Ego Depletion Depletion
Thursday, March 10, 2016 at 19:03 This article by Daniel Reeves is re-blogged from The Beeminder Blog with his permission as I believe it has considerable implications for time management.
The big news in psychology this week is that Baumeister’s Ego Depletion model is bunk. At least it has failed to replicate.
I’m trying not to gloat too much but I’ve been pooh-poohing Ego Depletion for years. My take has been, based on the theory of hyperbolic discounting, that willpower is an illusion — a manifestation of the conflict between desires at different timescales. Which is why commitment devices, by changing your incentives, route around the problem entirely. Hooray Beeminder and friends! And hooray for economist Robert Strotz and psychologist George Ainslie who figured this all out between 1955 and 1975 or so.
Actually I really can’t gloat too much because I was far from the first to balk at Baumeister’s model. In fact, it wasn’t until Carol Dweck’s challenge that I publicly expressed my skepticism. Then Nick Winter wrote a book, The Motivation Hacker, the thesis of which is basically that willpower is an unlimited resource.
More recently, Slate Star Codex reviewed Baumeister’s book, which is surprisingly light on Ego Depletion theory, other than to take it as a background fact. Slate Star Codex expressed skepticism, and even pointed out another replication failure for Ego Depletion from 2014, but did agree with the premise that mental willpower is depletable like physical willpower is. With the right inducement you may be able to eke out another mile of running or another hour of studying but in both cases the fatigue is real.
My counterargument is that with physical endurance you approach a physical limit asymptotically. The feeling that you can always eke out more with the right inducement is an illusion. Eventually one more straw will in fact break a camel’s back. With mental willpower it’s different. With the right inducement (say, continued employment) you can exert superhuman willpower, like waking up early and going to work every day for years or decades. Which is to say that with the right incentives, willpower doesn’t even need to be invoked. You can route around it and find creative ways to induce yourself to do what you really want to do.
Since I’ve now segued elegantly back to Beeminder, the best way to use such a commitment device, at least initially, is not to probe the hard limits of willpower but to fix egregious instances of akrasia — to do a bit more than the bupkes you’d do if left to your own devices. You can then gradually dial up the steepness of your graph, but stop before feeling overwhelmed by stress and anxiety.
In other words, make a measurable improvement well below the point that the limits of willpower are even a question (if you don’t think of it as routing around willpower altogether). Some people — like the productivity-ueber-alles types who try polyphasic sleep and whatnot — thrive on adding stress and Beeminder can accommodate that. But using it in moderation can reduce stress and that depleted ego feeling, like by getting you to spread your studying out over a semester instead of cramming for exams, or by making you pay attention to your Fitbit just enough to get in 10k steps a day, or getting yourself to bed on time instead of staying up until 6am writing a blog post.
PS: Discussion of Ego Depletion’s current replication crisis, along with practical implications, is ongoing in the Beeminder forum.
Reader Comments (27)
1. A big finding in psychology is that "willpower is like a muscle". For example, exerting willpower to not eat pie for breakfast will "deplete your ego" and make it harder to resist watching youtube videos instead of working in the afternoon. That spawned lots of advice about picking your willpower battles in the course of a day. The willpower-as-muscle analogy also led to advice about building up the strength of your willpower by exercising it.
All that advice was based on a lie. The evidence for it now appears to be bogus.
2. This is a massively big deal for the whole field of psychology because Ego Depletion was a very well-established result -- dozens of studies all agreeing -- and if it's wrong then can we really believe any results from the psychology literature? This is is psychology's replication crisis and to the field's credit they're taking it dead seriously, like by launching the Reproducibility Project.
3. How does willpower actually work? My opinion is that there's no such thing as willpower, just responding to different incentives. You want this whole pie in your body right now, and also you want to be two sizes smaller by next summer. Conflicting preferences are normally no big deal. You just, y'know, weigh them, make your tradeoffs, and reach a decision. But when the preferences apply at different timescales (pie now, thinner later) humans suffer from a massive irrationality which philosophers call akrasia and economists call dynamic inconsistency and normal people call ... being stupidly short-sighted, or in the case of time management: procrastination.
4. Commitment devices are a way to change your own incentives so that willpower is a non-issue. They make your short term and long-term incentives line up. There are many less drastic things you can do as well.
5. To the extent that you still want to think in terms of willpower, don't try to jump straight to superhuman feats of strength. Start with fixing the egregious failures. Maybe pick a hobby that you've spent zero time on for weeks. It seems like you've been "too busy" but you know that's false because you've spent non-zero time on many things of less value to you. So beemind spending at least half an hour a week on the hobby.
How was that?
Thanks!
Tom
Or dive in to the list of all the current commitment device apps that we know of: http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors
Or here's a definition of commitment devices and a bunch of synonyms and related terms:
http://blog.beeminder.com/synonyms
Carol Dweck's comments don't support the idea that Dr. Baumeister's conclusions were 'a lie' because she suggests that his results depend on specific circumstances, not that they were faked or the result of lazy science.
Thanks!
Tom
@Tom, thanks for the kind words! A commitment device works by taking away tempting choices or making them more costly, or making the smart long-term choices less costly. Examples of simple commitment devices include keeping candy out of the house or buying a gym membership or going somewhere without internet access (or implementing Mark's systems on paper!). You're pairing the immediate temptation with an immediate cost (having to go out to buy candy) or making the right choice more frictionless (gym is a sunk cost so it's like it's free now).
Harder core commitment devices set you up for immediate pain with the otherwise tempting choice. Like in my example of beeminding half an hour a week of a neglected hobby, every day Beeminder tells you the bare minimum you have to do to stay on track that day to keep your average to half an hour a week. If you don't do it, you'll be charged money. Being lazy is now costly -- right now, not just in the nebulous future -- so you don't be lazy.
I've been clear that I'm a cofounder of Beeminder, right? So take that part with a grain of salt, but there's lots of research backing this kind of thing up. Not psychology research either. (Oh snap) Like this study on smoking cessation in the New England Journal of Medicine: http://blog.beeminder.com/smoking/
(You will only know what I'm talking about if you have read the whole of the Slate Star Codex which article Danny references AND followed the links. The question is whether you will have done that because of your innate ability or because of your belief in hard work).
But I'm not actually taking the hard line that willpower is constant. Maybe hyperbolic discounting gets noticeably more or less severe depending on your level of mental fatigue.
Actually, let's define willpower as overcoming akrasia by pure introspection. If we agree on that definition then I have 2 different claims:
1. Willpower isn't any more depletable than, say, ability to do mental arithmetic.
2. If you align your short and long term preferences then no akrasia and no need for willpower.
I'm not that wedded to #1. Again, I think your donuts/dessert example is more elegantly explained by a simple reassessment of priorities in light of your hard day. But disagreements on #1 may be hair-splitting.
My big thing is that it's possible to route around willpower altogether.
To invoke Occam's razor again, this doesn't need to bring in depleted willpower or depleted ego or conflicting value systems or even reassssment of priorities.
If, later when one isn't so tired and can address the situation more consciously, one decides to do something to change one's habits (or, on the other hand, decides NOT to do so), then perhaps this is the point at which you can claim someone is making value judgements or setting priorities.
<< So when I'm tired, I tend (even more than usual) to follow the path of least resistance. And the path of least resistance is whatever you have habitualized yourself to do in such situations. >>
An alternative explanation (which would certainly apply to me) is that one tends to have more stable routines in the morning.
And I completely agree it's possible to route around it using positive and/or negative incentives.
If I were going to bet I'd say research will eventually show there are good, but not perfect, similarities between a physical muscle and willpower. It is (still) a good analogy, one that helps us understand willpower's limitations and the need to route around it.
Well, here's a question.
If we have no willpower, then presumably we will follow the path of least resistance at all times. This will of course vary enormously in where it leads us. We may follow the path of least resistance by failing to get up in the morning, or by binge eating chocolate cake. On the other hand In the Army getting out of our trench and facing almost certain death by charging the enemy may be the path of least resistance for all sorts of reasons.
However if we decide that we want to get up in the morning and don't want to binge on chocolate cake we can, as Danny puts it, "route around willpower altogether".
One way of doing this is to set up a Beeminder goal.
My question is: "Does it take willpower to set up a Beeminder goal?" (I'm talking about the actual setting up process for the goal, not the carrying out of it).
"My question is: "Does it take willpower to set up a Beeminder goal?" (I'm talking about the actual setting up process for the goal, not the carrying out of it)."
Without a personally compelling incentive experienceable in the short-term, yes. It takes "willpower". With a personally compelling incentive experienceable in the short-term, no.
That may be Beeminder's Achilles heel. I think it's similar to starting up any new productivity system, or making a new year's resolution or whatnot. We often have these little bursts of motivation and the hard part is the follow through. So if you can seize on your next motivation burst to get a Beeminder goal set up then -- if Beeminder works as advertised (and please, please talk to me if you feel it doesn't!) -- the follow-through will be in the bag.
When you are tired, many of your mental abilities take a back seat. Why hypothesize a pseudo-scientific entity like “ego” that is somehow depleted to account for willpower? And then pretend that this is somehow relevant to willpower and, as a result, willpower is like a muscle? Besides what is willpower anyway? If I suddenly quit smoking one day but constantly struggle with my decision to quit, do I have willpower? If I quit and have no desire to smoke anymore because I see how harmful it is, do I have willpower or is it some other cognitive process?
The exchange between Daniel and Seraphim is similar to what went through my mind when I first read Willpower. When I heard that “ego energy depletion” theory was debunked, I wasn’t surprised. I just wondered why it took this long.
Yes, it might be more about waking my body and mind rather than turning on my discipline.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/failed-replication-bargh-psychology-study-doyen
<< Makes you wonder which psychological experiments we can trust. >>
And not just psychological ones either:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis