost, let’s keep in mind that the idea is inconsistent with the most basic facts about how the mind works. The mind is an information-processing device. It’s not a hydraulic machine that runs out of water pressure or something like that. Of course it is a physical object, and of course it needs energy to operate. But mechanics is the wrong way to understand, or explain, its action, because changes in complex behavior are due to changes in information processing. The “willpower as resource” view abandons these intellectual gains of the cognitive revolution, and has no place in modern psychology. That leaves the question, of course, about what is going on in these studies.
Let’s back up for a moment and think about what the function of self-control might be. Taking the SATs, keeping your attention focused, and not eating cookies all feel more or less unpleasant, but it’s not like spraining your ankle or running a marathon, where the unpleasant sensations are easy to understand from a functional point of view. The feelings of discomfort are probably the output of modules designed to compute costs. When your ankle is sprained, putting weight on it is costly because you can damage it further. When you have been running for a long time, the chance of a major injury goes up. These sensations, then, are probably evolution’s way of getting you to keep your weight off the joint and stop doing all that running, respectively.
There’s nothing obviously analogous for not eating cookies or doing word problems. Why does it feel like something, anything at all, to (not) do these things? As we’ve seen, lots of other stuff happens in your head, all the time, and it doesn’t feel like anything. Further, given that it seems as if exerting self-control is a good thing, that is, that it generally leads to outcomes that might be expected to yield fitness benefits, you might expect that exerting self-control would feel good and easy. Why does it seem hard, and feel even harder over time? What is the sensation of “effort” designed to get you to do?
One reason it seems hard might derive from that fact that “exerting self-control” entails incurring immediate costs in various forms, and “effort” is the representation of these costs. Consider not eating a cookie. There are probably modules in your mind that are designed to compute the benefits of eating nice calorie packages. They’re wired up to the senses, designed to calculate just how good (in the evolutionary sense) eating the calorie package is. From the point of view of these modules, not eating the cookie is a cost, in particular, the lost calories in the cookie. So, the sensation of the effort of not eating it—”temptation”—is probably evolution’s way of getting you to eat the cookie, just as the sensation of pain is evolution’s way of getting you to stay off your sprained ankle. In both cases, the experience is the output of a module designed to compute costs.
The same argument applies to other opportunities, and they take various forms. In some experiments, subjects are told to ignore words flashing on a computer screen, something that feels quite effortful. Why? Well, not reading words on a screen carries a loss of information: What did those words say? A similar argument applies regarding Ariely’s work on decision making during sexual arousal, which we looked at earlier in this chapter. The reason that subjects respond to those survey questions when they are aroused is probably because the mechanisms designed to take advantage of mating opportunities are computing benefits in the environment, though they are being fooled by the fact that the images they are getting are pictures rather than actual people.
Is it also a cost to solve word problems? Sure, but the cost isn’t caloric. Solving word problems requires the use of certain fancy modules, and when one is doing one of these tasks, these modules are kept busy. This means that doing these tasks carries real (opportunity) costs: all the things that these modules could be doing but are not because they are engaged. It’s not unlike what happens when you start up some big piece of software on your computer: Other things suffer, necessarily. Starting up software carries these costs. Working on word problems, similarly, prevents you from using important modular systems from doing other tasks.
So, instead of a resource view, my view is that the issue is more of an effort monitor—an “effortometer”62 in the mind. My guess is that the reason it feels like something to pay close attention to something, solve hard problems, or avoid eating cookies is that doing these things is costly from the perspective of certain modules.63 The feeling of “mental effort,” on this view, is like a counter, adding up all these opportunity costs to determine if it’s worth continuing to do whatever one is doing.64 As these costs get higher—either because one is doing the task for a while, or for some other reason—the effortometer counts higher, giving rise to the sensation of effort, and also giving the impatient modules more and more of an edge.
If I’m working on word problems—but not getting anywhere—using my modules in this way isn’t doing much good, so maybe I should stop. Interestingly, as illustrated by the results of the studies described above, the effect seems to extend from one task to another, even if the tasks are quite different.
This idea suggests that a mechanism is needed that performs these computations, weighing the costs and benefits of doing tasks that make use of certain modules. Some modules are counting up these costs, and when the effortometer increases, there is less suppression of the short-term modules—it’s time to move on. So, it’s not “willpower” that’s exhausted—it’s that the ratio of costs to reward is too high to justify continuing. As Baumeister himself indicated, “it is adaptive to give up early on unsolvable problems. Persistence is, after all, only adaptive and productive when it leads to eventual success.”
The effortometer view suggests a way to “reset” or at least reduce the count. Suppose we give subjects a reward, such as a small gift, or even light praise; this ought to “reset” the counter, just as when a foraging animal’s time is rewarded by finding food morsels. Diane Tice and colleagues conducted some work in which some subjects were told not to think of a white bear,* and others were not. The idea was that not thinking of a white bear takes some “willpower,” and when you’ve just used your willpower, you have less of it left to use in the next task, which was drinking an unpleasant beverage. They found that if you have to suppress thinking of a white bear, you can’t drink as much of the awful Kool-Aid. So, that looks good for a “resource” model. Your willpower sponge has been squeezed out.
Some subjects were, however, given a small gift after suppressing thinking of a white bear. These subjects were able to drink just as much of the nasty stuff as those who were at liberty to think of as many white bears as they wanted. That is, their “willpower” seems to have been restored, making them able to endure the foul-tasting beverage.
These findings are very hard to accommodate with a “resource” model. If my self-control sponge is squeezed dry by not thinking of a white bear, a gift shouldn’t help me exert willpower—I’m all out of it. (And certainly the gift didn’t increase the amount of glucose in my body.) In contrast, this finding fits very well with the effortometer model. If the effortometer is monitoring reward, then a gift resets it, and ought to improve subsequent self-control tasks.
Elsewhere in the book (I forget where) he also notes that the easiest explanation for people to go low on willpower when hungry is simply that a situation where your body urgently needs food is a situation where your brain considers everything that’s not directly related to acquiring food to have a very high opportunity cost. It seems like a more elegant and realistic explanation than saying the common folk-psychological explanation that seems to suggest something like willpower being a resource that you lose when you’re hungry or tired. It’s more of a question of the evolutionary tradeoffs being different when you’re hungry or tired, which leads to different cognitive costs.
I now plan to split up long boring tasks into short tasks with a little celebration of completion as the reward after each one. I actually decided to try this after reading Don’t Shoot the Dog, which I think I saw recommended on Less Wrong. It’s got me a somewhat more productive weekend. If it does stop helping, I suspect it would be from the reward stopping being fun.
Clarke and Sokoloff remarked way back in the nineties that a “fashionable” view “equates concentrated mental effort with mental work,” but that “there appears to be no increased energy utilization by the brain during such pro-cesses.”52 A more recent review concluded that it is “unlikely that the blood glucose changes observed during and after a difficult cognitive task are due to increased brain glucose uptake.”53
Now, I’m not an expert on the brain’s consumption of glucose, but you don’t actually have to be an expert physiologist to notice something is amiss. Subjects in this literature who do a few minutes of a “self-control task” are referred to as “depleted.” What, precisely, is missing? Consider that in the radish/cookie experiment, subjects’ brains in both conditions have very similar sets of modules that are active. Basically, everything brains normally do is still going on—the senses, memory, monitoring autonomic activity, and so on. In the radish condition, some modules are, presumably, inhibiting others from causing the subject to indulge in the cookies. I don’t really know if it is possible to estimate what fraction of modules differ between these two conditions. My guess is that this number would be small. Could these extra modules be draining the brain of glucose?
Consider that the entire brain uses about .25 calories per minute.54 If we suppose that the “self-control” task increases overall brain metabolism by 10%—a very large estimate55—then the brains of subjects who do one of these tasks for five minutes, who are categorized as “depleted,” have consumed an extra 0.125 calories. Does it seem right that you need 100 calories from lemonade to compensate for a tenth of a Tic Tac?56 Even worse for the glucose model, performance on “self-control” tasks should be much lower after exercise, which consumes orders of magnitude more glucose. However, research in this area shows exactly the reverse.57
Footnotes:
52 Clarke & Sokoloff 1998, p. 673.
53 Messier 2004, p. 39.
54 Clarke & Sokoloff 1998, p. 660.
55 I have in mind here evidence from imaging (PET, fMRI), in which percentage changes are small, and of course restricted to particular regions. See, e.g., Madsen et al. 1995.
56 Note also that in this work, researchers use Splenda for the control. While sucralose, which gives rise to the sensation of sweetness, is itself not metabolized, Splenda packets contain carbohydrates in the medium in which sucralose is delivered, and so have about 3 calories. The “zero calorie control” in these studies has an order of magnitude more calories than this (very large over-) estimate of how many calories are consumed. Note also that performance on physically taxing tasks (riding a stationary cycle) can be improved by simply swishing a sugar solution around in one’s mouth (Chambers, Bridge, & Jones 2009). It could be that concentrated sugar in the mouth acts activates reward systems, which would explain why lemonade has this effect.
57 See, for example, Tomporowski 2003.
Cited references:
Chambers E. S., Bridge, M. W., & Jones, D. A. (2009). Carbohydrate sensing in the human mouth: effects on exercise performance and brain activity. Journal of Physiology, 587, 1779–1794.
Clarke, D. D., & Sokoloff, L. (1998). Circulation and energy metabolism of the brain. In G. Siegel, B. Agranoff, R. Albers, S. Fisher, & M. Uhler (eds.), Basic neurochemistry: Molecular, cellular, and medical aspects (6th ed.) (pp. 637–669). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott-Raven.
Madsen P. L., Hasselbalch, S. G., Hagemann, L. P., Olsen, K. S., Bulow, J., Holm, S., Wildschiødtz, G., Paulson, O. B., & Lassen, N. A. (1995). Persistent resetting of the cerebral oxygen/glucose uptake ratio by brain activation: Evidence obtained with the Kety-Schmidt technique. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, 15,485–491.
Messier, C. (2004). Glucose improvement of memory: A review. European Journal of Pharmacology, 490, 33–57.
Tomporowski, P. D. (2003). Effects of acute bouts of exercise on cognition. Acta Psychologica, 112, 297–324.
My reading of the passage Kaj_Sotala quoted is that the brain is decreasingly likely to encourage exerting will toward a thing the longer it goes without reward. In a somewhat meta way, that could be seen as will power as a depletable resource, but the reward need not adjust glucose levels directly.
I never suspected it had anything to do with glucose. I’d guess that it’s something where people with more willpower didn’t do as well in the ancestral environment, since they did more work than strictly necessary, so we evolved to have it as a depletable resource.
Interesting. So the willpower seems to be in the mind. Who would have guessed that? :D
How can we exploit this information to get more willpower? The first idea is to give youself rewards for using the willpower successfully. Imagine that you keep a notebook with you, and every time you have to resist a temptation, you give yourself a “victory point”. For ten victory points, you buy and eat a chocolate (or whatever would be your favorite reward). Perhaps for succumbing to a temptation, you might lose a point or two.
Perhaps this could rewire the brain, so it goes from “I keep resisting and resisting, but there is no reward, so I guess I better give up” to “I keep resisting and I already won for myself a second chocolate; let’s do some more resisting”.
But how to deal with long-term temptation. Like, I give myself a point at the morning for not going to reddit, but now it’s two hours later, I still have to resist the temptation, but I will not get another point for that, so my brain expects no more rewards. Should I perhaps get a new point every hour or two?
Also, it could have the perverse effect of noticing more possible temptations. Because, you know, you only reward yourself a point for the temptation you notice and resist.
I think that’s cheating. Willpower is the ability to unpleasant activities in exchange for positive future consequences. The chocolate / victory point is shifting the reward into the present, eliminating the need for willpower by providing immediate gratification.
In About Behaviorism (which I unfortunately don’t currently own a copy of, so I can’t give direct quotes or citations) , B. F. Skinner makes the case that the “Willpower” phenomenon actually reduces to opperant conditioning and scheduals of reinforcement. Skinner claims that people who have had their behavior consistently reinforced in the past will become less sensitive to a lack of reinforcement in the present, and may persist in behavior even when positive reinforcement isn’t forthcoming in the short term, whereas people whose past behavior has consistantly failed to be reinforced (or even been actively punished) will abandon a course of action much more quickly when it fails to immediately pay off. Both groups will eventually give up at an unreinforced behavior, though the former group will typically persist much longer at it than the latter. This gives rise to the “willpower as resource” model, as well as the notion that some people have more willpower than others. Really, people with “more willpower” have just been conditioned to wait longer for their behaviors to be reinforced.
The standard metaphor is “willpower is like a muscle”. This implies that by regularly exercising it, you can strengthen it, but also that if you use it too much in the short term, it can get tired quickly. So yes and yes.
Do you build willpower in the long-run by resisting temptation? Is willpower, in the short-term at least, a limited and depletable resource?
I felt that Robert Kurzban presented a pretty good argument against the “willpower as a resource” model in Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite:
Elsewhere in the book (I forget where) he also notes that the easiest explanation for people to go low on willpower when hungry is simply that a situation where your body urgently needs food is a situation where your brain considers everything that’s not directly related to acquiring food to have a very high opportunity cost. It seems like a more elegant and realistic explanation than saying the common folk-psychological explanation that seems to suggest something like willpower being a resource that you lose when you’re hungry or tired. It’s more of a question of the evolutionary tradeoffs being different when you’re hungry or tired, which leads to different cognitive costs.
I now plan to split up long boring tasks into short tasks with a little celebration of completion as the reward after each one. I actually decided to try this after reading Don’t Shoot the Dog, which I think I saw recommended on Less Wrong. It’s got me a somewhat more productive weekend. If it does stop helping, I suspect it would be from the reward stopping being fun.
I would assume that thinking does take calories, and so does having an impulse and then overriding it.
Kurzban on that:
Footnotes:
Cited references:
But what’s the explanation for people to go low on willpower after exerting willpower?
My reading of the passage Kaj_Sotala quoted is that the brain is decreasingly likely to encourage exerting will toward a thing the longer it goes without reward. In a somewhat meta way, that could be seen as will power as a depletable resource, but the reward need not adjust glucose levels directly.
I never suspected it had anything to do with glucose. I’d guess that it’s something where people with more willpower didn’t do as well in the ancestral environment, since they did more work than strictly necessary, so we evolved to have it as a depletable resource.
I don’t know about the first question, but for the second: yes.
Apparently the answer to the second question depends on what you believe the answer to the second question to be.
Interesting. So the willpower seems to be in the mind. Who would have guessed that? :D
How can we exploit this information to get more willpower? The first idea is to give youself rewards for using the willpower successfully. Imagine that you keep a notebook with you, and every time you have to resist a temptation, you give yourself a “victory point”. For ten victory points, you buy and eat a chocolate (or whatever would be your favorite reward). Perhaps for succumbing to a temptation, you might lose a point or two.
Perhaps this could rewire the brain, so it goes from “I keep resisting and resisting, but there is no reward, so I guess I better give up” to “I keep resisting and I already won for myself a second chocolate; let’s do some more resisting”.
But how to deal with long-term temptation. Like, I give myself a point at the morning for not going to reddit, but now it’s two hours later, I still have to resist the temptation, but I will not get another point for that, so my brain expects no more rewards. Should I perhaps get a new point every hour or two?
Also, it could have the perverse effect of noticing more possible temptations. Because, you know, you only reward yourself a point for the temptation you notice and resist.
I think that’s cheating. Willpower is the ability to unpleasant activities in exchange for positive future consequences. The chocolate / victory point is shifting the reward into the present, eliminating the need for willpower by providing immediate gratification.
(No one said cheating was a bad thing, of course)
I once heard of a study finding that the answer is “yes” also for the first question. (Will post a reference if I find it.)
And the answer to the second question might be “yes” only for young people.
In About Behaviorism (which I unfortunately don’t currently own a copy of, so I can’t give direct quotes or citations) , B. F. Skinner makes the case that the “Willpower” phenomenon actually reduces to opperant conditioning and scheduals of reinforcement. Skinner claims that people who have had their behavior consistently reinforced in the past will become less sensitive to a lack of reinforcement in the present, and may persist in behavior even when positive reinforcement isn’t forthcoming in the short term, whereas people whose past behavior has consistantly failed to be reinforced (or even been actively punished) will abandon a course of action much more quickly when it fails to immediately pay off. Both groups will eventually give up at an unreinforced behavior, though the former group will typically persist much longer at it than the latter. This gives rise to the “willpower as resource” model, as well as the notion that some people have more willpower than others. Really, people with “more willpower” have just been conditioned to wait longer for their behaviors to be reinforced.
The standard metaphor is “willpower is like a muscle”. This implies that by regularly exercising it, you can strengthen it, but also that if you use it too much in the short term, it can get tired quickly. So yes and yes.