willpower is real
Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 2:51 pm
Choice, active response, self-regulation, and other volition may all draw on a common inner resource.
In Experiment 1, people who forced themselves to eat radishes instead of tempting chocolates
subsequently quit faster on unsolvable puzzles than people who had not had to exert self-control
over eating. In Experiment 2, making a meaningful personal choice to perform attitude-relevant
behavior caused a similar decrement in persistence. In Experiment 3, suppressing emotion led to a
subsequent drop in performance of solvable anagrams. In Experiment 4, an initial task requiring
high self-regulation made people more passive (i.e., more prone to favor the passive-response option).
These results suggest that the self's capacity for active volition is limited and that a range of
seemingly different, unrelated acts share a common resource.
In Experiment 1, people who forced themselves to eat radishes instead of tempting chocolates
subsequently quit faster on unsolvable puzzles than people who had not had to exert self-control
over eating. In Experiment 2, making a meaningful personal choice to perform attitude-relevant
behavior caused a similar decrement in persistence. In Experiment 3, suppressing emotion led to a
subsequent drop in performance of solvable anagrams. In Experiment 4, an initial task requiring
high self-regulation made people more passive (i.e., more prone to favor the passive-response option).
These results suggest that the self's capacity for active volition is limited and that a range of
seemingly different, unrelated acts share a common resource.