Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

To our children, Athena and Luke

Table of Contents SELECTED TITLES ALSO BY ROY F. BAUMEISTER Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Introduction Chapter 1. - IS WILLPOWER MORE THAN A METAPHOR?

However you define success—a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions—it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities. When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict “positive outcomes” in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control. So far researchers still haven’t learned how to permanently increase intelligence. But they have discovered, or at least rediscovered, how to improve self-control. Hence this book. We think that research into willpower and self-control is psychology’s best hope for contributing to human welfare. Willpower lets us change ourselves and our society in small and large ways. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.” The Victorian notion of willpower would later fall out of favor, with some twentieth-century

They’ve come to realize that most major problems, personal and social, center on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger.

feel overwhelmed because there are more temptations than ever. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant through the click of a mouse or a phone. You can put off any job by checking e-mail or Facebook, surfing gossip sites, or playing a video game. A typical computer user checks out more than three dozen Web sites a day. You can do enough damage in a ten-minute online shopping spree to wreck your budget for the rest of the year. Temptations never cease. We often think of willpower as an extraordinary force to be summoned to deal with emergencies, but that’s not what Baumeister and his colleagues found when they recently monitored a group of more than two hundred men and women in central Germany. These Germans wore beepers that went off at random intervals seven times a day, prompting them to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or had recently felt such a desire. The painstaking study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann, collected more than ten thousand momentary reports from morning until midnight.

The Decline of the Will Whether you survey the annals of academe or the self-help books at the airport, it’s clear that the nineteenth-century concept of “character building” has been out of fashion for quite a while. The fascination with willpower ebbed in

Whether you survey the annals of academe or the self-help books at the airport, it’s clear

that the nineteenth-century concept of “character building” has been out of fashion for quite a while. The fascination with willpower ebbed in the twentieth century partly in reaction to the Victorians’ excesses, and partly due to economic changes and the world wars. The prolonged bloodshed of World War I seemed a consequence of too many stubborn gentlemen following their “duty” to senseless deaths. Intellectuals preached a more relaxed view of life in America and much of Western Europe—but not, unfortunately, in Germany, where they developed a “psychology of will” to guide their country during its bleak recovery from the war. That theme would be embraced by the Nazis, whose rally in 1934 was featured in Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will. The Nazi concept of mass obedience to a sociopath was hardly the Victorian concept of personal moral strength, but the distinction was lost. If the ...

The decline of will didn’t seem like such a bad thing, and after the war there were other forces weakening it. As technology made goods cheaper and suburbanites richer, stimulating consumer demand became v...

IS WILLPOWER MORE THAN A METAPHOR? Sometimes we are devils to ourselves When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming on their changeful potency.

WHERE DOES THE POWER IN WILLPOWER COME FROM? Whether or not ingestion of food stuffs with preservatives and sugar in high content

I have terrible PMS, so I just went a little crazy. —Actress Melanie Griffith, explaining why she had filed for divorce from Don Johnson only to immediately withdraw it If willpower isn’t just a metaphor, if there is

In Mexico, married men are officially granted one day of liberty from their obligations on what’s called El Dia del Marido Oprimido—the day of the oppressed husband. On the eve of Lent, even the sternest Anglo-Saxon churchgoers are in a forgiving mood. They call it Shrove Tuesday, derived from the verb shrive, which means “to receive absolution for sins.” It’s all rather confusing from a theological standpoint.

RAISING STRONG CHILDREN: SELF-ESTEEM VERSUS SELF-CONTROL You’re a superstar no matter who you are or where you come from—and