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Episode 9: Self-Control as a Resource
9 Plays5 years ago
Is self-control something that we an think of as a resource that can be depleted and replenished? It's been a popular model in psychology for years, but it has come under question recently. We discuss "Why self-control seems like (but may not be) limited", a paper by Inzlicht and colleagues that proposes an alternate model.
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Transcript
Introduction to Cognation Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
This is Cognation, the podcast about cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, technology, the future of the human experience, and other stuff we like. It's hosted by me, Rolf Nelson. And me, Joe Hardy. Welcome to the show.
Exploring Willpower and Ego Depletion
00:00:25
Speaker
All right, so the topic of our show this week is willpower and self-control. The idea we're going to be discussing is
00:00:35
Speaker
ego depletion. Is it a thing? Is it not a thing? The idea is when you're doing something that requires a lot of willpower or mental effort to do something that maybe you don't want to do, but you should do that as a resource that can be depleted and over some exertion of that resource, you might find that it's harder to do something later that requires willpower after you just did
New Perspectives on Ego Depletion Theory
00:01:00
Speaker
something hard. The name of the paper that we're directly discussing,
00:01:05
Speaker
is one called Why Self-Control Seems But May Not Be Limited. This is by Michael Inslich, Brandon Schramichael, and C. Neil McRae, published in 2015. And it essentially proposes a different way of thinking about the concept of resources for willpower or ego depletion. Right. And so I think to get into this, we can start
00:01:33
Speaker
from a number of different directions, but maybe the place to start is to talk about the original finding that led to this direction in research and also that maybe a little bit about the resource model associated with that.
The Radish and Chocolate Experiment
00:01:47
Speaker
Right, so originally this is based on a paper from 1998 and a series of other pretty popular or pretty well cited studies on this concept of ego depletion and it was done by
00:02:02
Speaker
a researcher called Roy Baumeister, who is an extremely highly cited social psychologist, personality psychologist, has done a bunch of other things on the self, on other interesting topics that I think we would take to, consciousness, free will. So he proposed this idea of ego depletion. If you expend your thought processes, if you expend some mental energy on one process, one hard decision,
00:02:32
Speaker
and you'll have limited ability to stave off any temptation later. So his experiment initially, you get a choice of eating radishes or chocolate. So there's a temptation right there. If you exert the, the idea is if you exert the energy to resist the chocolates and you choose the radishes, it's going to be harder to resist something later. And it's going to be more difficult to carry out complex cognition at a later point.
00:02:59
Speaker
Right, exactly. So in that setup, he had students come into a laboratory where they had been baking cookies, chocolate chip cookies, and so describing the paper that there's an aroma of baking cookies in the room and there's a plate of chocolate chip cookies and there's a plate of radishes. And if you're in group one, you're told to only eat the radishes and don't eat the cookies. And if you're in group two, you're allowed to eat the cookies. And then there's a control group
00:03:28
Speaker
of not eating anything. And so the idea is that it's kind of nasty to sit there and eat a bunch of radishes that you don't really want to eat when there's a plate of delicious, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies sitting right there. And it requires some exertion of the willpower of self-control. Later, after that, you're sort of tired from this. You've exercised this willpower and the resource of willpower is now fatigued or tired.
00:03:58
Speaker
Anything that requires that type of conscious control later will be harder. So in this case, they just had students work on unsolvable anagrams. So these word puzzles that couldn't be solved and they just wanted to see how long they would persist at the task. The students who had eaten the radishes lasted about eight minutes on this unsolvable task and the students who
00:04:25
Speaker
ate the cookies lasted more like 19 minutes. And actually the control group lasted even a little bit longer on average, maybe closer to 20 minutes. Right.
Metaphors and Studies on Cognitive Resources
00:04:33
Speaker
So it's obviously a kind of metaphor because we don't necessarily expect that you can directly observe your willpower and that you've got more willpower right now, or you've got less willpower. So this is something that they're inferring from the experiment. They've got this theoretical concept of willpower or I guess ego as though
00:04:54
Speaker
limited resource, and you use it on one thing, you have less for another. This is a cool experiment for sure. I think a lot of people got super excited about this idea. It has so many practical implications, right? You've got a limited amount of thinking ability, of cognitive ability. You might as well use it on the stuff that's important. Don't waste your anxiety or your decision-making processes on the little stuff. Save them for the big stuff, right?
00:05:24
Speaker
You know, if you're dieting and you're tempted by tasty foods all the time, this points the way to, you know, you can think of ways that you could increase willpower or that you could avoid temptation in the right sort of way. So super interesting experiment. Yeah, and there was a number of different experiments that kind of followed up off of this that were similar in nature, all in the same flow of you first do something that requires some exertion
00:05:53
Speaker
inhibitory control, willpower, executive function, what have you. And I think that we'll get into that a little bit later because I think what exactly you're doing might actually be tapping different processes or abilities or resources. So I think that this is not a homogeneous set of experiments. And I think that's part of the problem. But I think to your point, it is a very cool idea. And I think there's something there
Willpower in Popular Culture
00:06:20
Speaker
for sure. So I think it's definitely worth
00:06:22
Speaker
delving into. And it's also some go ahead, finish. Yeah, I was just going to say that it's something that's also gotten into the popular culture as a concept. So it's one of those psychology concepts that's broken through. And I've even read accounts that, for example, President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg use this concept in their lives by always wearing the same clothes or same basic outfit every day so that they would have to expend less mental energy
00:06:52
Speaker
on making that decision and have more leftover for other thoughts. Now, yeah, I think I think the fact that they did that is true. And Einstein also, right, this is I had heard this previously about Einstein, like even before this became a pop culture meme, that is some sense probably true. But I don't know that it's necessarily directly related to ego depletion.
00:07:20
Speaker
Well I think the thing that it is most closely related to is maybe selective laziness, which is probably the smartest thing you can do.
00:07:29
Speaker
Be as lazy as possible on the stuff that isn't as important. And I love the idea of having a uniform and you don't have to think about the clothes that you are. The one thing that I do is I have two kinds of socks. I have black socks and white socks. When enough of them get holes in them, I just buy a whole bunch more black socks and a whole bunch more white socks and throw the rest away. Then you don't have to worry about pairing socks. Saves you so much time. I wouldn't say that it salvages my ego or
00:07:57
Speaker
That stuff is just selective lazinesses. Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. No, I totally agree. And I, you know, I do the same thing. I have the same basic style of jeans that I always wear. I've got really only got two pairs. Let's be honest. You know, that I wear to work and no one notices, you know, that I can tell. Well, now they'll notice because if they listen to this, but it does. It is a savings there of just time and effort.
00:08:25
Speaker
And I talk about this idea of decision fatigue sometimes.
Cognitive Effort in Work and Real Life
00:08:29
Speaker
When you have to make a lot of decisions, it gets tiring. If that's one less decision that you have to make, all the better. Yeah, I know that Barry Schwartz and some of the researchers have linked this kind of stuff up to even as much as depression, that when people have too many choices that they have to make and there's too many
00:08:48
Speaker
sort of an overwhelming number of options on the table that it can lead to all this regret about not getting the stuff that you didn't pick. And, you know, it's just sort of cognitively overwhelming. I think probably the place where this may be most familiar to most people is getting work done in the, you know, in the workplace that you, you have a bunch of tasks that you have to do for work. And initially you start out, you know, you can just kind of pick things up and you can,
00:09:16
Speaker
turned through everything, but after a while your motivation might wane a little bit. You may be less inclined to keep working on the hardest stuff and more interested in not doing anything, right? This is your motivation, this is your motivation wanes after a time. Yeah, so you might switch back to looking at Facebook or whatever it is that you do to entertain yourself in between hard tasks. You need to refresh yourself in a way. Right, if you're thinking about it in terms of the resource model, which is I think
00:09:45
Speaker
most intuitive way to think about it and the way that the original researchers were really coming at it, Baumeister et al. It kind of makes sense from the perspective of if you're exercising this muscle of cognitive effort and it gets tired, you take a little break and then you feel better and you come back. Yes. Oh, and the one other thing that I think this links up with that people might be familiar with is Michigan's marshmallow studies. So, you know, years before the,
00:10:14
Speaker
Baumeister experiments, the studies where young children could either eat one marshmallow now or you can wait a couple minutes and then you can get two marshmallows. And finding that the ability to delay gratification and to sort of work on waiting for a larger reward is a really important factor in later development. This is something that I think has pervaded national consciousness too, is that willpower is an important factor for success in the world.
00:10:43
Speaker
delayed gratification, especially, and some kind of self-control. Right, exactly. And it makes sense to dive in a little bit now into what we mean by self-control and be a little bit specific because it matters a bit when we talk about this. And different researchers define these things differently. And I think we have a very good sense of the intuitive concept of self-control basically means you're preventing yourself from doing something that you want to do in the moment and doing something that you should do.
00:11:13
Speaker
or have to do instead. And it's closely related to the concepts of executive function, abilities like task switching, working memory, and inhibition. And I think in this case, it's most closely related to the concept in cognitive psychology of inhibition. You're inhibiting a dominant or pre-potent response, something that you would normally automatically just do, preventing yourself from doing it. From this point of view, I guess the,
00:11:41
Speaker
Freudian term, if people wanna map this on, I'm hesitant to talk about Freud, I guess. Because most- I think it's fun. I think it's fun in this case because I think, yeah, they brought it up. Yeah, they brought it up. Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, it's called the ego depletion, right? But there is something interesting about, okay, so Freud thinks about this sort of thing as the id, the ego, and the superego. So the id is just this animal nature that just wants immediate gratification on everything it does. And then you've got the superego that sort of
00:12:11
Speaker
better angels of your nature that look down and say, no, no, no, you should wait and exercise prudence and all of this stuff. So that's how it would be characterized in Freudian terminology that got immediate gratification, then you've got waiting around for something later on that's going to be better for you. And you know, you kind of know that it is, but you still want that now. That's that form of inhibition.
Challenges in Measuring Willpower
00:12:37
Speaker
What's interesting about this is that the way that inhibition is studied in the laboratory is often quite different. The types of tasks that cognitive psychologists use in the laboratory to study inhibition are things like the stroop task, for example. You want to describe the stroop task? Yeah, so the stroop task is something that people might have seen before when you've got a word that's a color word like red or green or blue, and it itself has a color.
00:13:06
Speaker
So you could have the word red printed in red color, or it could be printed in green color. And the basic finding is people are slower to name the colors when the word is different. So there's this conflict. The idea is that you're showing some ability to inhibit that word from getting through if you can just name the colors and ignore the word itself. That's right, exactly. So the ability to do the task requires
00:13:36
Speaker
Inhibitory control and your speed at doing the task is a measure of your inhibitory power or the strength of that ability in you Yeah, you're showing some it's like an ability to restrain yourself from something kind of interfering with What you thinking or what you're perceiving? Yes, exactly. Now. This is a situation where it's true that
00:13:58
Speaker
you know, this is a difficult task. So if you do it, you immediately get the feeling and the intuition that, yeah, I have to inhibit this dominant response, no doubt. But it doesn't feel to me like the same thing as not eating a chocolate chip cookie. One thing that feels different to me about it is that in the case of the chocolate chip cookie, I want the chocolate chip cookie. You don't want to say the other word. You kind of are aware that you're not
00:14:27
Speaker
You're trying not to say that other word, right? I've been told to do so by a researcher. I have some motivation to do so because I don't know why there's some social pressure or I. Maybe I'm given a reward even in certain circumstances. Usually it's more just the social pressure of wanting to be good at whatever it is that you're doing right and.
00:14:51
Speaker
It's somehow less intrinsically rewarding than eating a delicious chocolate chip cookie. Yeah. There's no, uh, it doesn't feel like there's any internal conflict about what's the, you know, there's no angel or devil on the shoulder. There's no, you know, what, what should I be doing and what do I want to do? Is there a difference between those kinds of things? Yeah. And the radish and chocolate chip cookie thing, you know exactly what you're supposed to do. Right. Exactly. And it's clear. There's no,
00:15:18
Speaker
There's no processing power that is required to figure out which is the correct response. So in some ways, they're almost not even the same thing at all, really, right? I mean, in one case, it's all about processing power of actually determining which is the correct answer. And in the other case, it's merely choosing the so-called correct answer when you don't want to. Yeah, but I mean, there seems to be something closely related about them, too, in that it seems- You're not doing the automatic thing.
00:15:47
Speaker
or the most dominant or pre-potent response? I mean, it's the case that people who have frontal cortex damage, so to their prefrontal lobe, that seems to cause a lot of this inhibitory stuff, I think have problems with stroop tasks, you know, these short kinds of tasks like that, but also with impulse control in general. So maybe that's one of the ways that people are mapping this together, related to brain areas that
00:16:14
Speaker
appear to be involved in both kinds of self-control. Yeah, exactly. So the frontal lobes are involved in executive functions. Broadly prefrontal cortex is important for self-control and inhibition, et cetera. It does a lot of other things. So other ways that you would decide that these things were the same thing are different things, right? So how else would you decide that they were the same or different? Whether or not that the kind of inhibition stuff that they do in a stoop task versus the radish and cookie. Right.
00:16:43
Speaker
You could do a factor analysis, right? You could look at all the people, thousands and thousands of people, and you could measure them on both tasks. So people who are poor at this troop task are also super tempted by the cookie and rarely eat the radish. Or the marshmallow tasks. Or the marshmallow task. The problem with that is that having done some of that kind of thing with relatively large numbers of participants, what you find is this really kind of unsatisfying
00:17:13
Speaker
fact, which is that the people who tend to be good at these types of laboratory tasks tend to be good at all of the different laboratory type tasks. Being good at taking a test is all about figuring out what the test maker wants you to do and then also being motivated to do it. I think that explains all of that correlation. That's a big theory. It is. So I think basically then the idea of correlating
00:17:38
Speaker
performance on an inhibition task and, you know, like the Stroup task or the Flanker task and whether or not you're going to eat the marshmallow is not going to help you determining whether they're the same thing or not. I think knocking out a brain region and seeing if it destroys both is a little bit better, but I think we'll find that if we look at that closely that the evidence is quite mixed. And then if you look at which areas are activated doing the task is also interesting, but also
00:18:07
Speaker
Of course, fraught as in ways that we know. Well, this is a tough question. I don't know if it's something we can figure out just. Yeah, we're not going to solve it here, but let's just say that there's we're possibly not talking about the same construct across all of these different studies, and that might be part of the problem. But I mean, that is it is something that I hadn't thought as much about as to what extent those two things are related. The kind of quick
00:18:33
Speaker
Inhibition and then just sort of overall general willpower as people think about it in everyday life Right and that even then even if you even if we and then I think there's a third thing which is the clothes thing was the decision fatigue I don't think that that's the same thing as either of the other two right because What I'm trying to spend time deciding whether I'm gonna wear this pair of pants or that pair of pants sure it takes time if I'm
Decision Fatigue vs. Inhibition
00:19:01
Speaker
stressed out about the decision because for whatever reason, I think I might not look good in these pants, but I might look better in these pants, but I'm not sure and I care, then that could cause me some anxiety for sure, right? And that anxiety might be resource depleting, cognitively depleting, emotionally depleting, but it's not, I have no, there's no sense in which I requires inhibition. What am I inhibiting? I'm not inhibiting anything. At the end of the day, I just need to put on pants.
00:19:30
Speaker
And I'm going to put on pants, right? Either way, it's just choosing which pants to put on requires some energy. But it's like it's not the same. I don't feel like that would even be pulling from the same pool as the pool of like not eating the cookies. Well, you do have to inhibit the other pair of pants. That's true. Yeah, exactly. That's true. It's a morass. It's like a rabbit hole.
Defining Self-Control
00:19:50
Speaker
It is. It is. It is a rabbit hole. It is a rabbit hole. But I think we can move forward in the sense that if we take we have to limit ourselves here a little bit, though, I think, to make progress because
00:19:59
Speaker
What I liked about why self-control seems but may not be limited paper is that it presents what I would call self-control, which to me is something that makes sense, which is you are actively not doing something that you want to do because you know that it will help you out to not do it. Or you are doing something that you don't want to do for the same reason. It just feels more tractable. You've got two different competing things that you want.
00:20:28
Speaker
are operating at different timescales. Yeah. And I think it's, it's really closely. I mean, people talk about self-control and I think it's closely related to this idea of willpower, which is really totally connected to the idea of will itself.
Willpower and Free Will
00:20:42
Speaker
You free, like free will free will, right? Free will. Because if you cannot prevent yourself from doing something that you know that you should not do and that will be harmful to you by doing it, that starts to feel like you don't have free will.
00:20:58
Speaker
Does it feel like a cop-out at times, though, because it's easy to say, oh, I just lost my willpower, or my willpower just kind of faded, or that person doesn't have enough willpower. You're kind of pointing to this thing that you don't ultimately know if that's the best way to explain it. It can be sort of giving up when there might be a better account of how it works. That makes sense. I agree. Well, I think let's look at it in the context of this resource versus
00:21:28
Speaker
you know, this other model. And then I think it might, might lead to some, some new thoughts. Okay. So let's maybe we can think about some of the reasons why thinking of willpower as a resource is not supported by the literature.
Regenerating Willpower
00:21:45
Speaker
Some of the things that they cite here are the ideas that you can regenerate some of this by engaging in some activities that you like. So people who smoke cigarettes,
00:21:57
Speaker
can seemingly regain some willpower by taking a break and having a smoke. People who are watching your favorite TV program can seemingly regenerate this. And then other sorts of activities, just affirming some core value that you hold or prayer seems like it might be something that can defend against these reductions in self-control. So this seems to at least
00:22:25
Speaker
these authors cite this as a reason to not take willpower as being a resource. That if you can just suggest that you have more self-control, then it doesn't seem like it's a limited process if you can regenerate it so easily. That's right. Yeah, you can regenerate it. You can also affect it based on framing. Right. Depending on how you frame the problem, you can impact the
00:22:54
Speaker
apparent amount of this resource, which would kind of go against the idea of a resource. I think one of the things about the resource model that got caught up into it right away was this idea that the resource is itself measurable as being related to the level of blood glucose.
Debunking Blood Glucose Theory
00:23:16
Speaker
And that was the idea that if you drank a sugary drink after doing something that was
00:23:22
Speaker
straining your self-control or your willpower that you would somehow be protected a bit against this depletion. Yeah, to me that feels like a misleading way to think about it. Unless you find that it's 100% related to glucose that all willpower is, is just reducing energy that's available to your brain and turns out you just have glucose and you can have as much willpower as you want.
00:23:51
Speaker
I don't think is the case. I think that may be a misleading way to think about it because it sort of mixes to modes of, you know, when we're thinking about a psychological process, it's an abstraction and it's something that's going to be much more complicated and instantiated in a pretty sophisticated way in your brain. Thinking of it as a liquid or, you know, just a bunch of sugar is oversimplifying it.
00:24:20
Speaker
Yes, and I think the original idea was the brain uses so much glucose, especially the frontal lobes, when they're active, they're just using up all of this limited resource and therefore you run out of it. And if you add some more back in, you can go longer. Like a fuel tank, yeah. Like a fuel tank.
Willpower as a Muscle
00:24:41
Speaker
And I think that just in every way that's almost certainly totally wrong.
00:24:47
Speaker
I mean, just in the sense of like the order of magnitude of the amount of glucose that we're talking about here is just way off. It would be nice though. I think that would be great if that's entirely the way that it worked, that you could just have as much willpower as you wanted if you just have a little more glucose. Right. That would be cool. That would be cool. I mean, it's really, it really gets to the same kind of framework as like the idea of that the brain is like a muscle that if you
00:25:16
Speaker
exercise it for a while, it gets tired, and needs to regenerate its resources. Which, by the way, might actually be true, but is not entirely- What do you think this is? I mean, because this is something you've thought a ton about. Is this a good metaphor? Is that a good way to think of cognitive training and something like willpower, too, as just a single faculty of the mind?
00:25:45
Speaker
Something that can exercise more. I was wondering about that. I mean, that's a, this is a topic that people have discussed at length for, I don't know, probably millennia, right? Can you improve your willpower through exercise by habit or repetition of exercise of the will? Does it. Sustained concentration, sustained inhibition of your impulses. Yeah.
00:26:14
Speaker
Right, and I don't have the answer for that. Certainly, if you train people on inhibitory tasks, they get better at those tasks. A lot of debate about what that means. And I don't know that it would really solve this problem here, even if we could answer that question exactly for those tasks. Because again, I don't think those tasks that we're talking about, the Stroop task or the Flanker task, et cetera, are necessarily the same thing as what we're talking about here with self-control. But it definitely feels like
00:26:44
Speaker
if you get in the habit of doing things that are hard to do, but reap benefits later, that you get better at doing that. Does that mean that it's a habit because it becomes an automated, now you've automatized the act of inhibition, if you will, right? So it's not really inhibition anymore. Or is it that there's some sort of resource that you've strengthened, or maybe you've changed your values?
00:27:13
Speaker
I mean, all of these are different ways of thinking about it. Yeah, and it seems like it loses a bit of the muscle metaphor a little bit that what you're really doing is making stronger connections. You're not necessarily bulking up. It's really more about increasing links between concepts and connections in your brain than it is about strength and sort of raw pure ability like that. That's right. That's right. Yeah, it is.
Process Model of Willpower
00:27:43
Speaker
It's an analogy either way. And I don't think we even know enough about how muscles work for it to be a super perfectly useful analogy, but it's also definitely the case that it's different. Let's talk about the process model itself. I'll jump into the way that they think about it and then maybe go back to the framework that they use. They conceive of
00:28:11
Speaker
This as switching from two kinds of goals, switching over from one kind of goal to another kind of goal. The first kind of goal is the have to goals. And the second kind is the want to goals. This is exactly kind of what we're talking about, delayed gratification versus immediate gratification that people
00:28:31
Speaker
have these two modes and maybe from an evolutionary standpoint, it's good to have a balance between these two things that you shift off from one mode of thinking into another mode of thinking. If you do one for long enough, you kind of slip into the other mode of thinking. Your motivation is changing over time in order to rebalance. After you're thinking about all of these half do things for a long time, then you get to these want to things for a while.
00:28:59
Speaker
And this is coupled with the idea that doing heavy thinking itself, just a high cognitive load, is something that people have become more and more reluctant to do over time. So the longer you're thinking hard, the more it feels like work and the more you just want to stop doing it because it becomes aversive. Right. I mean, there's no question that that happens, right? If you go into like a very long exam, for example,
00:29:29
Speaker
You know, say it's like a three-hour final. You come out of that final and you're tired mentally. You wanna vet? Everyone who I've ever talked to will describe it in essentially the same way, that they're mentally tired. Now what that exactly means, we don't know, but that happens. You feel less like doing something mentally challenging after you come out of that three-hour exam. Okay, that's just more of an anecdotal thing,
00:30:00
Speaker
I feel like it's something that everyone listening probably can relate to in some capacity in their own life. Let's just take that for a given, that this is the thing that happens. You do something that's hard mentally for a while, that's effortful and it feels like work and you want to do something relaxing or chill after that. They relate this to an evolutionary perspective by just suggesting that this is a good strategy in general as
Balancing Exploitation and Exploration
00:30:29
Speaker
your priorities just shift over from time to time. I really like the idea of just thinking about exploit versus explore as two different strategies that one uses in their life, really. It's an evolutionary concept at the end of the day. You need to balance the amount of time that you're exploiting a certain activity or ability versus exploring new possibilities.
00:30:58
Speaker
trace it all the way back to, you know, to hunting and gathering. You know, you've found a patch of blueberries that is super, you know, it's just a lot of blueberries there. So then you move it from, you've explored, now you're moving into the exploit mode. So you're exploiting this patch of blueberries and it becomes a point of diminishing returns where there are still some blueberries on there, but it's getting to the point where you should probably spend more of your time exploring
00:31:27
Speaker
new areas for different types of food that you can find. Right, because exploring could pay off in a big way if you find another rich blueberry patch and it could make your overall efforts much more worthwhile. Absolutely, absolutely, exactly. And then because there's this diminishing returns to the current activity and at some point you will actually run into some real trouble if you don't spend energy on exploring new stuff, it becomes important to get in the framework of
00:31:57
Speaker
switching between exploit and explore. And I also think that it's true that people differ in their interest and willingness in doing one or the other. Some people love to try new stuff all the time and try out new, learn new skills constantly, you know, try new ways of doing things all the time and others just want to really, you know, that's the explore mode and they prefer that. And then others really want to spend more of their time exploiting their
00:32:25
Speaker
current skills and abilities. One of the ways that I like thinking about this kind of thing is what you choose at a restaurant. So how long how long do you go to the same restaurant before you just order the same thing each time? Do you continue to explore the menu and figure out something new because you don't know if you're missing out if you if you don't try it or do you just you know that's what you want?
00:32:51
Speaker
you're going to like it, and you should just stick with that every time you go to the restaurant. Right. And these strategies have different values for different people. I think in the case of this situation here of cognitive control or self-control, the issue is what they're trying to draw a link between the fact that it's true that people switch between these modes, trying to link that to the idea that there is a
00:33:21
Speaker
natural equilibrium or balance between the two modes. And that when you spend so much time exploiting one way of doing things or one task mode, that you naturally become more motivated to move into an explore mode. And they're specifically trying to say that you're motivating, motivated to switch task priorities from have to to want to goals, which is somehow
00:33:49
Speaker
drawing a link between, I think between exploit as being a have to situation and want to as being an explore type situation. And that's where I, that's where they start to, I think it starts to get a little, little dicey. Because as I said, sometimes people really like the exploit. And even if it's a task that's difficult, for example, you know, say, say someone's an artist and they just love painting. They may prefer spending all of their time painting, even though it's difficult and challenging, and even tiring for them.
00:34:19
Speaker
and that's also how they make their money. So maybe that's, is that a have to or want to at that point? It's definitely exploit, but is it have to or want to? I don't see that there's a direct mapping between exploit and have to and explore and want to. I mean, it doesn't seem like it in the very example because it just seems like a pure, let's just maximize our overall strategy, which is to figure out how much time you do this
00:34:48
Speaker
how much time you pick berries and how much time you explore for newberry sources. I guess it's similar in the sense that they're both switching between modes, but it is not clear that it's exactly the same thing. I get that, yeah. Maybe the idea is that it's something that's conserved in evolution and it's still a part of the same process.
Evolutionary Perspectives on Self-Control
00:35:11
Speaker
To me, I would think of the exploring as being the long-term goals
00:35:18
Speaker
And then exploiting is doing what you can with what you have right now, immediate gratification. You bought the chocolate chip cookies, you went out, you got a job to get the chocolate chip cookies, you have a roof over your head, you have all this stuff, and now it's time to just huddle down and just eat a whole bunch of chocolate chip cookies. Right, right. But in terms of their model, I mean, I guess what they would say is,
00:35:44
Speaker
Okay. The resource model says you're sitting there, you've got radishes and chocolate chip cookies in front of you. You have to expend energy to resist eating the chocolate chip cookies and you're doing it because, you know, because you have to, you're told that you have to do it and it's requiring this resource that's depleting it over time. Then when you go into a second task, we would just have to do, you're doing something that you have to do in this case, it's solving an impossible task that you have less resources to do it.
00:36:13
Speaker
In the process model, in the first case, you're motivated initially to work on this half-two task. But after a while, you're like, well, I've worked on this half-two task for quite some time. I'm going to switch to something that I want to do, rather. And so then you have less vigilance for the half-two task. That makes sense to me. But I'm not sure how it directly relates to exploit versus explore. It seems like, again, those are slightly different things.
00:36:41
Speaker
One of the ways they talk about this is that it needs several levels of explanation and that what they're trying to, I guess the account that they're trying to get at is what they call a proximate account, sort of the closest level look at things. So if zooming way out, think of this as an evolutionary account, then maybe it's kind of like a trade off between exploration, exploitation, then
00:37:08
Speaker
There's a middle account, which they suggest people should find more evidence for. And then there's their proximate account, the switching off between these two types of goals, the have to goals and the want to goals. I guess they're suggesting that they're not necessarily mutually exclusive or they're not different or the same. They're just looking at it from a different level. Yeah. And I think it's cool. I mean, I think it's a cool model. I don't know. It seems a little challenging to me to figure out how you would decide in an experimental way this one versus the resource model.
00:37:38
Speaker
and really, really feel like you definitely proved one or the other because in each case, you've got something that is happening for a period of time that is then leading to that thing happening less likely in the second phase, whether it's because there's a resource that has been depleted, the tank is lower, or it's that you there are two competing processes that are out of balance. Yeah, I don't know how you experimentally differentiate between those two things.
00:38:07
Speaker
Yeah, they really just seem like two fundamentally different ways of looking at something, and at least on the surface, they both seem intuitively right.
Resource-Based vs. Process-Based Models
00:38:16
Speaker
People use language to describe both of those things. I'm exhausted. I've got no willpower to resist anymore. And also, I'm tired of thinking too much. I just wanna veg out. Right, and I think there's also, this got me thinking when I started to get into this idea here,
00:38:35
Speaker
of the, especially on the explore versus exploit, this idea of satisficing, right? The idea that like, it's sort of, it's sort of related to your idea of laziness too, right? Which is, which is, yeah, I'll be coming out with some papers on that. I think that which is the explanation. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. For sure. I, and I, you know, because it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to work hard.
00:39:03
Speaker
But not too hard, right? Because working, putting forth effort, however that's measured, does require resources. Those resources might be energy consumption in tissue. It could be just time. If you're working on something for a period of time, you're not working on something else. So there's a trade-off there. But of course, in the physical sense, we know that you do get, in fact, do get tired and you do need to sleep to replenish them. And I think there's probably something to that for cognitive activity as well, right?
00:39:32
Speaker
can be pretty sure that sleep, a big part of why you sleep is to replenish cognitive and neural resources, not just physical bodily resources. So it does make sense to stop doing work at a certain point, and the question becomes, what is that point? And so that's where I was sort of thinking that there was something compelling about the idea of, all right, I've been working on this for a while, I think I've done enough to kind of get by. Therefore, I should probably spend time doing something else
00:40:03
Speaker
whether that be relaxing just to regain my energy or exploring a new activity that might be beneficial for me down the road. I do feel like there's so many day to day issues that this does relate to that sort of trade off. I think that, you know, there's this focus concentration. You can focus and do your work and really put your nose to the grindstone and get something done.
00:40:29
Speaker
Then afterwards, you might be more interested in something more creative, that you're kind of stepping back and looking at the broader picture and trying to figure out where to best, you know, where to best apply yourself for the next thing that you're going to do. I mean, you can see the kind of advantage that you might get from this trade-off of having the ability to focus and do hard work, but then making sure that you're reviewing larger options and seeing where, I mean,
00:40:58
Speaker
what should you do next? Where should you put your hard work next? And if you exclusively do one or the other, if you've only got your nose to the grindstone, you may miss out on a lot of opportunities. And if you're not doing any work at all, you're not gonna have anything produced, you're not gonna get anywhere, right? So this kind of theory seems like it can apply to all different aspects of life. Yeah, absolutely. And I was just thinking now about leisure time as well.
00:41:28
Speaker
thinking about that as like also one of the roles of leisure is that it actually, because you're not focused on a specific task, and here now we're really talking about working memory concentration, that sort of thing, less about inhibition, but you're focused on a task, you're not thinking about other things, so you're not exploring the space of other things you could be doing that might be higher value.
00:41:55
Speaker
And so leisure time actually is a time that allows you to kind of reflect and be potentially creative in unexpected ways. I do feel like that is true. And you can see it developmentally too. You can see the value of just, I mean, this is sort of like play for kids. You know, they need, I think that kids need to apply themselves to certain things, but they also need to step back and just play around and have
00:42:23
Speaker
sort of freedom to explore and survey the entire situation. So I think, in a sense, you could play activities and work activities into this. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. When you think about it that way, this idea that like the willpower is this most important thing. It's so like, it's everything that's important for being successful, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe not, maybe not, right?
00:42:50
Speaker
If you think that the application of willpower is the thing that's keeping you on task only, maybe it's not so important that it be applied so intensely for such long periods of time as being the thing that's key for success. Certainly not being able to apply willpower when it's needed is going to be bad. So it's necessary, but maybe not sufficient.
00:43:16
Speaker
Finding the right balance is more important than just maximizing the amount of willpower that you have. That's right. That's right. Well, maybe we can take a little bit of a break right now.
The Replication Crisis in Psychology
00:43:32
Speaker
All right. So the other main issue that we wanted to relate this to is
00:43:42
Speaker
the whole replication crisis in psychology or in the social sciences, which I think a lot of people might be familiar with or if you're not, a lot of experiments in psychology, and I think in particular in social psychology, have been under question as to whether or not they represent real effects. And this came about a few years ago when there was a giant effort to see what kinds of effects replicated and what didn't. A larger percentage of
00:44:12
Speaker
effects did not replicate. In other words, they couldn't repeat the kinds of effects that they found when they tried to set it up in exactly the same experiment. So people have been obviously concerned about this. Why are our effects like this being published? Are we crazy? What's wrong with psychology? So this current paper and the studies that it's based on the stuff by Roy Baumeister with the initial ego depletion studies has been under question lately too.
00:44:42
Speaker
Right, so the idea is that, as Ralph mentioned, there's been a big topic lately in psychology and social sciences broadly, that many studies that were really seminal in the past were not able to be replicated. When someone tried to do the same experiment that was as described in the literature, when they did it with the same number of subjects and same setup, they didn't find the same results. There was a null result or a different result. And the thought is that this is a
00:45:12
Speaker
function of a number of different problems in the way that research is conducted in social sciences. The biggest one being the sample sizes. The number of participants is too small in many of these studies. In order to see a significant effect in a small sample, you need a huge effect, a very large effect. And the probability that you find that effect is somewhat random. So if you get lucky, you might see a big effect in a small sample, but it's not the real size of the effect. The real size of the effect may be much smaller or zero.
00:45:42
Speaker
and you just happen to see it by random chance in that particular setup on that particular day or that particular week. And then another factor which obviously people are concerned about is the idea that there may be some bias that experimenters are bringing to the table that graduate students who need to be searching for jobs need to get a publication out in a paper, which means they need to have an effect that exists, so they may be
00:46:13
Speaker
either intentionally or unintentionally selecting the results that give support to their ideas, and that there might be a serious underlying issue with motivations in psychology, such that we're rewarding certain kinds of studies that are really looking to find these effects, and there might be something just fundamentally off about it. So in the original ego depletion study of Baumeister et al.,
00:46:43
Speaker
as we mentioned at the beginning, they did actually four different experiments, but the most famous one was the chocolate chip cookie experiment. So I'll just repeat that briefly so that we're all on the same page. In this study, there was a choice of radishes or chocolates on the table and students were taken in and they basically were told either to eat the radishes only or eat the chocolate chip cookies only. The students who ate the radishes were worse at sticking to a
00:47:12
Speaker
task later on that was basically solving unsolvable word puzzles. So they spent less time on the word puzzles than the students that either ate chocolate chip cookies or were the control subjects. So seemingly something like perseverance or stick-to-itiveness. Right, exactly. So this active application of what they might be referred to as self-control or active volition
00:47:41
Speaker
The idea being that that's that's a resource that somehow depleted. Then this was called into question from a number of different researchers, also supported by a number of different researchers. Lots and lots of papers written about it. Most recently, there was a big big effort to this. The paper is called a multi lab preregistered replication of the ego depletion effect. And the idea here was that they wanted to bring together a bunch of different labs.
00:48:07
Speaker
and pull together a lot of different subjects into it, perform an ego depletion study that would solve for this idea of bias, because there's all these different labs, some who are pro and some who are against the idea, that also would allow them to have a lot of subjects, a lot of participants. So in the original Baumeister study, there was, I think, 67 participants, which is a really pretty good size number for the average psychology experiment, but it's really not.
00:48:36
Speaker
It's not out of bounds for, it's hard to, I guess as, you know, if you're a lay person, it's hard to get a sense of how many subjects you should have, but that's certainly not out of the range of most psychology experiments. Correct, correct. And in order to expect to find an effect with 60 odd subjects, it needed to be a pretty big effect to see it reliably. So the idea was that some of the other studies
00:49:06
Speaker
that didn't show this in replication attempts maybe weren't set up correctly or maybe they were too small themselves. They didn't see this effect that may not be so large. The idea was, let's solve this once and for all, let's do a really big study. They ended up recruiting 2,141 subjects into an ego depletion protocol. However, this ego depletion protocol was not the chocolate chip cookie study at all.
00:49:35
Speaker
It was a very different type of ego depletion effect, but because other researchers had used a similar type of paradigm and called it an ego depletion effect, these guys, Hager et al., are calling this study a replication. I have some problems with calling it a replication. Okay, so you think that they are not, again, so this Gigantor big replication study
00:50:04
Speaker
seems to have no effect of ego depletion. In other words, suggests that ego depletion is not something that's super robust. That's right. Very small effect and it was not significant. But the task that they did in this study was quite different and I think in important ways. So the basic task was there was, you know, against the sequential task set up. So you do first you do one task and then you are measured on the second task and you have two versions of the first task.
00:50:34
Speaker
one is the depletion task and one is the no depletion task. In the case of the depletion task, participants, so in each of these cases, what you were doing is you were looking at a computer screen and you had to respond if a word had an E in it. So for example, if the word eat came on the screen, you'd press the button. But if the word bat came on the screen, you would not press the button. So this is supposedly compared to the radish slash cookie choice.
00:51:03
Speaker
Right, so exactly. In the no depletion case, you're just always pressing whatever there is an E word, so eat, horse, et cetera. In the depletion case, you have to inhibit some responses. So whenever the word has an E in it, but the E is next to, or one letter away from a vowel, then you do not press the button. So it requires inhibition. So you would know, because you're used to looking, you're looking for the E, you're pressing on E,
00:51:32
Speaker
If the E is next to an A or an O, for example, then you would not press the button. So the word eat, now you would not press on eat, but you would press on horse. And then the follow-up task is another task that involves inhibition. I won't get into all of the details of the follow-up task because it's a little bit complicated. But basically, again, you're looking at a computer screen, you're pressing buttons to some things and not to other things. You have to do something that you have to inhibit.
00:51:59
Speaker
In some cases, you have to inhibit a particular response. Yeah. So in 2000 subjects across 23 labs, we don't see any effect of not pressing on an E word when it's next to a vowel on subsequent inhibitory control task performance. And they're calling that a failure to replicate the basic ego depletion effect. Yeah.
00:52:27
Speaker
There are certainly important differences between the two. So if you don't have real cookies and real radishes, then you don't get an effect. So it's definitely a, it definitely feels like a watered down version of the original task. Right. Exactly. I mean, I think this, this is also kind of indicative of what happens in cognitive psychology all the time and experimental cognitive psychology. You know, you get more and more refined about the task designs. You're like, well, you know, this is controlling for this, you know, potential, uh, confound.
00:52:57
Speaker
and pretty soon you're pretty far away from the basic original concept. The thing that actually draws interest to it in the first place. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, understood that it's somehow is a more refined or controlled environment, but it somehow misses the point of the original idea. It definitely doesn't feel like an ego depletion task. Right, exactly, exactly. I mean, I guess, you know, if you go all the way back to Freud,
00:53:27
Speaker
And it's really just like about the id versus the ego. Does the id even care about pressing a button on the computer screen for no reward? It doesn't even seem relevant. So it doesn't seem like an ego task at all. And so I mean, yeah, I mean, versus really preventing yourself doing something that you want to do. This would be the kind of task I think that if you had, if there was a measurable effect,
00:53:55
Speaker
it would be interesting because it would demonstrate that something like this depletion is widespread. But I guess if you don't get it, it's hard to know exactly what it means. That's right. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I think it's one of those things where, you know, this idea that if these two tasks are tapping the same mechanism and then that doing the first one first makes you less good at doing the second one, then it would suggest that there was some
00:54:25
Speaker
either an interference or a resource that was being depleted, whether we call it ego or whatever, some resources being depleted or interference, but we don't see it. But you don't see it, so it's hard to say something about willpower or ego depletion. If you're not seeing it, you don't know exactly what it is that you're not seeing. Yes. Yes, exactly.
00:54:51
Speaker
I mean, I think, I think the interesting thing, the interesting takeaway here is that like, it is hard to even say what a replication is sometimes, that there is a very real problem of replication in psychology. And there's also a very real problem of, of construct validity that like, are you actually even measuring the thing that you're arguing about? This gets into some deeper existential questions about psychology.
00:55:19
Speaker
It's a tricky thing because we in experimental psychology have to rely on kinds of effects like this that are not necessarily directly measurable. And we talk about attention, we talk about emotions, we talk about all of this mental stuff that we don't really have a direct measure of. And it's a problem in psychology as a field
00:55:51
Speaker
So it's the problem that originally caused behaviorism to take over the field. So in the early 1900s, people felt like psychology wasn't necessarily scientific enough, that the only thing worth doing is having something observable that you can measure. Don't worry about what the mind's doing, just study behavior. So that was the mode of psychology for a good 60 years or so.
00:56:19
Speaker
and sort of suck the life out of actually studying mental processes or how people actually think.
Behaviorism and Willpower
00:56:27
Speaker
But in some ways, we're back to, if we want to ask the interesting questions about issues of the mind, about mental processes, about consciousness, about any judgment decision making, anything that's related to the way that we think, we have to accept in a way that we're
00:56:49
Speaker
constructing these processes, we're not directly observing them in the same way that chemists are observing a molecule or physicists are using particle accelerators to directly observe some things. That's right. And it doesn't mean that they're not useful constructs either. I mean, I think we identified that the idea of willpower is a useful construct.
00:57:19
Speaker
It's something that if you don't have a word for it or the language for it, you're missing something important because a lot of things that we do and to move forward in the world require willpower in some form or fashion, require us to not do the immediate gratification thing, but to rather work on something that maybe reaps benefits in the long run. Yeah, it's a useful shortcut that people can use to describe things in a relatively straightforward way.
00:57:49
Speaker
You know if we had to describe everything that we did in terms of what molecules were moving around it's unhelpful to describe things in too low of chemical or physical way When it's plenty useful for us to use a term like willpower Yeah, and you can talk about whether someone else has a lot of willpower or not much willpower You can also talk about whether someone's willpower has been reduced for whatever reason or like they've lost it for whatever reason
00:58:21
Speaker
These are interesting and useful concepts potentially. I think you'd be losing something by not allowing yourself to go there. You may lose some precision by using terms like willpower, but I think what you gain is more than worth it. So then I think in terms of wrapping it up, where do we feel we stand on
Conclusion on Willpower and Validation Challenges
00:58:40
Speaker
this? I mean, I think that's something that would be good to kind of come to some conclusion on. I mean, from my perspective, I definitely do get the sense that
00:58:48
Speaker
There is something to the idea that when you work on something that requires a lot of intentional effort, or it's not just automatic, but rather you're somehow exerting effort to keep yourself on task, to keep yourself doing something, that you subsequently have less desire to do that kind of thing in the next period of time, that you in some sense want to do something. You want to work hard on a task that's challenging, but then you want to chill for a bit.
00:59:16
Speaker
I feel like that observation I feel pretty good about. And I think these experiments, some of these experiments speak to the concepts, but I feel like honestly, these paradigms are not really super satisfying in terms of answering the question of whether this observation is something that we can back up empirically. I don't feel like any of these experiments really solve it for me. I mean, they all feel a little bit off. They're not measuring the right thing or they're not done correctly. They're too small.
00:59:46
Speaker
They're not well controlled. So it's that situation that happens a lot in psychology where you've got an intuitive concept that feels useful, but it's difficult to map it to a really good experiment. Yeah, it's difficult to measure exactly what you're talking about and withstand all the criticism that comes from being a little bit imprecise. That's right. So I think the final point maybe on this is that this doesn't happen to robots.
Robots and Willpower
01:00:13
Speaker
This doesn't happen to robots.
01:00:14
Speaker
Are we talking Robopocalypse already? I think so. I think so. I mean, because think about robots, they don't they don't get tired. If they have fusion generators, they don't get tired. But if they have batteries, their batteries run out. Oh, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yes. But do you think it actually takes a robot more energy to do the thing that they don't want to do than the thing that they automatically want to do? Well, do you program
01:00:43
Speaker
Robots to have things that they want to do immediately versus things that they want to do later in the long term And you'd make a trade-out. Do you build a trade-off into them like that? Yeah, I mean it depends how Autonomous you want them to be and if you want to build the the robot with with a will then you kind of have to have something like that I don't want an autonomous robot. I think robots should do it. I know this is going on
01:01:09
Speaker
record and our robot overlords are going to be hearing this and punishing me appropriately. But I feel like robots should be doing what we tell them to do. I totally agree. We don't give robots leisure time to think about these sorts of things. Right. Exactly. So they just run down their battery until they're done the task. And then that's it. Of course, then we're not the only ones working on this. The other teams working on this are not going to follow that rule. So.
01:01:34
Speaker
But if any robot engineers are listening to us, do not build leisure time into robots. And I think that's pretty much that's going to delay the onset for at least five or 10 years of the robot apocalypse, which is enough for me. Yeah. Well, we'll be getting on towards the end of our useful lives by that point anyway. So that'll be good for us. Yeah. Thanks, everyone, for listening.