The Problem of Artificial Willpower: Why We Should Be Wary of Using Drugs to Make Us Enjoy What We D

For more than 15 years, psychologists believed the answer to that question was clearly yes. Indeed, a whole line of research, based on a seminal study published in 1998, suggested that not only is human willpower a depletable resource, but it's also drawn from a singular source in the brain. Hold back from scarfing down a chocolate chip cookie, and you'll be less persistent at logic puzzles. Refrain from expressing your emotions, and math problems will seem so much more painful.

The Problem of Artificial Willpower

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"Self-control is an important construct within psychology," said Martin Hagger, a psychologist at Curtin University in Australia. "I just think the way in which it's been tested, and this paradigm we've been using, is somewhat limited and therefore causes problems."

Prior to that finding, ego depletion seemed on relatively steady ground. The original study, led by psychologist Roy Baumeister, who was then a researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, tackled the question in multiple ways. First, participants had to do a task involving willpower (eating radishes instead of cookies, making a persuasive speech that ran counter to their own beliefs or suppressing their emotions during a clip of the film "Terms of Endearment"). Then, participants had to do an unrelated but also challenging task, like working on unsolvable puzzles or unscrambling words.

Again and again, Baumeister and colleagues found that exerting willpower in one domain seemed to exhaust it, leaving no willpower available for tasks in other domains. [10 Things You Didn't Know About You]

Other researchers took the idea further. For example, one line of work suggested that the limited resource being depleted was glucose, the brain's fuel. A 2012 study, headed up by Hagger, found that even just swishing a sugary drink around in one's mouth seemed to give people more willpower to perform feats of physical strength or tedious tasks. The sugary taste, it seemed, was fooling the brain into thinking it had more fuel.

The researchers used a statistical method to adjust for small studies that showed very large effects for willpower depletion. Studies with small sample sizes have a lot of variability, Hagger told Live Science. Thirty or so people aren't very representative of all of humanity, after all. Thus, in studies with small samples, researchers expect to get some false positives, experiments that suggest that the effect you're looking for is real, when it in fact doesn't exist. As sample sizes get larger and thus more like the real population, the false-positive problem should decrease.

The meta-analysis worried Hagger and his colleagues, so they launched their multinational replication attempt. They used simple computer-based tasks that could easily transfer from lab to lab without language or cultural differences causing problems.

The tide is turning against the notion of willpower as depletable in other ways, too. A meta-analysis published in July in the journal Psychological Science examined the question of whether glucose limits willpower. Queen Mary University of London's Osman and her colleagues used a new statistical method called p-curve analysis to re-examine studies in the field. In statistics, a p-value is the likelihood that a finding occurred by chance. Most of the time, psychologists consider findings to be significant if the p-value is less than 0.05, meaning there's a 95 percent chance the finding is real and a 5 percent chance it's a fluke.

Osman and her team plotted out the p-values of several previous studies of glucose and willpower, and found that the distribution of these values was flat, rather than skewed toward smaller p-values, as they would be if the effect was real. In other words, the published findings linking glucose to strength of will were likely just showing things that happened by chance.

The crumbling of the science of willpower doesn't mean that psychologists have been dishonest or unscrupulous, Hagger said. Rather, a lot of small problems in the way research is conducted and published can add up to piles of data that don't mean much, he said. [11 Surprising Facts About Placebos]

Unlikely as this may sound, it illustrates a reasonable possibility: drugs like caffeine can positively alter how we experience what we are doing. Taken consistently, they might help us tolerate a long-term circumstance by regularly inducing an artificial sense of interest in what we would otherwise find uninteresting. Absent such a drug-induced interest, we may find ourselves more disposed to alter the course our lives are taking.

Today, thanks to science, our views and our responses to addiction and the broader spectrum of substance use disorders have changed dramatically. Groundbreaking discoveries about the brain have revolutionized our understanding of compulsive drug use, enabling us to respond effectively to the problem.

On the basis of this neural framework, we propose that willpower emerges from the dynamic interaction of two separate, but interacting, neural systems: a reactive system, in which the amygdala is a critical neural structure involved in triggering the affective/emotional signals of immediate outcomes, and a reflective system, in which the VMPC is a critical neural structure involved in triggering the affective/emotional signals of long-term outcomes (Figure 1).

Impairments in decision-making are evident in addicts, regardless of the type of drug they abuse, which suggests that poor decision-making may relate to addiction in general, rather than the effects of one specific type of drug. Alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, opioid, and methamphetamine abusers show impairments in decision-making on a variety of tasks.2,5,6,23 Although the differences in cognitive impairments brought on by the use of different drugs remains elusive, we have obtained preliminary evidence suggesting that chronic use of methamphetamine may be more harmful to decision-making than the use of other drugs.24 Direct comparison of the decision-making impairments in addicts on the IGT versus patients with VMPC damage showed that a significantly high proportion of addicts (63% vs. 27% of normal controls) performed within the range of VMPC patients, whereas the rest performed within the range of the majority of normal controls.3 Further characterization of these decision-making deficits, using skin conductance response (SCR) measures as indices of affective states during performance of the task, showed that this small minority of addicts (the 37% of addicts who performed normally) matched normal controls in all respects. However, the remainder of the addicts (the 63% who performed abnormally) had two profiles: one subgroup matched the VMPC patients in all respects (that is, they had abnormal SCRs when they pondered risky decisions), but another subgroup did not match the VMPC patients. This pattern of abnormal physiological responses when making risky decisions in addicts was also obtained with the Cambridge Gamble Task.25 A minority of normal controls performed like addicts and VMPC patients on the IGT, and with additional SCR measures, some of them matched the profile of VMPC patients, and some healthy participants were more like the addicts who did not match the VMPC patients.2,3 These studies suggest that decision-making deficits in addicts, and surprisingly, in some normal controls, are not uniform across all individuals. Our view is that attention to individual, as opposed to group, differences in these decision-making deficits is the key to understanding the nature of the addiction problem, its prognosis, and possible treatment. However, decision-making is not the only mechanism by which the reflective system exerts control over the impulsive system. There may be more than one mechanism for this control.

The most powerful force of human behavior is willpower. When managers learn to activate willpower, or volition, in themselves and others, companies reap the benefits of purposeful action taking and see more projects completed.

Afterward, these participants showed significantly less persistence to complete a challenging puzzle than the participants who could eat the cookies. The big idea from that experiment was that when you expend your willpower on one thing, you have less left to take on another.

So he and his advisor started questioning the idea of willpower fuel itself in 2010 by running a meta-analysis of all studies on ego-depletion. After conducting the study he and his advisor found a significant publication bias."

This analysis led many other researchers in the field to challenge the whole concept of ego-depletion, or at least its relative impact on our willpower. This led to the latest study in which they tried replicating all of the ego-depletion experiments with no significant results.

The science today indicates that factors like finding your purpose, having the proper perspective, and breaking your huge tasks into small, manageable chunks are far more important to strengthening your willpower and reaching your goals. [5]

When I learned that I was wrong about willpower, I wanted to ignore it, discredit it, and deny it. But being wrong about your ideas in life is inevitable. Your ideas are a reflection of your understanding, not your character.

The adoption of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer on September 16, 1987 marked a turning point in environmental history. It also showed that when science and political willpower join forces, the results can change the world.

Another problem we have to contend with is the tendency for the dopamine release triggered by the promise of one type of reward to make us more likely to pursue others. For example, when you look at erotic images, you may be more likely to make risky financial decisions, and if you dream about striking it rich, food can suddenly become very appetizing.

Resisting sweets, fighting emotional impulses, keeping distractions at bay, compelling yourself to do difficult tasks, or even making trivial purchase decisions all seem to pull from the same willpower reserve. 2ff7e9595c