The Art of Manliness - Is Self-Control Overrated？

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast

00:00:10.920 self-control the ability to resolve a conflict between two competing desires

00:00:15.280 is frequently touted as the golden key to success but many of the most popular ideas

00:00:20.340 about self-control are actually at odds with how it really operates here to unpack some of the

00:00:24.980 lesser understood and counterintuitive ideas around discipline and willpower is michael

00:00:28.820 inslecht professor of psychology who has studied the nature of self-regulation in depth in the first

00:00:33.940 part of our conversation michael impacts the popular ego depletion model of willpower and how

00:00:38.480 it hasn't held up to scientific scrutiny we then turn to the surprising fact that the people who

00:00:43.160 seem to exhibit a lot of self-control don't actually exercise a lot of discipline and restraint in their

00:00:47.580 lives that the achievement of goals is more a function of having virtuous desires and what

00:00:51.960 contributes to having those desires after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is

00:00:56.500 all right michael inslecht welcome to the show thanks for having me on so you are a professor

00:01:14.180 of psychology and you've done a lot of research on self-regulation and self-control and a lot of

00:01:21.420 your research has provided some counterintuitive insights about how we can get better at achieving

00:01:28.200 our goals in life so in a paper you wrote with some colleagues you kind of went through the various

00:01:34.080 models to explain how people go about in self-regulating and going about achieving their goals in

00:01:41.360 life whether that's saving money losing weight being a better father being a better professor the best

00:01:48.120 known model i think people are likely familiar with is the resource model of self-control this is all

00:01:55.580 about willpower for those who aren't familiar with this model can you walk us through this theory of

00:02:00.200 self-regulation and self-control yeah i'd be happy to and i've spent a good part of my career

00:02:05.880 first being a lover of this theory a real admirer of this theory to then being questioning somewhat

00:02:12.760 skeptical to then outright being hostile and and a quick of it so i've gone the full uh the full gamut

00:02:18.280 but let me just kind of tell you what uh you know let me try to give steel man what this theory is about

00:02:24.560 so this is called the resource model of self-control and it suggests it makes two propositions so the first

00:02:30.660 one is that there's many different forms of behavior kinds of behavior we might see in the real world you

00:02:35.600 mentioned a bunch of them uh at the top there so you know uh being a good researcher being calm and

00:02:41.700 cool and collected in the face of pressure or where you might get angry expressing empathy or feeling

00:02:47.120 empathy for someone else as opposed to seeing things through your own lens exercising eating well

00:02:52.860 studying etc all these different kinds of behaviors i can go on and on by the way they all seem to rely on

00:02:59.420 self-control they all like you know the extent to which you can control yourself seems to predict

00:03:04.160 how well you do each of these various behaviors so there's something common across many different

00:03:09.920 behaviors and this is the assumption of self-control being central and maybe another version of that is

00:03:16.500 saying it relies on some kind of central resource okay so that first proposition is i would say more or

00:03:24.440 less accepted although there's been some pushback around the edges about that idea but i think that idea is

00:03:30.300 somewhat safe so not controversial the second idea is that that central thing that central resource

00:03:37.880 is is actually a resource it's actually a depletable resource like all resources are that's finite

00:03:44.600 and disappears or gets used or depleted and consumed the more you use it okay so the more i control myself

00:03:55.500 let's say i go to work in the morning and my boss is being a jerk and i've got to regulate my i got

00:04:00.760 to control my own impulses my own angry impulses because i know if i express anger to my boss there's

00:04:06.200 a good chance i won't have a job the next day so i control myself and then at lunch i'm a good boy

00:04:11.400 and i eat salad and not a burger or in canada what i love to eat is poutine oh yeah so doing those two

00:04:19.280 things you know uses self-control and depletes the central resource and what that means is that later

00:04:27.300 on later in the day maybe i will be like really impatient with my children when i get home when

00:04:33.920 they're misbehaving because i don't have that resource that resource is gone i have less of it

00:04:39.020 and i just kind of lose my cool lose my that's possible so the analogy that i like to use when

00:04:46.040 explaining it is that self-control is kind of like a fuel the resource you can think of the resource

00:04:51.740 that we use as kind of like a fuel when i drive my car to go from point a to point b and my motorcycle

00:04:57.080 from point a to point b i use fuel to get to point b now if i've used up all that fuel i will not be

00:05:05.240 able to go to point c but the only thing that will help me to go go to point c is is getting the gas

00:05:10.720 station and filling up again same thing happens with self-control if i use that resource

00:05:15.800 to again regulate my emotions with my boss to eat well i have less of it or i have none of it

00:05:20.660 so i can't control myself any further so this is an idea that was exceedingly popular in what was

00:05:27.200 first formulated by roy batmeister someone who i spar with a lot but someone who i admire as well

00:05:32.280 so just because i just because i disagree with him doesn't mean i don't like him i actually do like

00:05:35.340 him and it was first introduced let's say in 1994 the first empirical paper was produced in 1998

00:05:42.260 but it really exploded in prominence in the early 2000s and i would go to conferences and every

00:05:47.840 practically every talk was talking about this resource model of self-control oh by the way i

00:05:52.940 haven't used the term that that roy batmeister coined the term is called ego depletion this is

00:05:57.900 this notion that when i've used this resource i'm in a state of depletion and he's kind of hinting at

00:06:03.420 froy who talked about the ego that you know my ego is depleted i have less willpower i have less

00:06:08.200 ability to to express my agency and again because agencies is involved in so many different things

00:06:13.920 so many different aspects of our lives it would mean that many aspects of our lives are compromised

00:06:18.900 when we are in a depleted state so tons of people got super excited they applied it in different places

00:06:25.360 and perhaps like the apogee of excitement and interest was when then president barack obama

00:06:32.100 in a very famous interview with uh michael lewis alluded to his knowledge of the resource model of

00:06:39.120 self-control he said that he wore the exact same thing every single day except for that infamous 10

00:06:44.820 suits right he wore the exact same thing every single day so that he did not have to decide what to wear

00:06:50.460 that day therefore not using resources and making that decision right these are inconsequential decisions

00:06:56.320 let's wear the same thing every day and then i can spare that cognitive resource that self-control

00:07:01.900 resource to you know help do the work of the presidency so exceedingly popular um so that's

00:07:09.200 the kind of i hope the steel man version of the resource model of self-control yeah we uh actually

00:07:13.820 i remember i read roy balmeister's book willpower that was back in 2011 2012 and we did a whole series

00:07:20.520 about it kind of summarizing because like to me it just seemed very like yeah this makes sense

00:07:25.680 that we have this sort of finite source in our brain that as we use it it gets depleted and it gets

00:07:33.040 harder and harder to maintain self-control so yeah one of the studies that stood out to me and i think a

00:07:38.140 lot of people quoted similar to that barack obama thing how he made fewer decisions it was with judges

00:07:42.900 so it's like they found that judges were more likely to deny parole as the day progressed as it got

00:07:50.080 towards more towards lunch and then and then as i got closer to lunch the idea is like well they've

00:07:54.920 just made all these decisions so they just wanted to go the easy way and the easy way is just deny

00:07:58.380 parole and like yeah that makes sense as you you know i have everyone's experience that you get kind

00:08:02.760 of tired so you just you don't exercise your self-control as much so talk about you started you you like this

00:08:08.680 idea like a lot of people at the beginning then became skeptical of it walk us through your skepticism

00:08:14.000 yeah i i definitely will but i i if i don't get to it i want to talk about that that israeli judge

00:08:19.780 study because it's a famous study in this canon and it's a bad study for lots of reasons okay but let

00:08:26.100 me answer your question first so so what so why did my enthusiasm start waning so it started waning

00:08:31.480 initially because i just started noticing internal contradictions in the theory like the empirical

00:08:38.680 evidence that you know was seen as supporting the theory actually didn't it undermined it but it

00:08:45.320 seemed like and some of the these empirical findings were being produced by some of the major proponents

00:08:49.960 of the theory itself and it just seemed they were like hey like that theory doesn't make sense given

00:08:55.000 what you've just found so some colleagues of mine and i we started writing a series of papers

00:09:00.520 just pointing to the inconsistencies and suggesting that hey there's probably something cool here

00:09:06.920 but it might not be the reason you think it's happening so what are some of the the inconsistencies

00:09:12.040 so the first one that i noticed is that if people were motivated to actually maybe let me back up one

00:09:21.200 second let me just quickly describe the kind of typical study in this canon so the typical ego

00:09:27.020 depletion study uses what we call a sequential task paradigm okay what that means is simply people in

00:09:34.020 one condition are given a task that's either in one condition the task is very difficult it's it's

00:09:40.420 effortful it requires self-control and the other condition it doesn't require self-control it's not

00:09:45.120 effortful it's easy and the logic here is in that one that first group they're engaging in self-control

00:09:50.640 therefore they're using up their resource and then afterwards everyone in both conditions is given a

00:09:57.000 second task that always requires effort self-control etc and the typical pattern of findings is that

00:10:03.920 for those people who who controlled themselves who exerted effort at time one they showed diminished

00:10:09.600 effort willingness or ability at time two okay so just a simple example now let me see if i can

00:10:17.220 remember uh let me find a good one here for you okay if a time one this is a study done by kathleen

00:10:23.160 voss and a few others kathleen voss is like what considered the number two person in ego depletion

00:10:28.460 world you know she had she brought in dieters into a lab who were hungry and at first she had them all

00:10:35.020 watch a kind of a shocking 10 minute clip i think it's tamed by today's standards but it's a movie

00:10:40.920 depicting kind of gross things maybe like a fear factor you can think of it that way and one group had

00:10:45.740 to hide all their emotions they had to like sit there with their face still they're being video recorded

00:10:50.560 and then to suppress all feelings that's hard that's difficult our natural response is like

00:10:55.920 what something's discussing is to recoil second group could act naturally so one group is using

00:11:00.060 effort they're controlling themselves the second group is not and then afterwards they were given

00:11:04.020 like a bunch of ice cream they're actually given nine scoops of ice cream to taste now you could

00:11:08.820 conduct this experiment by having you know just a couple of teaspoons of ice cream or you could have

00:11:14.980 all nine scoops and the experimenters weighed the ice cream before and after to determine how much

00:11:19.680 people ate and people who first first restrained their emotions ended up eating more ice cream

00:11:25.380 afterwards than those who did not restrain their emotions evidence of ego depletion you use this

00:11:30.540 limited resource you use it all up therefore you couldn't control yourself at time two with eating

00:11:35.080 the ice cream that's one of like hundreds of studies okay so why why did i start becoming doubtful

00:11:41.040 if you started motivating people for that time two task to do the right thing they could easily do it

00:11:49.440 so for example if you told people you know we'll pay you more money if you kind of restrain yourself

00:11:57.040 from eating the ice cream in that second study people could easily not eat the ice cream if it's a

00:12:02.800 resource that's actually been diminished like fuel in your car it doesn't matter how much money i smack

00:12:09.100 down on the hood of my car my car is not driving it's on empty so me being motivated to get from

00:12:14.780 point b to point c won't help me the only thing will help me is refueling so motivation and all

00:12:21.240 different kinds of motivations even if you interact with a nice experimenter and they ask you to do the

00:12:27.000 second task that's hard you're more willing to do it as opposed to interacting with a let's say less

00:12:31.880 nice experimenter again if it's a resource that's been depleted and used what's going on that doesn't

00:12:36.800 make sense that's like one bit of evidence another bit of evidence is in some clever studies done by

00:12:43.460 at hurt at university of indiana they gave people false feedback after the time one task and they

00:12:53.120 told people in one condition hey it looks like you're really really tired you're depleted you have

00:12:58.600 no energy in another condition they told them wow it looks like you've had a really great night of

00:13:02.780 sleep last night you have lots of vitality and vigor you've lots of energy here now the trick is

00:13:08.280 that they gave this feedback to people who were actually depleted or not so some people did the

00:13:16.000 really really hard thing where supposedly the self-control was being used and depleted and told

00:13:21.320 them hey it looks like you've got lots of energy and some people who were not depleted they were told oh

00:13:26.240 it looks like you're tired and guess what happened afterwards on the time to task what predicted

00:13:31.220 their performance was not literally how much effort they expended at time one but the perception of

00:13:37.620 how tired and how much energy they had at that time so those who were actually depleted but were told

00:13:43.360 they had lots of energy they performed the time to task as well as anybody else those who were not

00:13:49.200 depleted but were given information about uh how they were really really tired they performed quite

00:13:55.640 poorly so again if i believe that my car has lots of gas but it's empty guess what i'm out of luck

00:14:02.320 i'm not going to be able to drive so it can't be a physical resource that's being depleted just not

00:14:07.400 possible so it has to be something else so that's where the doubt started creeping in and my colleagues

00:14:12.440 and i started formulating alternative hypotheses suggesting that it actually has nothing to do with

00:14:18.940 a resource a physical resource there's no you know fuel going on empty it's more about motivation

00:14:25.000 it's more about willingness to exert effort and if i've worked hard for an experimenter or if i've worked

00:14:31.520 hard you know for my boss and i've been a good boy biting my salad then god damn it i just want to do

00:14:37.780 what i want to do right now and i'm tired of pleasing other people and that might look like i'm losing

00:14:43.340 control but it's actually that i've chosen to do something else i've chosen to prioritize other

00:14:47.960 things so that was the kind of initial foray trying to explain this phenomenon phenomenon without any

00:14:54.560 recourse to a resource but that was my initial you know skepticism and then it got a lot deeper and i

00:14:59.760 can talk to you about that if you'd like yeah i mean talk about that judge experiment why do you think

00:15:04.380 that was a bad experiment oh boy okay so that's a bad experiment for a few reasons so the main reason

00:15:10.360 is that it turns out that at least in these israeli parole board hearings the cases that judges

00:15:17.560 are are looking at are not randomly assigned meaning that it's not the case that you get the same kind

00:15:24.640 of case at the beginning of the day as at the end of the day they're actually staggered in an

00:15:30.080 interesting way and it turns out that the they're ordered i don't know exactly why they do this but

00:15:36.040 it's ordered in such a way that the the cases that are essentially slam dunk you're staying in prison

00:15:42.020 being denied parole are stacked towards the end of the day they are stacked you know before lunch

00:15:48.300 and the ones where again there's a perhaps a greater chance of parole being actually given

00:15:53.920 is more towards the beginning of the day that entire study's premise is that you know the rates

00:16:00.420 of paroles being given should be random you should have an equal chance of being given parole or denied

00:16:06.200 parole at the beginning of the day or the middle of the day and the end of the day but they're

00:16:09.220 actually ordered in some whatever a sensical way then this this analysis doesn't make any sense

00:16:14.580 um so that's reason number one and then there's also like you know this might be for statistics

00:16:18.800 mavens here but it's something we call effect sizes okay that's just literally the size of an effect

00:16:24.200 how big should we expect something to be and from psychology over you know doing this over 100 years

00:16:29.900 we have a rough estimate for how large things should be for example on average men are taller than

00:16:36.840 women on average that's not true for everybody i'm i'm a short man i know plenty of tall women

00:16:42.520 but on average men are taller than women now there's an effect size to that that effect size is pretty

00:16:47.980 large again i'd use a cohen's d of like one you can forget about those numbers for the moment if you

00:16:53.040 don't if you don't care for them but they're large i can see it with a naked eye okay the judge study

00:16:58.740 the effect size was humongous it was way bigger than the difference between how much taller men are than

00:17:06.260 women on average okay so we should have seen this with our naked eye we didn't need someone to

00:17:11.860 publish a paper 10 years ago we could have seen that 100 years ago right so it should have led us

00:17:18.180 to believe that something was wrong with that study so that study you know the ideas might be correct

00:17:22.380 but that study does not give evidence for those ideas okay and then your doubts got even deeper with

00:17:29.560 this theory this resource model self-regulation like there was a theory that the resource was glucose

00:17:34.440 in your brain so if you were like depleted on glucose you had you know less willpower and then

00:17:40.380 there's things you can do to conserve your glucose or maybe if you give yourself a sugary snack you'll

00:17:44.980 have more glucose to make decisions but then you found research like that doesn't that doesn't work

00:17:49.400 another one is there's an idea with this theory that you could strengthen or increase your willpower

00:17:53.660 by doing you know different things like you know focusing on your posture you're using a different hand

00:17:59.680 to brush your teeth like little things like that by doing things that are a little bit harder you could

00:18:04.040 strengthen but then you've also done research saying no that actually doesn't work either yeah yeah so

00:18:09.680 there's lots in there so maybe i will say i'll say one thing about glucose and then i'll say something

00:18:17.360 more broad about about the field of psychology and science and social science more generally so glucose

00:18:22.200 it's actually the study of glucose and how preposterous it is on basic principles that then led to an

00:18:30.820 overturning of the entire idea of ego depletion okay so when i say biologically preposterous so first

00:18:38.100 let me just kind of say again steel man the idea so you know for those of us who've taken uh any high

00:18:43.520 school biology you know that glucose is important you know that glucose is the you know the fuel that

00:18:48.560 that our cells use to produce things so it would be not inconceivable that when we can't do things

00:18:56.820 when we feel lack of energy tired wanting to go to bed etc that we are glucose deprived okay that would

00:19:03.980 be like an intuitive kind of thing to think about but guess what we can actually measure glucose we can

00:19:10.240 measure it in the brain and when we do actual good studies measuring the actual consumption of glucose in

00:19:16.740 the brain through pets through pet studies i don't mean pet as in your your pets as as in positive emission

00:19:23.020 tomography it's a kind of neuroimaging you see that actually that thinking thinking about things

00:19:29.220 which controlling yourself a volition is a kind of thinking does not consume that much glucose it

00:19:35.500 consumes remarkably little glucose yeah people may have heard of this thing called the stroop test

00:19:40.360 it's a test where people are asked to name the color of the ink used to print a word and the color of

00:19:47.960 the ink contradicts what the color spells out so you know like the word blue is printed in red ink

00:19:55.220 and in this test it takes i mean it takes a fair it's hard it takes a fair amount of cognitive effort to do

00:20:00.440 and even doing 10 minutes of the stroop test only consumes one calorie of energy

00:20:05.720 one calorie of energy okay one calorie of energy

00:20:10.760 now glucose is incredibly important for the brain it's so important in fact that the brain has

00:20:19.760 mechanisms to ensure there's an oversupply of glucose the reason for this is because the brain

00:20:25.480 once the brain is deprived of glucose it leads to cell death and then leads to body death it leads to

00:20:30.640 death okay so the brain has mechanisms in place to ensure there is enough glucose around so there's no way

00:20:38.720 that one calorie is going to impair the brain there's no way that 10 calories 100 calories is going to

00:20:46.980 impair the brain that such that we are run out of energy okay it's just not biologically plausible it

00:20:53.000 doesn't make any sense so uh that's that's one so the glucose idea just is is like it's implausible

00:20:59.500 on its face and then it's also irreproducible and non-replicable okay so that brings me to my bigger

00:21:05.680 issue which has led me from just critiquing the theory to whole scale doubting it doubting at least

00:21:12.120 its empirical foundations is that for over 10 years now the field of psychology but other social

00:21:19.260 sciences and other sciences in fact have gone through what people are calling the replication crisis

00:21:25.120 and this is this notion that many of our cherished findings many of the things that we have been taught

00:21:30.260 in university classrooms taught and best-selling books are based on science that cannot be replicated

00:21:38.780 okay what does that mean again for those who have taken some science in high school

00:21:43.520 replication is the bedrock of science because if i discover something in a lab that's not true that's

00:21:50.420 not real in any meaningful way it just means i found something so i need to try it again and make sure i

00:21:56.900 reproduce it make sure i can replicate it so i want to do it twice three times four times five times

00:22:02.760 better i want other people in with independent labs who maybe are even skeptical and critical of my ideas

00:22:10.400 to replicate my ideas exactly and then and only then will i say okay i might be onto something and now

00:22:18.360 let's build a theory to understand these little factoids these little facts on the ground it turns out that

00:22:24.240 in psychology we've been really sloppy with replications and it's not psychology alone it's

00:22:29.520 economics it's scary cancer biology it's areas in chemistry there's other areas where we've had

00:22:38.200 like this the incentives aren't there for for people to conduct replications so people don't and as a

00:22:45.100 result we have these one-off studies that like sound good and are intuitive and then we assume they're real

00:22:51.780 et cetera and i can go i can talk for a long long time about this in fact i have gone on many podcasts

00:22:56.700 talking about this so we have the replication crisis so what's happened is probably the biggest

00:23:03.180 victim of the replication crisis has been in fact ego depletion this resource model of self-control

00:23:09.420 there have been now multiple attempts with thousands of participants with labs all over the world

00:23:16.080 to replicate some basic findings in ego depletion in the canon of ego depletion and i participated in

00:23:23.000 a few of these myself and i'm saying this i did this as a proponent maybe i disagreed with the theory

00:23:28.980 but i believed in the phenomenon okay and i was shocked when it was published eventually in 2016

00:23:37.380 when i first learned of the results of this big big project with again i think i had about uh over

00:23:42.280 2 000 participants all over the world could not replicate the basic effect we had zero could not

00:23:48.200 replicate it at all baumeister who's one of the lead architects of this area was very doubtful and

00:23:53.940 he had good reasons for being doubtful and maybe some not so good reasons but you know i given the

00:23:58.480 benefit of the doubt he well i should say kathleen voss who again is number two in this in this world

00:24:03.600 was also skeptical decided i want to do a better job of doing a mass replication and she did in fact

00:24:09.480 was a massive improvement over the first one but the results were unchanged still there's an inability

00:24:15.760 to replicate these basic findings and that's crushing you know for me who i've been in this

00:24:21.560 field like studying this for at least at the time for 10 some odd years now much longer than that it was

00:24:27.940 crushing like what have i done for the past 10 years so it led to like you know really really a lot of

00:24:33.220 a lot of soul searching now i'm going to say something that it might be difficult for some of your

00:24:37.680 listeners to grapple with and that is that just because we're unable to replicate this stuff

00:24:43.380 in a lab setting does not mean the idea is wrong it simply means that the tools we use to generate the

00:24:52.480 idea are not of the task and if we have other tools maybe we can find evidence of this and in fact

00:24:58.740 there are other tools and you know i think of ego depletion as a kind of fatigue you get tired

00:25:04.500 and uh brett you've been tired in your life i know that for a fact because you're a human

00:25:09.340 we've all been tired in life and when we're tired our cognitive systems act differently

00:25:14.880 and we're less able or willing to do certain things and at some level that's kind of like

00:25:21.400 what's kind of what ego depletion is saying but the paradigms used to get at ego depletion in the lab

00:25:27.340 we're kind of evoking it with really really short tasks that were not very demanding etc but when you

00:25:35.180 look at good studies in the real world it's not that israeli judge study but other good studies in

00:25:40.440 the real world you see evidence of this so for example there's a beautiful study the heng shen dies

00:25:47.020 that the lead author katie milkman who's a brilliant behavioral economist at wharton is another another

00:25:52.160 author looking at health care workers and getting tens of thousands of actual health care workers

00:25:57.380 real health workers who you know they have to wear they wear these badges and the badges have these

00:26:01.780 remote ids and the id would ping every time they enter a patient's room and in that room there are

00:26:08.220 also hand sanitizers and this is the study was done pre-covid by the way and there's a rule in all

00:26:13.700 these health care systems these hospitals you've got to sanitize your hands before and after you enter a

00:26:18.220 patient's room so you can look at compliance with you know these hand sanitizing first the bad news

00:26:24.520 health care workers only sanitize at best at best 50 of the time but the longer their shift was in the

00:26:32.100 day the less likely they were to sanitize their hands so that's evidence that they're like their

00:26:37.900 compliance with some external rule is going down over hours not over minutes but over hours so it's a

00:26:44.600 kind of it's kind of like the israeli judge study but again it's it's something you can believe

00:26:47.840 so that is real but again all the lab studies that we've learned about i no longer trust them

00:26:53.380 okay so the takeaway there is that something like ego depletion could be going on that diminishes our

00:27:00.380 ability to make good decision it's not it's not there's like there's like a single you know ego or

00:27:05.200 self-control resource it's just like you're just tired and when you're tired not only does your body

00:27:10.480 function less but your maybe your brain does too exactly so and like the truth is like when you frame

00:27:17.440 it that way isn't it a lot less exciting and interesting than ego depletion and some magical

00:27:21.440 resource being diminished after as little as five minutes yeah you know fatigue is is one of the

00:27:26.480 oldest topics in psychology and we've known about this for a long time it doesn't make it less

00:27:30.940 important it's good to know that when you're tired you know maybe don't operate heavy machinery but i

00:27:37.820 don't think people really need that lesson right so we've kind of known this already okay so the popular

00:27:43.860 ego depletion model isn't the right paradigm through which to view how self-control operates

00:27:49.700 and then you've developed this other counterintuitive idea in your research as well which i'd like to i want

00:27:55.600 to dig into we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors

00:27:58.640 and now back to the show we have this idea i think in general about achieving goals that you have to you

00:28:09.220 know white knuckle it you have to you know be gritty and just you know wear a hair shirt if it doesn't hurt

00:28:15.140 then it's like you're not really working and you're not really doing anything but one of your

00:28:20.400 counterintuitive findings in some of your research is that people who display more restraint in their lives

00:28:27.340 so people who are you know really successful at maybe restraining themselves from eating the cookie

00:28:33.260 or who are really good at maintaining an exercise schedule these individuals also report controlling

00:28:40.280 themselves less you know exercising self-control less so how is it these people who are it looks like

00:28:46.680 they're exercising a lot of self-control they actually aren't exercising a lot of self-control yeah

00:28:52.120 that's a really good question and to clarify one thing so i'm not the one who discovered this at least

00:28:55.900 initially that would be will hoffman who is a brilliant german psychologist so he conducted a really

00:29:01.040 i think brilliant study that many people have now copied and found similar results and what he found

00:29:06.420 was that when we look at people people and if you want to use the word self-control you could i don't

00:29:12.860 think that's the appropriate word given what you just said but people who end up doing well in life

00:29:17.900 they might have what we call high trait self-control i think a better term is what personality

00:29:23.580 psychologists call conscientiousness okay that's a broad trait that describes the extent to which

00:29:30.960 people are orderly uh follow rules are hard working uh have to some extent some traditional values

00:29:39.880 and show restraint they're thoughtful when we look at those and by the way those are the kind of people

00:29:45.260 we all want to be okay i say this because there is so much research now showing that these kinds of

00:29:52.700 people like they have all the goodies in life so this is brilliant study was started in 1972 the year of my

00:30:00.680 birth and they've tracked they tracked every single person that was born in the small city of dunadine

00:30:06.400 new zealand and they're still tracking them and they measured uh various aspects of their personalities

00:30:13.060 at a very very young age including the extent to which they're controlled or i think i want to i'm

00:30:19.340 going to stick with the term conscientious if you like grit you can call it grit if you'd like

00:30:22.400 and they were assessed on the level of conscientiousness based on their behaviors based on their parents

00:30:27.600 report based on their teachers reports and they followed them for at least when this one study was

00:30:33.900 published i think it was 40 years at this point and what they found was those people were higher in

00:30:39.320 conscientiousness higher in trait trait is the important word here self-control they had more

00:30:44.360 money in the bank they had better jobs they were less likely to be convicted of a crime they were

00:30:49.200 healthier they were less likely to be dead they were less likely to use and abuse drugs like you know just

00:30:55.580 better in every way okay and the thinking here was well look this is the best endorsement we can come

00:31:03.380 up with for the power of self-control now by that i mean state self-control exerting self-control in the

00:31:12.280 moment you called it white knuckling it that's maybe that's a good metaphor pushing through you see

00:31:17.380 the chocolate chip cookies you see the the salad you want the chocolate cookies they're a lot better

00:31:22.820 they're a lot tastier but you white knuckle it and you go for the salad instead okay it turns out

00:31:28.780 that conscientious people at least in some of these studies now a few not not only one or two many now

00:31:34.220 they engage in less of this they engage in less white knuckling they restrain fewer of their impulses not

00:31:43.900 more and the people who engage in more white knuckling and maybe this is a cruel way of referring to them

00:31:51.040 are the losers in life the people who are not conscientious the people who end up not having

00:31:56.580 the money in the bank who end up being convicted of of crimes they're the ones who engage in the

00:32:02.040 white knuckling so the problem i think and i just outlined this in a recent paper is because we

00:32:09.640 literally use the same word we use the word self-control for both the person and the process we got

00:32:17.720 confused and being a self-controlled person or better yet a self-regulated person a conscientious

00:32:25.740 person that is good but how do they get all those good things we assumed it was white knuckling we

00:32:32.560 assumed it was engaging in state self-control that's not the case we have ideas about what else they might

00:32:39.120 be doing but i think we were wrong for for many many years decades about how they got there and i think

00:32:45.940 the advice we've been giving people is also wrong i don't think greater white knuckling is going to

00:32:52.300 help people reach their goals at least in the long term and i want to caveat that at least in the long

00:32:58.880 term so for example diets uh diets diets don't work in the long run they work in the short run

00:33:07.200 okay so if you want a diet and let's say you're trying to get into your uh your wedding tuxedo

00:33:12.560 or my i mean my wife's who want to get into a wedding dress as you want to lose some weight

00:33:16.100 you can do it you can starve yourself for like a couple of months and you'll fit in your tuxedo

00:33:21.600 slash or wedding dress you can make that happen actors famously lose weight for roles gain weight

00:33:27.340 for roles but if you track people who are dieting and look at them two years out three years out four

00:33:35.500 years out five years out most people have regained all the weight they've lost or they're even heavier

00:33:42.080 and that's true for all forms or many many forms of kind of self-control kinds of tasks you might have

00:33:49.280 some temporary victories but oftentimes not always oftentimes you regress and so people who are in the

00:33:56.160 field of behavior change they talk about the uh oh what's the term i'm looking for now it's the habit

00:34:02.560 change triangle or the habit relapse a behavior relapse triangle you're a smoker you're really

00:34:09.480 really motivated to quit smoking um you engage in some intervention you reduce your amount of smoking

00:34:15.460 you're you're a full pack smoker now you're down to half pack smoker a good number of people most people

00:34:21.080 you know if you track them a year later they're gonna be back to being a full pack smoker okay now of

00:34:25.800 course people do quit not everyone relapses but that is the modal pattern so behavior change is

00:34:32.760 really really hard and i'm not i'm no longer convinced it's about gutting it out it's about

00:34:36.560 white knuckling it there are other things i think that are better okay so this is really important i

00:34:40.900 think this is really this is going against pretty much the entire self-improvement industry that's that's

00:34:48.200 out there it's telling you discipline you got to exercise willpower you got to do it even if you

00:34:53.120 don't want to do it and it looks like the research says the people who are actually really successful

00:34:57.360 in life they're not exercising that much discipline in the way we typically think and i think there's a

00:35:04.180 lot i think there's a lot going on here like culturally i think we valorize the whole white

00:35:08.620 knuckle discipline because it makes i don't know it's just something more moral about it feels like

00:35:13.740 that's the better way if it's hard then it actually counts and if it's easy then it doesn't count

00:35:19.960 for some reason yeah this is a beautiful paper came out a number of years ago called the

00:35:25.200 moralization of effort if you give people a description of a person who has a very good

00:35:31.540 outcome they get an a on a paper or produce some work of art or produce uh whatever some construction

00:35:37.780 project and they either worked hard they needed to work hard to get there or they didn't need to work

00:35:42.780 that hard to get there and you ask about the moral character of both those people the people

00:35:47.960 worked hard are seen as better people they're seen as more morally righteous so something in our

00:35:52.780 culture and not just our culture i think it's a lot of cultures that really valorize hard work and

00:35:56.760 there could be some good evolutionary reasons for that so but that is true but getting back to your

00:36:01.860 point about like this upends our kind of notions of the whole behavior change industry absolutely

00:36:07.400 and what we have found first i don't really have any good answers like other than behavior change

00:36:13.280 is really really hard anyone who tells you that it's easy in these quick steps this is what you

00:36:19.100 can do they're wrong it's not easy people typically relapse there's a reason why you know self-help books

00:36:26.060 that are about productivity keep on being best sellers by the same people buying those same books

00:36:30.600 if it was so easy why haven't they solved it so it's really really hard but we do have some hints

00:36:35.860 so for example those really successful people the conscientious people for some reason i don't know

00:36:41.840 how i don't know how they get there but they seem to have for lack of a better term more virtuous

00:36:48.420 desires so when you put the the salad and the cookies in front of them they actually want the salad they

00:36:55.880 like the salad they prefer the salad in other words their desires are better and therefore they don't

00:37:02.100 need to restrain themselves so as an example for me and this is actually true i'm not making this up

00:37:06.860 i i love apples i literally do eat an apple a day i and i enjoy it and if you give me a choice between

00:37:12.980 an apple and like a cake i'm not a big fan of cakes like i'm much more of a savory person than a sweet

00:37:18.560 person i'll take i'll take the apple any day but i did not use self-control to get there i did not use

00:37:25.420 any of it in fact i would need self-control to eat the cake because it would be going against what i

00:37:29.260 actually want so it seems like our behaviors follow our desires so maybe the trick is is is to have

00:37:36.820 different desires in other words if you have the desire for the the unvirtuous thing you might be

00:37:43.460 successful in restraining that desire for a time we have some research suggesting that people are

00:37:50.720 successful at restraining their desires about half the time okay that also means that half the half the

00:37:56.660 time they're not restraining their desires and there are certain situations where we're definitely

00:38:00.980 not restraining our desires so when you're tired right we talked about depletion when you're tired

00:38:05.720 you're less likely to restrain your desires when you're in a bad mood uh i need to like cope i'm

00:38:11.520 less likely to restrain my desires when i'm in a good mood i want to celebrate less likely to restrain

00:38:15.920 my desires when i'm drunk or high less likely to restrain my desires so um there's all kinds of ways

00:38:22.140 that we fail in restraining our desires but if you don't want the desire to begin with then you're

00:38:27.640 good so how is it that these conscientious people don't have these desires i wish i knew i really

00:38:34.660 wish i knew and i don't the closest i can come up with is like they set goals and they make plans to

00:38:40.480 reach their goals perhaps but i'm not sure that fully captures it no i think this is a really important

00:38:45.280 point because this is something i've come along to in the past couple of years that in order to be

00:38:49.120 successful in life you have to you actually have to want the thing like really really want it and

00:38:55.560 enjoy it that's the way you do it you have to you have to use motivation instead of discipline to be

00:39:00.560 successful in life and what really got me thinking about this making that shift was daniel chambliss i

00:39:06.400 don't know if you've heard of him he's a professor of sociology he wrote a book about olympic swimmers

00:39:11.360 in the 1980s but he wrote a paper called the mundanity of excellence and so he followed these olympic

00:39:17.280 swimmers for a year or so and going into their practices and watching their coach and one thing

00:39:23.740 he noticed about these olympic swimmers he wrote about in this paper the mundanity of excellence

00:39:27.080 is that these elite level swimmers would get up at five o'clock in the morning and just swim

00:39:32.960 non-stop back and forth it's the most boring thing to do laps in a pool but what he discovered would

00:39:39.240 differentiate between elite swimmers and sort of like the sea level swimmers the elite swimmers

00:39:44.500 actually enjoyed it it was just like yeah this is great there's nothing else i'd rather be doing

00:39:48.500 and the sea level swimmers the people who couldn't get who are decent but couldn't get to that olympic

00:39:53.440 level they had to just use disciplines like i don't want to be here but i got to be here and i've just

00:39:58.080 seen that in my own life too where like the goals that i've been successful at i've achieved them

00:40:04.180 because i actually enjoyed pursuing that goal so you know exercising like i exercise every day even if

00:40:10.380 it's christmas i exercise it's not because i'm exercising using any sort of discipline or self

00:40:14.960 control it's like i just enjoy exercising so it's part of who i am and i really enjoy it so i whenever

00:40:20.940 i talk to young people and other people like what can i do to you know be better at achieving my goals

00:40:26.520 as i fail that you know sticking to a diet it's like or sticking to an exercise plan i just tell them

00:40:31.280 pick something you enjoy pick something you enjoy and that will just take care of most that'll get you

00:40:36.160 like 90 there yeah i i i fully agree so uh as you were talking i was thinking about um thinking

00:40:43.720 about my son actually who's uh 15 wonderful boy and the other day he's really he's really getting

00:40:49.820 into food tiktok and the other day i just he starts whipping up this incredible food and i just see him

00:40:57.060 chopping sitting there working and you just see the joy in his face that he doesn't really get with

00:41:02.260 anything else other than maybe playing soccer and then i think about myself so i'm the one who cooks

00:41:06.140 in in my family and i cook because it's i feel it's my duty and responsibility but i don't get the

00:41:11.840 same kind of pleasure and as a result the meals i make um aren't as complicated they probably aren't

00:41:17.360 as good either and i can just see like oh wow he really loves it like he should lean into that yeah

00:41:22.740 and i think too a lot of these we call them like influencers or pop culture discipline gurus you know

00:41:29.580 they talk about you gotta wake up at four o'clock in the morning to exercise and just always be grinding

00:41:33.760 like i i actually think they enjoy it that's why they do it like they're yeah they actually enjoy

00:41:39.700 getting up that early exercising they're probably making money at you know espousing so of course

00:41:45.120 they're motivated to tell people that's what you need to do yeah i don't think they're actually

00:41:48.460 exercising self-control or discipline i think they actually enjoy doing that stuff yeah yeah so yeah

00:41:53.260 that yeah i agree 100 but the other thing we should be aware of with this kind of stuff

00:41:56.900 is to be aware of what's called selection bias okay so if you're successful in whatever endeavor

00:42:04.260 and then then you give advice what kind of advice you're going to give people you're going to give

00:42:07.880 people advice to do what i did but you don't have the counterfactual of what about the people who do

00:42:14.460 exactly what you do but don't achieve your success so how do you know it's the things you're doing

00:42:20.560 or the things that you that you feel you're consciously aware of doing as opposed to some other things

00:42:25.520 so we got to be aware sometimes of people who are too um too readily dispensed with advice

00:42:29.740 no yeah i agree so the takeaway there you got to get your desires right and the trick is like well

00:42:35.880 how do you desire good things like how do you actually want to do good things and not want bad

00:42:42.260 things for you and you said it's kind of a mystery but i mean it's not a complete mystery so

00:42:46.800 what are some things we could do like what does the research say that we could do to

00:42:49.780 shape our desires yeah so it's it's mostly a mystery but there are some clues so first okay

00:42:55.360 so i'm not sure if you've ever seen or read uh clockwork orange no i know i know about it though

00:43:00.100 okay so excellent movie i recommend it to all your listeners it's gruesome but there's one famous scene

00:43:06.120 by the way i'm not recommending this i'm just kind of stating what we could do there's a scene so the

00:43:11.080 story there is this violent offender who just like loves he loves raping he loves raping and killing

00:43:16.580 people he actually enjoys it so what do you do for someone who likes he's got bad desires so what they did

00:43:23.840 was they engage in what's called classical conditioning and they had him watch scenes

00:43:29.620 of movie scenes of violence and then as he's watching the movie scenes of violence also gave

00:43:37.420 him i think a drug that made him feel sick so then he started associating violence with uh being sick

00:43:43.780 of course i would never never ever recommend people doing that but it suggests this this classical

00:43:48.960 conditioning is involved like associating things you ought to be doing with reward just conditioning

00:43:55.240 will will be helpful so if someone can devise an ethical way getting people to desire the right

00:44:01.020 things we're on the right step but i think society has has a place to play here okay so i'll give you

00:44:07.520 an example so i'm 52 i'm a gen xer proud gen xer and you know we i've i'm of the generation where

00:44:15.540 there's a due date for something that's when it's due that's when you submit it so like my paper is

00:44:22.120 due to my professor uh on uh september 1st that's when i submit it and if i submit on september 2nd i'm

00:44:29.220 gonna get penalized a number of years ago it's probably about a decade ago now the biggest school

00:44:33.780 board in toronto the toronto district school board started doing away with due dates and mandated

00:44:41.260 that all teachers accept assignments whenever and they could not be penalized based on how late they

00:44:50.540 are as long as they're submitted before the end of the year and the reason for that is i'm sure it's

00:44:54.400 really well intentioned you know there are clearly some times where people have things that are out of

00:44:59.380 their control that prevent them from handing things in on time what that rule did was it sent the

00:45:06.000 message that being on time is unimportant now this value of punctuality of being on time is not a

00:45:16.260 cherished value of course now we're also being taught that it's uh a product of white supremacy but i'll

00:45:20.940 leave that aside as you can probably tell from my from my tone i don't believe that's true so now we've

00:45:26.140 got this value of being on time degraded so now the kids who are kind of born into this they no longer

00:45:34.080 value this i now as a university professor like i went from when i started very few people would

00:45:40.000 hand things in late to now 20 to 30 percent of my students hand things in late so i'm just using this

00:45:47.160 as one example just to say that society's values we communicate what we care about you know by the

00:45:53.260 kinds of rules we have and then we start some people internalize these rules right and those

00:45:58.940 conscientious people by the way those are people who tend to internalize the rules of society

00:46:04.160 so that might be the secret sauce they see there are these certain kinds of things that i've been

00:46:10.260 told by authority figures in my life my parents my teachers who have you what have you that these are

00:46:15.220 the ways i should act they internalize that and then they start acting in accordance with those values

00:46:21.620 okay so i know i'm like saying this i sound like an old-fashioned conservative maybe

00:46:25.740 but i think there are uh there's some value to norms of like the kinds of behaviors we expect

00:46:33.360 yeah so it sounds like we can train people's intrinsic desires through extrinsic motivators

00:46:39.480 like using the carrot and the stick so maybe you don't naturally want to turn stuff in on time or

00:46:44.140 maybe you don't naturally want to exercise every day right you just don't have that desire

00:46:47.860 but you can set up some sort of reward system for you well if i exercise every day for a month i'll

00:46:55.000 give myself this you can even do this with your kids and i think the idea is that as you do these

00:47:00.500 things extrinsically motivated hopefully you'll eventually you'll internalize it and actually just

00:47:05.840 desire it just want to do it yeah so what you you've just nailed it right there like it's the

00:47:11.640 interface between going between extrinsic to intrinsic like that to me is a mystery but that's

00:47:17.540 exactly what we need to do yeah so for your listeners extrinsic motives are things that are outside

00:47:23.580 of you so right they're like someone gives you money to do something your job to some extent is

00:47:27.680 extrinsically motivated you probably wouldn't do your job if you weren't paid some of us would and

00:47:31.780 those are the people who love their job and those are the people who are healthy and happy

00:47:35.240 intrinsic motives are things you do out of love you're truly passionate about and that's where we

00:47:40.080 want to be for the kinds of goals we set for ourselves but how do i get myself to love broccoli

00:47:45.800 if i can't stand the flavor right so you can learn how to cook it better just like make it tasty

00:47:51.680 yeah that's true i that's that's a great great example cook it better i mean broccoli is delicious

00:47:57.260 who's wrong here but how do you get yourself to like to love exercise if you don't if you find

00:48:01.920 yourself getting tired quickly if you find moving uh laborious i think you can you can get habituated

00:48:07.780 um and you can get used to it you can stomach it but will you love it it's hard to know

00:48:13.540 but i think ultimately what you just said going from extrinsic to intrinsic if you receive enough

00:48:19.000 messages from people you admire and respect about the value of that thing then you know um maybe you

00:48:27.120 start wrapping your identity around that thing yeah and that could be one way of internalizing some of

00:48:33.000 these norms is wrapping it with identity potentially elliot berkman who's a friend and colleague at the

00:48:38.200 university of oregon he's talked a lot about this about um using identity as a tool to start

00:48:43.520 loving things so you know um for some people who have like forget to go to vote uh and we want to

00:48:50.000 motivate people to vote you know start identifying as a voter i'm a voter i'm a voter of course i'm

00:48:55.480 going to vote it's not that i vote i am a voter i am a healthy person it's not that i'm trying to

00:49:01.740 eat healthy i'm a healthy person so maybe that's one way you can start internalizing some of these

00:49:07.220 these values and norms yeah and i think the idea maybe also joining up with a community of

00:49:12.760 individuals who have those that desire that you want being around them so it could be like a crossfit

00:49:17.680 gym or it could be some sort of support group or something like that that could also help

00:49:21.760 to i think there's that power of uh mimetic desire like you've seen what other people are doing and

00:49:27.140 you're like i want to be like that so you're going to just follow them and that can help you

00:49:30.160 internalize that desire okay so i think that's interesting so we talked about willpower

00:49:34.080 not that great in helping you do what you want to do in the long term the people who are the most

00:49:39.780 successful in life they aren't exercising a lot of what you call state self-control so like

00:49:45.020 white knuckling gritting and then if you really want to be successful you just have to select your

00:49:50.000 desires actually want to do the thing that you're trying to do and actually not to want those things

00:49:56.760 you're trying to avoid well i want to go back to this you mentioned that conscientious people tend to

00:50:02.200 do this like individuals who are conscientious this is a personality trait and from what i understand

00:50:07.000 personality and temperament a lot of it is inborn like you're just kind of born generally a

00:50:12.440 conscientious person so what if you're not like what if you're not a conscientious person are you

00:50:17.440 just kind of hosed for life yeah yeah so i mean personality is uh as all traits they're strong

00:50:24.780 genetic uh contributions but it's not fair to say it's only born there's there's there's environment

00:50:30.460 there's learning but that doesn't get you out of jail here because uh it's typically early learning so

00:50:36.200 what if you're you're a 20 year old and you're not as conscientious as you'd like to be and you can

00:50:41.720 blame your parents uh because the genetics they gave you or the kinds of upbringing they the kind

00:50:47.280 of house they raised you in so uh it's hard yeah man it's hard for those people so you know the

00:50:52.660 conscientious people in life they don't need advice uh they're already figuring it out it's the low

00:50:56.520 conscientious people who are having a tough time so those are the people we should be trying to reach

00:51:00.920 out to and i think all the advice that you hear um you know it's what's hilarious is that the the

00:51:07.100 people are most likely to kind of listen to the advice are conscientious people right the people

00:51:13.020 don't need it so i i think the same principles that we kind of have been talking about uh for a little

00:51:17.580 bit you know would apply to the non-conscientious person it's like how can you develop tools to help

00:51:22.880 you in your life so the one thing i've started kind of thinking of a little bit more about

00:51:28.340 is planning and literally using a calendar to schedule things to help you kind of meet your

00:51:36.200 goals i think that's like part of the battle is simply like planning in detail how you're going to

00:51:44.680 reach your goal so there's a really old theory that is like as simple as anything out there but it's

00:51:50.840 still powerful and that is goal setting theory which simply suggests if you set a goal you're more

00:51:57.260 likely to be productive in that thing you're you're you're trying to reach and guess what the more

00:52:02.780 specific you are at setting your goals the more time bound your goals are the more likely you are to

00:52:09.200 meet your goals it's it's simple but actually works so for the non-conscientious people um think

00:52:15.920 carefully about what your goals are map it out be specific and then put those things in your calendar

00:52:22.680 i don't mean i'm meeting mark at 7 p.m to go for drinks on a wednesday night yeah you can do that

00:52:28.460 too but i mean i'm going to engage in this thing so let's see if you've got a goal that's multi that

00:52:34.040 has multiple parts like writing a book writing a paper writing an article for a newspaper you've

00:52:39.120 never done that before an op-ed let's say so break down those goals into smaller bits and schedule it

00:52:45.800 in your calendar so you know these are the kinds of things i think are again elementary seems stupid

00:52:51.680 but i believe that kind of thing could potentially be more effective than just white not going out

00:52:56.680 yeah okay so for non-conscientious people i thought it was interesting point you made that

00:53:00.400 they're the ones who need the advice of the most but they're probably not

00:53:03.960 listening to it so there we got to think you got to think of ways especially if you're a parent or a

00:53:08.320 teacher what can you do to reach those individuals the most that's that that's tricky i don't have

00:53:13.740 any easy solutions to that yeah yeah i'm not sure i have any easy solutions as a parent of two

00:53:18.700 children i'm not trying to give any parenting advice to anybody yeah right and i think it's

00:53:22.740 interesting too you know there are a lot of people who give the advice well you know you shouldn't just

00:53:26.400 tell people exactly what to do like micromanage them they're often probably conscientious people so

00:53:31.900 they don't need to be micromanaged but then then if you give that to a non-conscientious person

00:53:36.200 they're going to flounder yes okay so one advice and this relates to some current work uh what work

00:53:42.040 we just published uh like a few months ago and it's also it's this advice has been out there already

00:53:46.500 probably perhaps made most famous by carol dweck who's a psychologist out of stanford university

00:53:51.840 and she's gotten some flack for some of some of her work and some of it's not i don't think as robust

00:53:56.300 as others but she does make this point of giving advice to parents when they deal with children

00:54:00.500 where she talks about reinforcing or rewarding trying reinforcing effort rewarding effort not rewarding

00:54:10.960 outcomes or performance now i think to some extent you could take that too far

00:54:16.420 so when my kids were younger they would be participating in soccer everyone gets a trophy

00:54:21.520 literally every person gets a trophy and then it's rude awakening when hey one day you're like well

00:54:25.920 there's actually variability in who in soccer playing ability and guess what the better soccer

00:54:30.400 players end up on the team and the worst soccer players don't end up on the team but nonetheless i

00:54:34.660 still think that lesson is is a good one and why is that so i like to think a little bit

00:54:39.420 less these days about self-control and more about the exertion of effort so what is effort effort is

00:54:47.580 you can think of it as the intensive if we talk about mental effort the intensification of a mental

00:54:51.560 process to achieve some goal so it's thinking really hard pushing yourself slowing down typically it

00:54:58.640 involves some form of resistance so again you can see how self-control is related here because

00:55:04.060 self-control is about resisting temptation there's some other thing pulling you so you got to resist that

00:55:09.500 with physical effort it's the same thing it's like you're lifting a weight there's literal resistance

00:55:15.400 there's little literal weight that you need to overcome to lift that thing and you need to exert effort

00:55:21.220 to lift that weight no matter how light it is it's still somewhat effortful and it's very heavy it's very effortful

00:55:28.340 so i think exerting effort is something that's required for many aspects of life and effort feels

00:55:35.560 a specific way in the body a characteristic way that effort feels or the way it's displayed if you

00:55:41.860 typically furrow our brow we typically tighten our stomach and our pupils tend to dilate specific brain

00:55:49.440 areas involved but it has a feeling that we also are conscious of we're aware of it and that feeling

00:55:55.680 is there for many different forms of effort again even physical effort shares a lot in common with

00:56:01.660 mental effort it feels the same way now what would happen if you started pairing that feeling of effort

00:56:09.780 with reward then what could happen and this relates to that kind of clockwork orange thing i was talking

00:56:15.820 about earlier is you start reinforcing the feeling of effort effort becomes a secondary reinforcer

00:56:24.240 you're like oh yeah when i have that feeling not always but sometimes often good things happen

00:56:31.960 i'm going to keep on doing that thing so you want to reinforce in children the exertion of effort of

00:56:38.300 trying just push yourself and that's fundamentally different than you don't reward your kid for getting

00:56:44.040 an a you reward them for trying really hard now if you try it really hard you might get an a you also

00:56:51.440 might not but you keep on rewarding the effort eventually people start tolerating the effort

00:56:57.400 liking the effort and then maybe more willing to exert another aspect of their life yeah because

00:57:03.420 in general humans and other animals we typically take the path of least resistance which makes sense

00:57:09.820 because when you expend less effort you expend less energy so it's efficient so i guess by rewarding

00:57:17.640 effort that's a way to overcome that tendency to avoid effort and this relates to something else your

00:57:23.620 research has found and it's called the effort paradox and i think that the this effort paradox relates to

00:57:29.480 what we've been talking about because i think the reason people assume that doing effortful things

00:57:35.020 takes self-control you know it takes discipline is because we instinctively know that effort can be

00:57:41.740 unpleasant you know so if something's hard you know we're gonna have to grit our teeth to get it done

00:57:46.620 but i think we also forget sometimes that hard things can also be pleasurable like there are hard

00:57:53.260 things that we do that are both effortful and unpleasant in some ways but you know they're also

00:57:58.480 deeply they're deeply satisfying it's like they're different they're different kinds of pleasure so tell

00:58:04.440 us about that tell us about the research on the effort paradox yeah so effort as i described this feeling

00:58:09.780 it typically although i think there can be some argument coming in the pipeline soon but for now at least

00:58:15.780 we're saying it doesn't feel good it's not a pleasant feeling all else being equal we know

00:58:21.500 this from every single animal we've ever tested if you give an animal from an ant to a human you know

00:58:29.640 a choice to exert a high effort low effort for an ant how do you do that you put some food that they

00:58:35.360 like at the end of a long path or at the end of a short path for humans you might say hey you've got to

00:58:41.200 do this mental exercise to get that thing you like money let's say and then you look which one they

00:58:46.420 prefer if the rewards are the same ants grasshoppers birds rats humans chimps we will prefer the easier

00:58:56.140 route the path of least resistance and that's true for physical effort and cognitive effort

00:59:01.040 psychologists we like to say that humans are cognitive misers we're intellectually lazy we don't like to think

00:59:07.140 so that's true or seems to be true on the one hand but on the other hand it looks like we love effort

00:59:16.500 so people on their spare time do things like climb mountains they play jigsaw puzzles they play sudoku

00:59:26.280 they sometimes pay money for these things so they're willing to forego an actual resource a material

00:59:33.860 resource that could benefit them in some other way to engage in something that's effortful and some

00:59:39.920 people might say oh it's it's not they're not going for it for the effort they're going it for the reward

00:59:44.060 like that feeling of of having climbed a mountain for having completed that really difficult crossword

00:59:50.800 puzzle but now imagine the world in which that crossword puzzle was easy was effortless you weren't

00:59:58.000 climbing mount everest you're climbing like the 10 meter high little hill in your town no one feels

01:00:03.640 proud of the climbing the 10 meter uh you know hill so sometimes we do things precisely because

01:00:10.400 they're effortful the effort is the point we're not doing it despite their effort we're doing it because

01:00:16.580 it's effortful so it's sometimes hard to reconcile these things we seem to avoid it but we also seem to

01:00:22.720 love it especially after the fact so there's this famous study now describing something called the

01:00:30.560 ikea effect so ikea of course is that famous uh swedish uh retailer where they sell you relatively

01:00:38.880 inexpensive furniture but the trick is you got to build it yourself and they're not easy necessarily

01:00:44.760 to build you know some of this ikea furniture and there are services out there we can pay people to

01:00:49.680 build it for you so in a series of studies these researchers they had people either they built a little

01:00:57.220 box a little ikea box themselves and you can imagine how good or bad those will look right some of them

01:01:03.100 will be okay probably there'll be some crooked pieces there might be some like why is there an extra

01:01:07.440 screw how come they gave me an extra screw right or they're given the box built perfectly by an expert

01:01:13.780 and then afterwards these people are asked how much they like their boxes how much would they be willing

01:01:20.600 to sell the box to someone else and it turns out that people like their own boxes more than the boxes

01:01:28.680 that the experts built for them which are objectively better they required more money to part with those

01:01:35.480 boxes so it seems at least after the fact people require more in return uh for things that required

01:01:43.960 effort if you do something that's really hard you feel more pleasure and this is done at the level of

01:01:48.900 self-support at the level of the brain the level of physiology if you've done something really hard

01:01:53.400 and you succeed you show all signs of valuing that reward more than if you get the same reward but had

01:02:01.880 to do something really really easy so this is paradoxical nature of effort we seem to loathe it

01:02:06.800 we seem to love it so that's what that effort paradox so what are the practical implications of this

01:02:12.140 like how can we use the effort paradox to help ourselves achieve our goals yeah that's a good question

01:02:17.380 that's a really really good question i think the first is to realize that just because something

01:02:23.740 is hard by that i mean uh effortful doesn't mean you should not choose it even if the rewards seem

01:02:30.780 the same we've also found now some research it's not published yet but we found over and over again

01:02:36.220 that when we have people do something that's truly meaningless so we talked about the stroop task

01:02:41.480 now psychologists are interested in the stroop task but doing that stroop task for anything longer

01:02:46.600 than a minute when it's kind of a curiosity gets boring and effortful and difficult and it's not

01:02:51.300 meaningful or interesting if i give you a hard version of a stroop task or an easy version of the stroop

01:02:57.360 task you think the hard version was more meaningful was a good use of your time it was purposeful

01:03:06.020 versus pretty much the same stroop task but a little bit easier you know you find it less effortful

01:03:10.800 so realize that a lot of the kind of maybe not joy we derive from life but a lot of the meaning

01:03:16.560 the eudaimonia that we might derive from life might be at least in part coming from doing effortful

01:03:23.740 things and again if you reward effort you might cultivate a taste for it so just because something

01:03:29.680 is hard doesn't mean we should avoid it and sometimes some of the best things come only from

01:03:35.380 effort and you can only get them from effort okay i like that so don't write off effortful things

01:03:40.500 because maybe doesn't feel good in the moment because on another level it could provide satisfaction

01:03:45.520 and even meaning you might just need to work a little more to pay attention to that less obvious

01:03:50.780 source of satisfaction there could be things you both loathe and love at the same time well michael

01:03:56.560 this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about your work yeah if you'd like

01:04:00.460 you can go to my website my website is simply my name www.michaelinslecht.com and i know it's a hard

01:04:08.920 one to spell hopefully it'll be on the show notes i'm also on twitter at at m inslecht i n z or i n z

01:04:15.700 for you americans l i c h t for twitter you can find me there fantastic well michael inslecht thanks

01:04:21.400 for time it's been a pleasure thank you for having me my guest here is michael inslecht you can find

01:04:26.580 more information about his work at his website michaelinslecht.com also check out our show notes

01:04:30.240 at aom.is slash control we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic

01:04:34.340 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at

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The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

Is Self-Control Overrated？

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