How can radishes and cookies help us better understand willpower and decision-making?
September 1
Subject: Willpower/Ego Depletion - Radishes and Cookies
Event: Publication of Roy F. Baumeister’s book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, 2011.
The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will. -Vince Lombardi
On September 1, 2011, psychologist Roy F. Baumeister released his book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University performed a classic study on willpower, which came to be known as “The Radish and Cookie Experiment.” All the subjects in the experiment were told that they were being tested on taste perception. To ensure that each participant arrived with an empty stomach, they were asked to skip a meal prior to the experiment.
As participants entered the room, they smelled the aroma of freshly baked cookies. On a table in front of them, they found two plates: one of cookies and one of white radishes. Half of the study participants were designated as “radish eaters,” which meant that although they could see and smell the cookies, they were limited to only eating radishes. The other half of the participants were designated as the “cookie-eaters” and were allowed only cookies.
In the second phase of the experiment, all subjects participated in a puzzle-solving activity. They were told that they could take as much time as they wanted to solve the puzzles; however, what they were not told is that the puzzles were impossible to solve. The researchers then carefully recorded how much time the puzzle solvers worked before giving up.
While the cookie-eaters spent an average of 19 minutes working on the puzzles, the radish-eaters lasted an average of just 8 minutes.
The conclusion that Beumesiter drew from this study is that the radish eaters gave up sooner than the cookie eaters because of what he called ego depletion (AKA decision fatigue). According to this theory, willpower is a limited resource. The radish-eaters, for example, used up their reserve of mental energy resisting the tempting cookies. This reduced their powers of self-control and resulted in their giving up so much sooner than the cookie-eaters, who maintained their stores of mental energy (1).
Reporting on the study in The Atlantic magazine, writer Hans Villarica said,
In the psychology world, the key finding of this seemingly silly study was a breakthrough: self-control is a general strength that's used across different sorts of tasks -- and it could be depleted. This proved that self-regulation is not a skill to be mastered or a rote function that can be performed with little consequence. It's like using a muscle: After exercising it, it loses its strength, gets fatigued, and becomes ineffectual, at least in the short-term. (2)
Baumeister’s study provides new insight into metacognition - our ability to think about our own thinking. If we have been exerting mental effort in making decisions, problem-solving, or delaying gratification, we should understand that ego depletion will reduce our ability to efficiently take on the next challenge we’re faced with. This is why some famous decision makers such as Steve Jobs and Barack Obama were known to wear basically the same outfit every day. They realized that making decisions -- even mundane decisions about what to wear or what to eat -- sapped their mental capacity, so they consciously made an effort to reduce the number of decisions they needed to make each day.
Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: What is ego depletion, and how does the contrast between radishes and cookies in the experiment help us understand its effects?
Challenge - How to Just Do It: Write a public service announcement (PSA) that gives the audience a tip on how to increase willpower. We all face the daily struggle of getting ourselves to do what we need or should do, instead of what we want to do. What is a specific tip that will help your audience delay gratification, fight procrastination, and increase motivation?
Also On This Day:
-September 1, 1928: Author Robert M. Pirsig was born on this day. He received 121 rejections for his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig persevered. The book he wrote in 1968 about a motorcycle trip that he and his son took from Minnesota to San Francisco was finally published in 1974. Not only was the book published it achieved cult status, selling more than five million copies. Typical of someone with an indefatigable spirit, Pirsig reframed his challenges as opportunities to learn, saying, “If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.”
-September 1, 1939: It is said that the first casualty of war is the truth, which is especially true in the case of World War II. The six-year war began on this day under false pretenses when Germany invaded Poland. As justification for the invasion, the Germans used false flag operations the night before, concocting a fake narrative that one of their radio stations had been attacked by the Poles.
-September 1, 1953: On this day, a 27-year-old man named Henry Gustav Milaison underwent a medical procedure in Hartford, Connecticut that would eventually make him the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience and psychology. After suffering frequent and severe epileptic seizures for more than 15 years, H.M. was so desperate for relief that he agreed to undergo a radical surgery where his hippocampus and amygdala were removed from both hemispheres of his brain. After his surgery, Milaison’s seizures stopped; however, the negative side effect of his surgery was that he could no longer form new memories (3).
Sources:
1- Walton, Greg and Carol Dweck. “Willpower: It’s in Your Head.” New York Times, 26 Nov. 2011.
2- Villarica, Hans. “The Chocolate-and-Radish Experiment That Birthed the Modern Conception of Willpower.” The Atlantic 9 April 2012.
3-Mo Costandi, Mo. “Science’s Memory Man.” The Guardian 18 October 2010.
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