Willpower

Temptation is all around us and as humans we only have so much willpower in the tank to fight it. In this episode, Robert and Julie discuss the science behind willpower, how we deplete this exhaustible resource and what you can do to boost your resolve.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas,
and this is our first recorded episode back from the
Christmas New Year's e break. You're gonna be getting this,
you know a little later in January, but this is

(00:24):
our the first episode we're recording of the New year.
So I have to ask, Julie, what did you get
for Christmas? Thank you for asking. I got an accordion?
Whoa button accordion? Now? What? Now? What is a button accordion?
Because with accordions I tend to picture like there's that
little the little deal that you see hoboes and monkeys playing,
and then there's like the big, honking like weird Ari

(00:44):
Yankovic Polish Grandfather model. It's sort between those two. Cost
wise to you, by the way, I'm telling you this
is crazy. With accordions, they're either like they just go
up super high. So of course the model I have
is a reasonable dollar amount, um. But as a result
is the button one, and it's actually simpler and um.
The button one has buttons instead of keyboards on one side,

(01:06):
but it still has that delicious sound that it makes
when it's you know, um exhaling and inhaling air. That's
what I do. You have a history with with this
versus a new endeavor that you're setting out on. Uh.
I've always been obsessed with them, and um, I always
wanted one, and my my husband finally said, hey, because
it's one of the things I wasn't gonna go I

(01:27):
and buy for myself. Right, But what does this mean
for me? Yes, okay, it means that, Um, not only
do I need to learn how to do you know
these great polka songs that I have to um, sit
down with a book and learn how to do this,
I need to use some self control, some willpower. Right.
And that's the at this time of year that's on
everyone's mind because New Year's I mean everybody's thinking what

(01:50):
am I going to do with my New Year? What's
going to be different this time? Um? You know, because
there are some people maybe thinking, oh, can I have
a little more. I knew where I stood in twelve,
I knew what was going on. I just want to
stick with that. Well, you can't new year, new things
going on, So we inevitably end up thinking about things

(02:10):
we can change. What are we going to do differently?
And uh and and ultimately we have to face the
question do we have the the the stick with it?
Do we have the willpower? Do we have the grit,
the grit to really make it happen? Do I have
the grit to poka? Yeah? And I have a feeling
you do? I think? I think? I think so too. Yeah,
we'll see. You know, if if I get decent at it,

(02:32):
maybe I'll play for you guys. That would be awesome
in two years. Well, now now that everyone's going to
be be wanting and wanting, if they're gonna ride in
and they're gonna say when is you? Theyre going to
play the accordion on the part I know. And you guys,
don't encourage me because I'll just do it every single
podcast and you'll be like why uh, But yeah, I
mean this is something I really want to do. And

(02:53):
so right there there's some motivation, but it turns up
that's not going to be enough. It's not. No. I
need to bear down and figure out what willpower is
and how I can game it. And in order to
do so, we need to look at willpower and and
try to get at the bottom of it, scratch at it.
And one of the ways that we can do that
is we can look towards the American Psychological Association and

(03:16):
they define willpower as the ability to delay gratification, resisting
short term temptations in order to meet long term goals.
The capacity to override an unwanted thought, feeling, or impulse.
So clearly, if I'm trying to play, I cannot listen
to my body if it says it has to get
up and go use the restroom. Right, if that sounds
reasonable for right? Um, the ability to employ a cool

(03:39):
cognitive system of behavior rather than a hot emotional system.
So I can't like go crazy with the according and
if I'm angry and I'm not doing well and like
smash it to smithereens right, I got to stay the course. Um.
And then a limited resource capable of being depleted. So
this is not something that I should probably undertake after

(04:00):
a day of crunching numbers, making big decisions. Um. Being
mentally fatigued. Yeah, this may remind some people of the
whole the whole idea of of ego depletion and decision
fatigue that we've touched on a number of times, and
and that the research into decision fatigue really stems from
research into willpower and temptation and and and we'll get

(04:21):
into more of that as as we us as we
moved through this this podcast. But you know, at this
time of year, I find like the the easiest models
that people tend to go to for understanding willpower. Of course,
it comes to do I have the will to go
out and do something I don't want to do? Exercise?
Do I have the will to resist doing something I

(04:43):
really wanted to eat? Chocolate or junk food? I mean
right now that in in our brake room somebody brought
in a big hanking box of like gourmet chocolates. Yeah.
I think they're Harry's chocolates or something. Yeah yeah, And
and and I know exactly what they were doing. They're like,
I must get rid of this. The temptation is too
great for me to eat all of these. So they
brought them into the break room, dumped them, and just

(05:04):
let everyone have at it. But the thing about those
chocolates I have to at this point is that they've
probably been sitting there for six days. No, no, they've
been sitting there two days, only two days. Yeah, okay, sorry,
I'll tell you that because no, okay, because I I
considered having a bite, and then I thought, you know
what if it's just like the other stuff, it's been
out for a while. Yeah, I put them there, and

(05:25):
I keep I keep sneaking them back into into his office,
and I think he was just thrown away first. And
then I started like mashing them into the keyboard a little,
and then he had to dig him out with his fingers.
And by the end of it, he's so covered with
the chocolate. He just gives into the temptation. There you go. Yeah,
but you know a lot of this, this idea of
like especially with chocolate things, things like chocolate. We've we've
discussed this before. It's something that our body wants and

(05:45):
our body needs. And in a simpler time it would
be harder to get that candy sugar rush. Now we
live in an age where you can pretty much eat
all the sugar you can possibly stand and uh, and
then our bodies have to pay the price for that.
So temptation is uh. We see it in other animals
as well, as we'll discuss. But there's there's something distinctly

(06:07):
human about so much of this idea of temptation and
willpower about all right, In a simple sense, our body
is wanting something that our mind knows we shouldn't have. Now,
we've discussed the body mind connection in previous episodes, so
I think we all know that it's a little more
complicated than that. We're not just this brain creature living
in this flesh body creature. If we look back at

(06:29):
some of the philosophy of willpower and choice, if you
look back at the words of Plato, Plato argued that
the human experience is one of constant struggle between the
intellect and the body, between rationality and desire. So along
those lines of truth, freedom is only available when willpower
unchanges from bodily emotional, instinctual slavery. So okay, well, I mean,

(06:53):
you know it's I think it's one of the things
that is the tradeoff of having um, you know, highly
complex exprain. Right, is that these are all these sorts
of things will present themselves as temptations to as humans,
probably more so than other species. Right. And what did
Oscar while to say about temptation? He said, and this
is from Roy and Gray, and this is the character

(07:14):
in that book, a hedonistic character that shows up says
the only way to get rid of temptation is to
yield to it, resist it, and your soul grows sick
with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.
So there's a bit of truth to that. It's interesting,
like the Platonic model and then this Oscar Wild model,
for lack of a better description, there's the idea that

(07:36):
will power is the victory of the mind over the body,
and it's a very it's a winnable thing if you're
smart enough and you're you have enough fortitude. And then
there's this Wild model where it's ultimately this hopeless battle.
Like you can think. You may think you're going to
defeat the chocolate. You may think you're gonna start going
to yoga or spin class every you know, three days
a week or whatever your your January first plan is.

(07:56):
But wait, by the end of January, you're gonna be
facing a different story. Now this is jumping ahead a
little bit about we're going to discuss, but it would
be interesting to look back at Klato's childhood and Oscar
Wild and see the amount of stability in each of
their childhood's and whether or not it was a good
predictor of their own ability to self control. So let's

(08:18):
talk about willpower across species, because this is interesting. Yes,
and as we as we mentioned, certainly humans have it
more complex than any other creature because we have this
this culture and these all these ideas about what we
need to do, and we're we're more self conscious in
a very real way. But we have performed experiments to

(08:40):
see if if willpower is exerted elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
So it turns out studies have shown that that dogs
can resist temptation. Chimpanzees can distract themselves from sweets with
other objects, which is particularly interesting because some people do that.
They try and just like, don't think about the chocolates
in the brake room. Instead, let's focus on work. Let's

(09:02):
buffle down, or let's listen to some music or I'm
you know, something to distract me from the fact that
the temptation is there. You don't want to go and
bring the chocolate to your desk because then it's going
to be even harder. Yeah, mentally, out of sight, out
of mind. And it's also been found that, like the dog,
dogs can resist temptation with a little extra glucose, and
we're gonna get into the glucose connection to all this
as well. But but that's again something we've touched on

(09:22):
when we've discussed a decision fatigue, the idea that you
can take some glucose and then that will give you
a boost that you need. Yeah, that's right, because again,
you've got a finite amount of mental resources and they
are often taxed when you are hungry and fatigued, and
so giving yourself a shot of glucose is a nice
way to bolster your self control. Yeah, I mean, I

(09:45):
keep thinking of a video game model for all of this.
You know, where you're playing a video game and there's
like maybe there's like a life meter that fills up
and depletes a little as you're injured, and then there's
maybe a stamina meter that depletes as your character runs
around in the game world, and ultimately a that's the
way it is in the real world. You have these
finite resources that you use throughout the day, be it

(10:05):
physical energy or this emotional intellectual energy, this ego, this
cognitive load, and different things will take a notch out
of it. So in the same way that your life
depletes every time a Goblin statue in the gut with
a sword. Every time you have to deal with a
really lofty decision or small decision, or just resisting the
chocolate that's in the brake room, it depletes your your

(10:28):
willpower meet just a little more. And if that thing
bottoms out, then you're eating chocolate. Well, and I thought
it was interesting too. Um. In the article that you
wrote how willpower Works, you talked about how they are
different parts of the brain that respond to willpower into temptation,
and there's a couple of different parts of the brain.
One is called the ventro medial prefrontal cortex and this

(10:49):
is just behind the forehead. What we see is that
when people are choosing between sweets and health food, for instance.
I believe this was a two thousand and nine Celtech
study that you talked about. Um, theo who held out
against temptation. We're processing in this venture medial prefrontal cortex,
but they were also processing in something called the Dorso

(11:09):
lateral prefrontal cortex. And it thought that this Dorset lateral
prefrontal cortex allows the venture medial prefrontal cortex to weigh
both taste and health benefits. At this very same time
as opposed to the test subjects who had low self control,
who were only making value judgments with the help of

(11:30):
the venture medial prefrontal cortex. So there's this idea that
people can differ with self control possibly because of this
greater use of the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. Now, of course,
we need more studies like this to really try to
figure out whether or not these people are have just
become more adept at exercising self control and as a

(11:50):
result they're using dorsal lateral more, or if they are
inherently more muscled up in that area. So let's talk
a little bit about what it wears down again the
think of the video game, think of the life meter
of the stamina meter, and now think of these two
other meters, cognitive load and ego depletion. So you have
cognitive capacity on one meter and then you have ego

(12:11):
on the other. First, we're gonna talk a little bit
about cognitive capacity and cognitive load. All right, Cognitive capacity
basically affects our ability to hold out against temptation. Uh,
it's essential and working memory, which we use when resisting temptation.
But also it's something we use when stay holding a
string of numbers in our heads. And this is this

(12:31):
is where it gets really fascinating. There was a study
from the University of Iowa, specifically Professor A. Bob A. Shift,
and he found that people task with remembering a two
digit number held out better against temptation than people remembering
a seven digit number when tempted with chocolate cake. So,
so again, there people are walking down the hall somebody

(12:52):
comes out and says, all right, this is the number
you need to remember. You remember the number twelve. You
you're remembering the number. You know seven, it would have
to be a million, wasn't it a million and something? Right?
And nine? One? Two? Yeah, that sounds good. You gotta
remember that. And then they walk a little further down
the hallway and then somebody comes out with a big

(13:13):
chocolate cake. You know, it's Cindy's birthday in the office.
Here have some cake. And then you have to continue.
And then at the end of the hallway, see if
you remember those numbers that were given to you. So
the idea here is that if if you distract the
brain with a more difficult task memorizing seven instead of two,
it becomes harder for the participant in the study to

(13:33):
make a healthy food choice, you're having to hold seven
numerals in your head. Your cognitive capacity is depleted enough
to wear that chocolate cake may just do you in.
Whereas if you're only having to remember too, then your
meter is less depleted and therefore you may be able
to take the punch, take the hit of resisting that
chocolate cake. So that's why I think ego depletion also
comes in because it's a nice sort of counterpart to this. Right,

(13:56):
We've talked about this before. Roy F. Baumeister, he's a
psychology us at Florida State University, and he's done quite
a bit of work on ego depletion. And here's a
pretty good example of how he proves its existence. He
had students sit down next to a plate of freshly
baked chocolate chip cookies. Okay, so imagine the smells wafting

(14:17):
into your nose. Some were allowed to snack away and
others were ordered to abstain from the cookies. And afterwards,
both groups were asked to complete difficult puzzles. So it
turns out that the students who had been forced to
resist the cookies had so depleted their reserves of self
control and trying to do that that when they were
faced with this task, this puzzle, they quickly threw in

(14:39):
the towel, whereas their cookie chomping counterparts were able to
conserve their willpower and work on that puzzle. So again,
what you're seeing here is the finite mental resources and
how to use them best. And this, you know, I
think this also gives me a lot of insight into
how I work. Like I find we have a fair

(15:01):
fairly nice teleworking policy at work, which means, you know,
we can work from home or from a coffee shop
or whatever. And I enjoy working from the actual house
a little bit, but I can't do it all the
time because there's just so many temptations I have to resist.
And they're not all like bad. It's not just like
should I drink alcohol at nine am? I mean there's
something like that, Or should I just sleep all day?

(15:23):
Not that kind of thing, but biscuit, isn't it. Well,
there's that there's like should I go check on the
cat and then and then in the afternoons when the
cat is running wild and and that's also competing for
my attention or you know, temptations to to walk around,
temptations to go ahead and have lunch a little early,
temptations to to go and turn on the TV for
a minute or something. You know, They're just all these
things that I could do, and I'm having to resist

(15:45):
all of them, and it kind of builds up. Um.
Where I put myself in a and say the workspace
here at work, or in a limited space like a
coffee shop, then I can focus more on the opposite.
When I'm at work, it's harder for me to concentrate
because there are people round and I would like to
talk to them, and so it takes more willpower for
me to bout down the hatches and really focus, Whereas

(16:07):
if I'm working from home, then I just turned up
the music, um, really loud, and then just sit there
and focus and blaze through. But again we're talking about
distractions here to say nothing about the Internet, of course,
I mean that's that, yeah, that comes with its own
set of rules, right, Um, all right, So how do
you bolster it right? How do you make willpower become

(16:29):
more central to what you're trying to accomplish. There's something
called closing the loop or the Zigarnic effect. Really interesting. Now,
for those of you who are sci fi fans and
you've cut the movie Looper, there's closing the loop in
that movie, which involves killing your future self when your
future self is sent back in time to your past self.

(16:51):
It's kind of complicated but also kind of cool. But
the idea is that there is a loop that is closed,
and that that just closes the book on you as
a time travel into wind hit Man, and so this
is a sort of similar thing. The idea is that
we create these these various open loops in our life,
and that The example that comes to mind and solely
to me, is that I'm telling somebody about a movie

(17:12):
or a book that I really dig, and I'm like, hey,
I'll bring in a copy of knowledge of borrow it.
And then if I don't do that, if I don't
bring in the copy of that book or that that movie,
or whatever it happens to be, then that's always on
my mind. I'm thinking, Oh, I was going to bring
in a copy of this novel for Matt to read,
and I forgot to bring it. And so that's the
first thing that enters my mind every time I see
or think of that person. Well, and I've got a

(17:34):
good example of my friend Maria. I finally wrote her back. Um,
but it's been a couple of months. She lives in Germany, moved,
so I don't have a chance to talk to her
as often two months to to email her. The reason
is because she writes this beautiful like eighteenth century missives
that are like very intelligent and thoughtful. Once I always
feel like I really need to give her something back
that email. This this email, although saying eighteen century missis

(18:01):
was no. No. But here's the thing. For the past
two months, nearly every day I thought, I've got to
write Maria, write Maria. And what we're talking about again
is my brain trying to close the loop, my unconscious
serving up thoughts to my conscious self to say, hey,
you need to do this. In the Zigarenic effect, this
closing the loop actually has its roots in the nineteen
twenties at the University of Germany. The reason it's called

(18:25):
the Zigarnic effect is because one of those students was
very intrigued by this experience she and how other students
had when they went to a restaurant and there was
a large group of them and the waiter took their order,
but never wrote anything down, and he delivered every single
order to every single person. He matched the order to
the face. Um. She went back later because she had

(18:46):
left something behind, or rather one of the students did,
and that waiter looked at her blankly and did not
recognize or did not know what group she was talking about,
had absolutely no memory. And she was amazed, and so
how could you so quickly forget me but have remembered
all the detail orders of this large group of people.

(19:07):
And he said, oh, well, once I you know, once
the order is delivered, I don't have a memory of
anything anymore that has to do with that or to
clear out that that bit of cognitive space. Yeah, so
bloomas Arnick, the student in her mentor said, okay, well,
I wonder if human memory makes a distinction between finished

(19:28):
and unfinished tasks. And so their research, as well as
decades of other pure research, resulted in what they called
this like arnic effect that says, yes, indeed, the unconscious
mind is like a small child kind of uh, you know,
sitting there and tugging at the sleeve of the adult,
the conscious saying, hey, you need to really pay attention
to this. And so the idea is that self control

(19:50):
comes into play when the nagging thought is met with
an action plan and you can then begin to close
the loop. So this is one of those things in
your own life. It's kind of you just have to
figure out the action plan, the the step to take
that will continue to close the loop. Because if you've
got a lot of loops open, you know that that

(20:11):
is first of all, I'm going to be depleting your
mental resources right right um. And second of all, you
have to have a very distinct action plan to try
to close it in order to take that action. Yeah,
I mean, it really drives home why checklist like checking
things off of on a like a daily checklist. It
can be such a satisfying experience to some people more

(20:33):
than others. But like my wife is someone who likes checklists,
so she's mentioned before how it gives her pleasure to
check things off because with each check you are closing
a loop. Like in doing out a bag, it's just
getting lighter and lighter as you finish up each little project.
But here's where I think it's really interesting. Even with
a checklist, you have to be super specific because what

(20:54):
we're talking about here is psychology right. So if you
write down on your check list, talk to Maria, right Maria,
or consult with Maria. That's not specific enough, email Maria,
or if you don't have her email address, get Maria's
email address. So you have to tell your brain very
specifically what to do or it wants to skip over
those things. There's a really interesting article about that in

(21:17):
UM Mental Floss this month that talks about this this
ability to try to close that loop. And they used
Drew Carey as an example because here, yeah, yeah, because
he actually sought out UM experts in this and wanted
to try to figure out how he could organize himself best. Huh. Well,
And I imagine Mental Floss was bringing this up because
of New Year's because of resolutions, because when and because

(21:39):
one of the things you everyone is really piping about
is that you need to make a specific resolution. Don't
say this is the year I get in shape. Well,
how are you going to get in shape? And then
you know, let's make some realistic, achievable goals towards that end,
not just I'm gonna go to the gym more, well,
how many times the weeks you canna go to the gym?
Or what are you gonna what's your plan? What are

(21:59):
you gonna try and do? Like, maybe the plan is
as simple as I'm going to go in this month
and get a health evaluation, or if you're a little
more advanced than that, you could say, well, I'm definitely
going to go to this spin class I've been going to,
but I'm gonna go three times a week, like I
know I should that kind of thing, right, Yeah, it's
kind of like that old maximum how do you eat
an elephant one bite at a time? I've never heard that. Yeah,

(22:22):
I like it because it's descriptive. It's just kind of
depressing to me. Yeah, and plus you're going to run
through the choice needs pretty fast and then you're just
gonna be eating like elephant elbow and gristle. And that's
snow fun snow to tail though it's pretty popular these days.
Um alright, so enough of food trends. Um, what's another

(22:44):
way to bolster it? Uh? Well, we talked about this
a little bit with um the animals distracting yourself from
the thing, and this actually has its roots in a
study called the Marshmallows Study, very famous study from the
nineteen sixties where psychologist Walter Mitchell devised and experiment using marshmallows, cookies,

(23:06):
and pretzel sticks to test four year old self control. Okay, well,
you know we're talking a lot about marshmallows and sweets now,
and I know this chocolate in the breaker, and so
before we get into that anymore, I feel like we
need to take a quick break and I need to
go chocolate. And then when we get back, we'll really
get going with this idea of the childhood mind, childhood

(23:28):
willpower versus the uh seemingly insurmountable temptation that is the marshmallow.
All right, we're back. So we were talking about marshmallows.
We're talking about children, were talking about temptation and willpower,
about the depletable resource that is our willpower, and all

(23:50):
the studies that have gone into it. That's right, little
fluffy marshmallows. Um. This is the thing that Walter Mitchell,
the psychologist in the nineteen sixties used to tempt kids
four year olds. He told the kids that they could
either eat one treat right away, or if they were
willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes,
they could have two treats when he returned. So this

(24:12):
is just classic short term payoff versus well, not even
long term payoff, but slightly less short term payoff. I
can either eat one delicious marshmallow now or I can
have two later. And this is a very simplistic model,
but it matches up so well with everything else we
do in our lives. It's like, can I have the
short term reward of not working out right now, or

(24:32):
can I have the long term reward of being in
better shape, the short term reward of eating as much
Chinese food as I can possibly stuff in my body,
or the long term reward of not being dead. It's
true because if you think this is way too simplistific
of an experiment, yes, just as you brought up, you know,
think about that example, your four year old self and
then you're forty year old self is met with the

(24:56):
same sort of challenges in a different form. Um He
found out, uh, the psychologist Walter Mitchell found out that
those who buckled after just thirty seconds didn't have the
same coping behavior as those kids who held out. And
these high self controllers used something called strategic allocation of attention.
In other words, they sang songs um, they untied and

(25:18):
retied their shoelaces, they covered their eyes, they played hide
and seek with the treats on the table. Um basically
anything to try to divert their attention from the thing
that they wanted. And when I think back to those
studies on animals in self control, the one about the
chimpanzees really stands out because they were essentially doing the
same thing. They had four adult chimpanzees. This is a

(25:41):
two thousand and seventh study from Georgia State University, and
what they did is they had a candy dispenser that
would um just flow candy for like thirty seconds unless
the chimpanzees put their hands in front of it that
would stop the flow. So they quickly learned that if
they reached for it, that would stop and they wouldn't
get as much candy. So with one group of the

(26:04):
chimps they gave they gave them um magazines and something
like rubber tubes and a toothbrush okay uh. And then
the other group they didn't give them anything. And what
they found is that the ones that were given these
what they called toys these magazines, would flip through the magazines,
look at the pictures, and by the way. Entertainment Weekly

(26:25):
was one of the magazines. Also some food and wine
circulars from Atlanta restaurants, So this is not entirely intriguing
stuff to a chimp, but nonetheless those are the ones
that would help hold out for something like longer, which
is pretty significant from six minutes to twelve minutes, and
trying to reach for that candy. Well, you know, again,

(26:47):
I guess just the idea that every time you even
glance at that slice of chocolate cake, you're depleting the
wheel power, Like it's just a little more willpower that
you're having to use not to go eat it. So
if you cannot look at the chocolate cake and it's
look at Entertainment Weekly, then all the better, unless you
happen to run across the full page at for well,
and then you're just hoast you might as well reach

(27:08):
for it. Um. So it just it brings up a
lot of interesting questions about whether or not self control
is something that is innate or is it something that
is in our environment. And again this marshmallow study has
even more um importance when you look at it in
terms of our environment, because in two thousand and twelve
researchers at the University of Rochester took this study and

(27:31):
they kind of turned it on its head, this Marshmallow
study by looking at the relationship to the reward in
the circumstances under which it was presented, and how that
could affect self controlling kids. And again in kids. It's
really important to do this with because we again we
begin to see that children exercising self control ages three
and four, we'll sort of predict how they're going to

(27:54):
react in their later years and we'll talk more about that. Um.
But I wanted to get sort of at the the
the fluff of the marshatflow study here. UM. What they
did is they had researchers bring out these trades of
I think it was just like crayons or something like
a jar of crayons, and they said, okay, kid, um,

(28:15):
I have like an awesome amount of crayons and markers
in the other room. But if you can just hang
on and not use these and wait until I get back,
you will get the awesome set of crayons markers. And
so for half of the kids they brought back the
awesome crowns markers, they got the reward because they sat
there and they waited. They sat there in didn't color,
didn't create art, and waited for better tools to be

(28:37):
brought to them exactly, and then they started doing it.
The other kids got punked. The researchers came back and said,
I couldn't find it. Okay, So what are they doing here?
They are setting up circumstances for this reliability or unreliability
with the researcher. There's a lesson here. One group is learning, Hey,
if you when adult tells you that he'll bring you here,
she'll bring you more markers if you don't use the

(28:59):
ones you have, listen to because we'll probably get more markers.
And the other team it's like you said, they're getting burned.
They're realizing, oh man, adults are awful. They did I
was supposed to get more. I could have been coloring
this whole time instead of holding out for markers. They're
gonna never kind of come. This is awful. Innostances shattered.
It's like Woody Allen kid, by the way, But this
inner dialogue, though I would say there's an important lesson there,

(29:20):
it's like, don't It's kind of like I'm going to
hold off on creating art. Until I'm really good at
it kind of a thing. But that's just me reading
too much, you know. It's like, no, you don't hold off.
Don't you have better tools? Work with the tools you have,
and then you can get better tools. But anyway, well,
here's where the marshmallow comes into play. Because now that
they've set up these circumstances, the researchers bring out the marshmallow, right,
and they're rolling out the basic, the classic marshmallow test.

(29:41):
Here's one marshmallow, eat it now, and that's great. But
if you can hold off eating this marshmallow, you'll get
two marshmallows and then you can eat those. Okay, So
the kids got screwed in the art project experiment. They
buckled after just three minutes while waiting for that second marshmallow,
because I already learned you can't trust these people. They're
not going to bring markers. They're probably not going to

(30:01):
bring me that second marshmallow. I might as well eat
this marshmallow now and then color a bunch of stuffy
limited number of markers. That's right. Wow, these kids are
I mean, they're they're angry. The second set of kids,
once that were rewarded and not punked. They waited for
twelve minutes, four times longer. Okay, And the video of
this is great because the kids are so like they

(30:22):
want that marshmallow. It's sitting right in front of them.
They're using their like sixty color sets that they've already won,
and they're like they're painting pictures of Marsha. Actually at
this point they've they've taken all that away, so it's
just the marshmallow that they're staring down and their little
feet are just going crazy on the ground and they're
just like their knees are going up and down and
they're trying not to eat it. They're turning it up
the side down, looking at it everything not to eat it.

(30:45):
But this is really important because, as the studies lead
author says, this is the last kids. She says, if
you are used to getting things taken away from you,
not waiting is the rational choice. And she said that
it occurred to her that the marshmallow tasking might be
correlated with something else that the child already knows, like
having a stable environment. Okay, So this is really important

(31:05):
because now it becomes this question of well, how much
does the environment have to do? How much does upbringing
have to do with as opposed to genetics, um, because
you know, someone like my husband has incredible self control,
and I've always thought about it in genetic terms, but
who knows. As a kid, maybe he could always know
that the reward was actually in sight, as opposed to

(31:28):
thinking out, well, I don't know what the carpet might
be pulled out from under me again. Or he's a Jedi,
because the way've described it sounds like he has like
Jedi like turn it off abilities. He does, he doesn't,
he doesn't understand why the people can't Vetian. Wasn't that
the thing? We're like, I've made this, this this choice,
I'm I'm not gonna eat me anymore. It's just just
gonna be vega that. And then we quit drinking like

(31:49):
seven months ago and for him and was like, whatever,
flip the switch. So okay. Then there's a question of heredity,
and now we don't have a lot of data on that.
There's some information from Edinburgh's university study that looked at
eight hundred sets of identical and non identical twins to
figure out how they differed, and they found that the

(32:11):
identical twins were twice as likely as non identical twins
to share the same personality traits, suggesting that DNA might
have had something to do with the way that they
go about their day. Lead researcher Professor Timothy Bates said
that the biggest factor they found with self control, and
there was a big genetic difference in people's ability to
restrain themselves and persist with things when they got difficult

(32:35):
and re out to challenges in a positive way. Now
that being said, um again, you can't just look solely
at genetics and say that that's the thing right there,
that's the reason why a person has some uh self
control or doesn't. And I wanted to bring this up
because there's a New York Times article called Genetics and
Crime and it talks about self control and genetics. And

(32:58):
Terry Moffatt, who's a heavioral scientists Duke University, says that
knowing something is inherited does not in any way tell
us anything about whether changing the environment will improve it.
For example, self control with a lot like height, it
varies widely. The human population is highly heritable, but if
effective interventions such as better nutrition is applied to the
whole population, that everyone gets taller than the last generation.

(33:21):
And I keep coming back to the whole mind body connection.
You know. You look at the platonic idea that it's
it's intellect versus the base demands of the body and uh.
And then we look at how glucose, you know, the
simple sugar that we find naturally in various plants. How
that energizes body and brain and gives us this extra
booster resolve. It's like the power up in the video game.
It's like, Oh, I'm about to be defeated about the

(33:42):
chocolate cake, and then I then I reach over here
and get this this glucose power up, and now I
can resist it a little more or be you know,
remain more focused on the task at hand. That kind
of thing. You fall into, this this trap though of
thinking of it in terms of like purely a body
uh type of situation. You end up reading that quote
from Moscow Wild and thinking, well, I guess he's right.

(34:04):
You know, there's no defeating the chocolate cake in the
long term. If you're locked in a room with it,
it's gonna wind up in your belly. But there is
an interesting study that we ran across. This is from
Stanford University. From Gregory and Walton and Carol Dweck, who
we're going to discuss a little more in a bed.
They looked at how belief system plays into it, and
they found that it did play a vital role in
how long willpower holds out against desserts and indicaence. So

(34:28):
what they found in their study was that you had
individuals who were very informed about how willpower supposedly works
and the end and very much on board with the
idea that there is a finite amount of it. They
did run out eventually and then they're just gonna have
to eat that cake. And then they also looked at
people who didn't believe this, that this wasn't part of
their view of the world and themselves that adhered to

(34:50):
an idea that that willpower was infinite, that there, that
it would never run out, that it could never run out,
you know. Um, And you can sort of draw various
examples from your own life about what what who fits
into what category, you know, but just think of, like
I guess, like a really positive person who's like, yeah,
I'm I'm gonna quit smoking and then they're they're done
with it, you know, or they think they're done with it.

(35:11):
That they believe that willpower is and maybe this is
some insight into the way her husband's mind. Maybe he
just doesn't see himself as having a finite amount of willpower.
What's fascinating here, and what the researchers found out is
that people who felt that the resolve was limitless were
able to press on, wearied but relentless against the chocolate

(35:32):
cake or what have you. So, so that's a little
little it's kind of like a mind of her body
situation there. It's interesting because Carol Dweck does she does
talk a lot about belief systems shaping kids to write. Um,
so when you think about a kid being labeled as
something right, as being smart or having a lot of willpower,

(35:53):
you know, what does that do to them psychologically? And
I wanted to bring up a study of one baby
is born in ninety two in a New Zealand town. Again,
Terry Moffatt talks about this, and she reports that the
less self control a child displayed at three years of age,
more likely he or she was to commit a crime
more than thirty years later. In fact, we're talking about

(36:15):
forty three percent of the children who scored in the
lowest fifth on self control were later convicted of a
crime versus of those who scored in the highest fifth.
Uh So that's when you begin to wonder, like, what
are the long term ramifications of this? Can it be gamed?
How much of this is psychological and um behavioral right

(36:38):
from from what you learn when you're growing up. And
I also wanted to say that on the flip side,
to those those kids who had a lot of self control,
they grew into adults with greater physical and mental health,
fewer substance abuse problems. That's that's no surprise. There fewer
criminal convictions that are savings behavior in financial security and um.

(36:58):
They say that these pattern held even after researchers controlled
for the children's socio economic status, homeland and general intelligence. Okay,
so put all that aside and then begin to think
about Carol d Wick and her ideas about self esteem
and what she calls the self esteem trap in education. Again,

(37:19):
this is this labeling a kid how self control. A
kid is smart. A kid is not smart because you
tell them when they have no self control, tell him
enough times, they're going to believe it. And then how
are you going to respond to the chocolate cake? It's
kind of like, well, I'm their chocolate cake. We both
know how this is gonna end. Let's go ahead and
do this now and then you eat. Yeah, And she
really she dwells more on the smart label because that's

(37:40):
something that has, you know, the self esteem movement has
been pretty strong since the nineteen seventies. In other words,
the education system said, we just need kids to have
better self esteem and then they feel better. But Carold,
we kind of scratched at it, and she said, m
I wonder if the effect of praise could actually have
inverse conclusions here another word, because the idea here is
if you tell a child that they're they're not smart enough,

(38:02):
that they all believe that they're not smart, so then
the work harder. Well, okay, well I shouldn't say that. Well,
the original idea is that if you tell them that
that they're not smart too much, they'll believe it. And
then there's this idea though that if you tell them
you're smart, you encourage them, then you'll you'll both of
them build them up. But then she's examining the question,
does this backfire after a point? Yes, because what's happening

(38:23):
here is that the kids who are labeled as smart
began to think that they are innately smart, that they
should be smart, that they don't really have to try. Yeah,
they don't have to exercise a lot of self control
or willpower in order to get something done. So what
happens is that they began to either pick the things
that are easy and not a challenge or um, they
began to think and or they began to think of

(38:44):
themselves as as failures and as posers. Right, and they
feel like they're going to get uncovered at any moment.
So what she's saying here is that it's empty praise.
It's praise like, hey, you're smart, you can do good,
you can do this, as opposed to sitting there and
saying you have to have the effort, you have to
have the self control, and you have to sit down
and you have to do this because and I won't

(39:07):
go into the specifics of this, because honestly, we could
do an entire episode on Just Carold wex work on
this one principle um. But over and over again, what
you see or those kids are failing and the kids
that are labeled as smart in fact, by age twelve,
if a kid gets called out in class, by a
teacher is given an empty compliment or empty praise, that

(39:31):
kid thinks that they're not doing well because they begin
to learn that if they're being um, if someone's just
giving them a bit of empty praise, they're being encouraged
because they're not doing well. Yeah, they're just being patronized like, oh,
you're you're doing so well, and that doesn't work. You
see right through that exactly. So this all ties back
to self control because when we're talking about uh, self esteem,

(39:53):
you get self esteem by completing something right, by exercising
self control and then seeing this challenge that you've met,
that's where self esteem comes into play. So it's it's
pretty interesting because there are a lot of educators now
who are starting to say that it's less about i Q,
it's less about being smart or not being smart. It's
more about the effort in the character. Well, hopefully all

(40:14):
of this we've discussed it. It's sort of I feel
like it may be colors in. You know, again, this
idea of the mind body connection, that we're not just
this brain, we're not just this body, but with this
this interconnected system, and so you can see willpower and temptation,
you can see the battle on both sides. You can see,
you can see where where it happens in the mind,
you can see where it is very much an affair
of the body, and some of the things we can

(40:35):
do to to to make it work in our in
our favor. So certainly, if you're dealing with temptations, uh,
and you're trying to make your resolutions work, limit your
exposure to the things that are tempting you, such as
the chocolates in the brake room, what have you. And
make your your goals achievable and understandable and simple enough
that you can actually check them off the list. Yeah,

(40:58):
and just have a certain amount of under standing of
the limitations of willpower. But also you have to be
careful not to fall back on it. You don't want
to do whatever extent you can fool yourself into thinking
willpower is not a depleatable resource. That's that's great, because
if you're just going like, oh, well, willpower is gonna
run off at three pm, And that's kind of like
making an appointment in your outlook calendar to eat the
chocolate cake at three pm, because you're giving yourself an out,

(41:19):
You're giving yourself an excuse so it's it's tricky, it's complex,
but hopefully everyone has a little more understanding about how
it works now. Yeah. Yeah, And if if all those
things failed, then just imagine those chimps thumbing through entertainment
weekly doing a better job than you are at not
reaching for that chocolate cake. Or you know, if if
you're dealing with chocolate cake at work, collect pennies off

(41:43):
the ground and nickels, you know, dirty change from the ground,
bring them to work in a bag and anytime you're
the chocolate cake is tempting you in the breaker and
just like stick one of those coins into it, and
then you're like, then you've diseased it and you don't
have to worry about eating it. I mean, you might
become a pariah with your co workers, but hey, just
go over the top. Are just go ahead and squirt
some catchup all over that cake. Yeah, or I guess

(42:05):
you could throw it away. I mean, don't you get
into the tricky area of break room etiquette. But maybe
that's the thing to do, you know, because it things
like it's like a weapon in there. Somebody has has
dropped a bomb in the break room chocolate e delicious
bomb and maybe you should just dispose of it. Let
me ask you. You're right, You're right. I was gonna say,
I was just thinking about a robot coming in, and
in fact, Arnie could do that our robot. What if

(42:27):
you had a delicious pake, good like a chocolate cake,
but you wrote something on it like butt cake or
cloe wake a cake? Do you think that that would
prevent people for meeting it? Like? What term would you
have to put on there in order for someone not
to eat it? This would I smell a video project here?
We could We could pull this off at work, all right?
What would you have to ride on a cake? You
could have three cakes? We could That could be the

(42:48):
experiment and they may Actually if someone else wants to
try this before we get around to it, go for it.
Like what would happen if you brought in three cakes
and on one you wrote something yeah, you know, just
sort of normal, like happy birthdays, easy or something like that,
and then in the next one you wrote something a
little little gross, and then on the third when you
wrote something really gross. What would those cakes look like

(43:08):
at the end of the day, even though they're all
the same cake? I don't know. We need to find out. Yeah,
all right, Well, speaking of Arnie, let's call him over
and let's do a few quick listener mails. All right,
This one comes to us from our listener Wesley in
New York. Wesley says, Hey, guys, I just listened to
your life hacking episode and wanted to share another life

(43:30):
hack with you that I learned from a Ted talk.
Matt Killingsworth gave a Ted talk about how we are
less happy when our minds are wandering than when we
are living in the moment. Since watching we talk, I've
noticed that many of the times that I am feeling
stressed out or unhappy, it is because I'm thinking about
things other than what is going on around me at
that moment. Simply reminding myself to keep focused on the

(43:51):
moment and not let my mind wander has noticeably improved
my quality of life. Um, I think that that rings
completely true with the number of things we've talked about
on this podcast. You know, to whatever extent you can
live in the moment, not to say you don't think
about the past and you don't plan for the future,
but to whatever extent you can put your mind in
the present and not you know, worrying about the past

(44:12):
and fretting about the future. Then all the better. As
Buck Brennaman from the documentary Buck says, you cannot be
in two places at one time, right exactly, not dwell
in the past. Oh, I should also mention too, since
we were talking about that for gaming things for New
Year's and posture. Amy Cutty's talk on that, she had
mentioned that the reason why she was interested in that

(44:32):
is body postures because NBA female students slightly underperformed um
concerning their male counterparts. But when I failed to explain
in that is that the reason they were underperforming is
because a large part of their grade was dependent on
the class participation. And so what she was saying is
if you change their posture, could you get them to

(44:53):
be more demonstrative? Could you get them to feel more
confident in order to speak out? So I missed the
talking about that specifically, and I wanted to mention that. Cool.
And just on another quick note about some feedback on
episodes we did those two episodes on shamanism and science
and psychedelics, and listener Cathy wrote in just wanted to

(45:13):
to underline the fact that not every shaman is into psychedelics.
There are certainly other ways to reach some of these
mental spaces that we discussed in these in those episodes,
without the use of psychedelic substances, through the use of meditation,
to the use of yoga, through the use of music,
or his Cathy points out drumming. Uh so uh. You know,

(45:34):
as as a side note, we should stress that yes,
there are other means of reaching those those places, those
places in the mind. All right, and let's look at
one last listener mail before we close the bag here.
This one comes to us from Richard, and Richard is
responding to our nutmeg episode, which recently published. Richard says, Hi,
I'm Dutch Canadian. H it ain't much without the Dutch

(45:55):
uh l o L. I love nutmeg. I use it
in drinks, coffee and Hamburger. I mixed ground beef with
ground pork. I put in salt pepper in a generous amount,
not too much because it becomes too sweet. Of nutmeg.
Nutmeg adds a delicious flavor to Burger's kind of sweet,
kind of spicy, but not really brings out the burger flavor.
Love it been using nutmeg all my life. Great and

(46:15):
egg nog too. Happy holiday? Uh this This was of
course interesting because I we mentioned the history of nutmeg
and how fond of it the Dutch are even to
this day. So I was curious if we had any
Dutch listeners or listeners of Dutch descent what their thoughts
are on And sure enough, here's a gentleman of Dutch
descent who loves himself some nutmex So that was that

(46:36):
was excellent to hear about. Plus gave us a nice
little quote there. Yeah, alright, Well, if anyone else thought
there would like to reach out to us and share
your thoughts on willpower, temptation, nutmeg, what have you. You
can find us on Facebook and you can find us
on tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind on
both of those. On Twitter, we go by the handle
blow the Mind and uh yeah, you can check us

(46:58):
out there and you can and always droppes a line
at blur the Mind at discovery dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff
Works dot com