14 Facts About Decision Making And Willpower

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In a recent study of one million people around the world, researchers found that most viewed self-control as their biggest weakness and character failure. 

"In the last 15 years we've discovered that [willpower] really is a form of energy in the brain. It's like a muscle that can be strengthened with use, but it also gets fatigued with use," says New York Times author John Tierney. "You only have a finite amount [of willpower] as you go through the day, so you should be careful to conserve it and try to save it for the emergencies."

Tierney and social psychologist Roy Baumeister recently co-authored a book titled "Willpower: The Greatest Human Strength," which looks at how willpower and decision-making are interconnected. 

We pulled out some of the best takeaways, which Tierney covered in two excellent pieces for the Times ("Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?" and "Why You Need To Sleep On It"). 

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If You Believe You Have Unlimited Willpower, You Do

Image: Stanford University

We have more power than we think.

In Willpower: Discovering The Greatest Human Strength, New York Times columnist John Tierney and psychology professor Roy F. Baumeister look at the phenomenon of willpower and why some people seem to have more of it than others. They first determined that:

The most major problems, personal and social, center on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement at school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger.

And:

When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict "positive outcomes" in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control. ... We think research into willpower and self-control is psychology's best hope for contributing to human welfare. Willpower lets us change ourselves and our society in small and large ways. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, "The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our own thoughts." 

The Wall Street Journal recently took a look at this report and others on willpower, and advised readers not to take coffee breaks if they were feeling stressed -- because it'll just make their predicament worse -- among other things, on the subject of productivity.

The Journal also looked at Ego Depletion -- Is It All In Your Head? Implicit Theories About Willpower Affect Self-Regulation, where Stanford University researchers found that, after delivering three series of tests to students, "people who believe they have an unlimited amount of willpower were able to work longer -- without performing worse -- than people who believe that they have only limited willpower."

In the first experiment, researchers tested 60 students and found that those with a "limited resource theory" (i.e., they believed willpower was a limited resource) began making more mistakes as the test went on, following the "usual ego-depletion pattern." On the other hand, students with a "nonlimited resource theory" maintained their level of accuracy as the test went on (see chart; depleting condtitions involve more exhausting tasks, known as "Stroop tasks").

Veronika Job, one of the study's authors, told the Journal that the message "is that you can power through a period of high concentration, such as a final exam, if you believe you have unlimited willpower."

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