Many of us will start 2016 with
resolutions – to get fit, learn a new skill, eat differently. If we
really want to do these things, why did we wait until an arbitrary date
which marks nothing more important than a timekeeping convention? The
answer tells us something important about the psychology of motivation,
and about what popular theories of self-control miss out.
What we want isn’t straightforward. At
bedtime you might want to get up early and go for a run, but when your
alarm goes off you find you actually want a lie-in. When exam day comes
around you might want to be the kind of person who spent the afternoons
studying, but on each of those afternoons you instead wanted to hang out
with your friends.
You could see these contradictions as
failures of our self-control: impulses for temporary pleasures manage to
somehow override our longer-term interests. One fashionable theory of
self-control, proposed by Roy Baumeister at Florida State University, is
the ‘ego-depletion’ account. This theory states that self-control is
like a muscle. This means you can exhaust it in the short-term – meaning
that every temptation you resist makes it more likely that you’ll yield
to the next temptation, even if it is a temptation to do something
entirely different.
Some lab experiments appear to support
this limited resource model of willpower. People who had to resist the
temptation to eat chocolates were subsequently less successful at
solving difficult puzzles which required the willpower to muster up
enough concentration to complete them, for instance. Studies of court
records, meanwhile, found that the more decisions a parole board judge
makes without a meal break, the less lenient they become. Perhaps at the
end of a long morning, the self-control necessary for a more
deliberated judgement has sapped away, causing them to rely on a harsher
“keep them locked up” policy.
A corollary of the ‘like a muscle’ theory
is that in the long term, you can strengthen your willpower with
practice. So, for example, Baumeister found that people who were
assigned two weeks of trying to keep their back straight whenever
possible showed improved willpower when asked back into the lab.
Yet the ‘ego-depletion’ theory has
critics. My issue with it is that it reduces our willpower to something
akin to oil in a tank. Not only does this seem too simplistic, but it
sidesteps the core problem of self-control: who or what is controlling
who or what? Why is it even the case that we can want both to yield to a
temptation, and want to resist it at the same time?
Also, and more importantly, that theory
also doesn’t give an explanation why we wait for New Year’s Day to begin
exerting our self-control. If your willpower is a muscle, you should
start building it up as soon as possible, rather than wait for an
arbitrary date.
A battle of wills
.
Another explanation may answer these
questions, although it isn’t as fashionable as ego-depletion. George
Ainslie’s book ‘Breakdown of Will’ puts forward a theory of the self and
self-control which uses game theory to explain why we have trouble with
our impulses, and why our attempts to control them take the form they
do.
Ainslie’s account begins with the idea
that we have, within us, a myriad of competing impulses, which exist on
different time-scales: the you that wants to stay in bed five more
minutes, then you that wants to start the day with a run, the you that
wants to be fit for the half-marathon in April. Importantly, the
relative power of these impulses changes as they get nearer in time: the
early start wins against the lie-in the day before, but it is a
different matter at 5am. Ainslie has a detailed account of why this is,
and it has some important implications for our self-control.
According to this theory, our preferences
are unstable and inconsistent, the product of a war between our
competing impulses, good and bad, short and long-term. A New Year’s
resolution could therefore be seen as an alliance between these
competing motivations, and like any alliance, it can easily fall apart.
Addictions are a good example, because the long-term goal (“not to be an
alcoholic”) requires the coordination of many small goals (“not to have
a drink at 4pm;” “not at 5pm;” “not at 6pm,” and so on), none of which
is essential. You can have a drink at 4pm and still be a moderate
drinker. You can even have a drink also at 5pm, but somewhere along the
line all these small choices add up to a failure to keep to the wider
goal. Similarly, if you want to get fit in 2016, you don’t have to go
for a jog on 1 January, or even on 2 January, but if you don’t start
doing exercise on one particular day then you will never meet your
larger goal.
From Ainslie’s perspective, willpower is a
bargaining game played by the forces within ourselves, and like any
conflict of interest, if the boundary between acceptable and
unacceptable isn’t clearly defined then small infractions can quickly
escalate. For this reason, Ainslie says, resolutions cluster around
‘clean lines’, sharp distinctions around which no quibble is brooked.
The line between moderate and problem drinking isn’t clear (and liable
to be even less clear around your fourth glass), but the line between
teetotal and drinker is crystal.
This is why advice on good habits is
often of the form “Do X every day”, and why diets tend to absolutes: “No
gluten;” “No dessert;” “Fasting on Tuesdays and Thursdays”. We know
that if we leave the interpretation open to doubt, although our
intentions are good, we’ll undermine our resolutions when we’re under
the influence of our more immediate impulses.
And, so, Ainslie gives us an answer to
why our resolutions start on 1 January. The date is completely
arbitrary, but it provides a clean line between our old and new selves.
The practical upshot of the theory is
that if you make a resolution, you should formulate it so that at every
point in time it is absolutely clear whether you are sticking to it or
not. The clear lines are arbitrary, but they help the truce between our
competing interests to hold.
Good luck for your 2016 resolutions!
Source: BBC
No comments:
Post a Comment