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Metacorner : Today we are going to talk about a subject I’m an amateur in. As in I engage in this field of study “as a pastime rather than as a profession”. I would normally not talk about those things because.. who asked? Well, this is my blog. You are welcome.

I didn’t want to post this today, but this topic has been living in my head rent-free for a long time and I’m hoping that putting it all down in writing will free me. So, I guess you could say I’m motivated to write this against my will hehe..

Do not take anything here as reliable, just some thoughts from a random guy.

What is willpower? What is motivation? How do they work?

What do you think?

I invite you to ask yourself:

  • What do you think willpower is?
  • Do we have limited or unlimited willpower?
  • Why is it sometimes hard to use willpower?

I’m sure nearly everyone has some concept of how those work.

On the scientific side, until recently, the most popular and influential theory for willpower was the Ego depletion theory.

The Ego depletion theory states that willpower is a limited mental resource that can be exhausted by use. It was coined by American social psychologist Roy Baumeister.

The initial experiment went something like this : hungry grad students are recruited for a psychological experiment. Unbestowed to them, the experiment starts in the waiting room where there’s a bowl of cookies and a bowl of radishes. One group is given permission to eat the cookies while they wait, the other group is forbidden from eating them (but nobody is watching). Then they are tasked with solving an impossible puzzle, and the scientists track how long they keep at it before giving up. The group denied the cookies gave up earlier (hypothetically because they ran out of willpower juice in their brain from resisting the cookies before).

It cannot be overstated how big a result it was in the field of psychology. It was cited extensively in research and written about. It was a powerful result that united many phenomena and had great explanatory power.

But..

An influential line of research suggests that initial bouts of self-control increase the susceptibility to self-control failure (ego depletion effect). Despite seemingly abundant evidence, some researchers have suggested that evidence for ego depletion was the sole result of publication bias and p-hacking, with the true effect being indistinguishable from zero. - Friese et al. (2018), Is Ego depletion real? An analysis of arguments

It’s one of the poster child of the replication crisis. Sadly, mainstream self-help hasn’t caught on yet and it keeps being spread. While it’s not gone, it’s mostly discredited now.

Metacorner : Another study suggested that Ego depletion is a true phenomenon, but only in subjects who believed that it was a thing. The belief itself makes it real..

That’s a double hermeneutic problem: wrong science tells us what is real, and we believe it. Replication experiments are done, and they detect the effect, but the effects are only there because we believe that the phenomenon is real. This is another example of how our beliefs literally shape our world.

As a layman, it came as a bit of a shock how much… it seemed like science doesn’t understand how willpower works? Also in the media, scientific findings like these are described with such confidence. Wtf!

There are many competing theories and intense debate, but no consensus.

It feels like that’s a day 1 thing?! Like ok, maybe day 2. Day 1 we setup the lab and read the literature, but like day 2 we figure out what the fuck is willpower! 🙃

It reminds me of the subjective / objective divide I discussed in the Absurd post. Science (and our objective worldview) has yet to really pierce the subjective veil. Science doesn’t understand consciousness, for example. Anyway…

The quest for understanding continued regardless. I spent more time reading the theories and comparing them with my own experience, trying to have a deeper understanding of the concepts.

Everybody has a folk psychology understanding of their mind, it’s the way we understand our minds and the minds of others because we have firsthand experiences with them.. Like how everybody is opinionated about nutrition because we eat all the time. It could be really incorrect, but it’s going to influence your life in a deep and meaningful way.. So at the end of the day, I guess it’s worth thinking about it a little in my opinion. This is in part what I’m doing here.

Willpower paradox

This paper really was a turning point in my thinking : Goschke (2022), The Willpower Paradox: Possible and Impossible Conceptions of Self-Control.

In this review article they did something very interesting. They compared the various theories of willpower and they analysed the underlying implicit assumptions in them.

They came up with 3 key assumptions (in my words):

  1. Intensionality: Willpower is intentional and self-initiated.

  2. Unitary-agent: People are unity agents in the sense that “their choices are determined by which option has the highest subjective expected utility of all options considered at the moment of choice”. This implies that a single “agent” evaluates all the gains and losses internally.

  3. Syncronicity: Willpower is used to overwrite the current strongest desire (short-term goal) for a current weaker desire (long-term goal).

So let’s say you are offered two snack options : a cookie and an apple. Also, let’s say you are on a diet. Naturally, the cookie is more tempting, but then you decide to use your willpower, calculate the expected outcomes rationally, and let’s say you decide to eat the apple. Then you overwrite your desire for the cookie, and you eat the apple. The end!

It’s not so simple. The problem is that you can’t have all three assumptions be true at the same time and have a coherent theory. It’s a paradox.

How is it possible that your strongest desire is to eat the cookie, and at the same time, you more strongly desire to recruit your willpower to eat the apple instead?

It’s a bit subtle, but if the long-term goal desire is stronger, then there is no need to use willpower because it’s not the strongest desire. But it’s paradoxical to say that while you most strongly desired to eat the cookie, you at the same time actualy most strongly desired NOT to eat the cookie and instead use willpower to eat the apple.

The paradox can be resolved by dropping any of the 3 assumptions and keeping only 2.

If we drop intensionality then it’s not a paradox anymore because then it becomes an automatic system that kicks in when we have a conflict between competing desires and we don’t need to actually desire it for it to happen.

I can’t bring myself to abandon this one. It makes willpower non-conscious, and in a way, it makes us non-rational beings. Also, if it’s automatic, why does it feel so hard in the moment? Most other automatic processes are kind of.. effortless?

If we drop syncronicity, then we have proactive or reactive system in place that makes sure that the undesirable desire 🙃 never rises to the level of being the strongest desire, so in a sense we never “overcome” the strongest desire. The strongest desire always wins. We just anticipate that the desire will take over and suppress it before it can.

That’s interesting and I don’t have a strong argument against it.. Except that it doesn’t feel like that to me! It truly feels like the strongest desire is to eat the cookie and then I have the option to fight it and take the apple.

And if we drop unitarity, then we can have one agent that strongly desires the cookie relentlessly and another that strongly desires the diet, and the fight is on.

While I used to view myself as a unitary agent, I have to admit that the divided view describes what it feels like to use willpower for me.

This means that according to the paper, I’m in the same camp as the “Dual Valuation Systems Models” and the “Goal-habit Theories”.

The dual valuation system theory is interesting…

Dual valuation systems. Theories postulating dual valuation systems assume that a reflective (“deliberative,” “cold,” “cognitive”) system mediates the computation of the subjective utility of goals and actions based on deliberative judgments about the subjective probability and expected value of anticipated future outcomes […]. This system is assumed to operate in a slow, controlled, and resource-demanding manner. By contrast, the impulsive (“hot,” “emotional,” “visceral”) system mediates automatic affective responses and the activation of behavioral impulses by current desires and the prospect of an immediate reward. Impulses are defined as urges to perform a certain behavior (e.g., to act on a temptation). - The Willpower Paradox

Metacorner : Sorry for dropping an actually dry citation, but if you read this far, you are probably somewhat interested anyway 😅.

It’s also possible that willpower is many things, and this is a language limitation where we lumped together many concepts under the same terms (willpower, self-control), which is probably the case, but let’s put that complexification aside for now…

I just feel like it’s a bit too limited. Like it’s the classic emotion versus reason or conscious versus unconscious. Also, it doesn’t feel that way subjectively to me.

Like sometimes I really want to do something, but then I’m really afraid of doing it. Those are both “hot” emotional states. Sometimes it’s not clear what the short-term or long-term outcomes are going to be.

How I currently think willpower works

I think that the main reason why we don’t know for sure what willpower is, is because we don’t know for sure how the mind functions. So I first need to explain how I believe the mind works.

My Art. It’s ugly, I know

The way I see things is that it’s not system 1 versus system 2, it’s a whole diverse ecology of systems, or rather agents. Agents in the sense that they have agency. They want things, have goals, and perceive the world differently. One agent might want you to eat the cookie, and another agent wants you to stick to your diet. They each (metaphorically) pull on the self in their own direction on the self. The self is what experiences consciousness.

This explains why we can have multiple (even conflicting) desires at the same time. Those agents are activated by what we perceive and think about. They can influence what memories and thoughts float to the surface. Those thoughts can, in turn, trigger other thoughts and emotions (e-motion, energized-motion), creating more force on the self for a given outcome.

They are basically sub-personalities. Not full fledge personalities, to be more precise, they are your personality when put togeter. Otherwise, this would be dangerously close to the homunculus fallacy.

The homunculus fallacy is a reasoning error where a concept is explained by referring to a smaller version of that concept, leading to infinite regress. For example, explaining how the brain processes visual information by suggesting there is a “little person” inside the brain observing the images creates a loop of needing another “little person” to explain how the first one sees, and so on. - Wikipedia

It’s a big (ontological) claim to say that our mind is constituted of sub-personalities. It’s not just my idea, though. It turns out my conception is very similar to how IFS views the mind. That’s why I initially got into IFS, but that’s a post for another day.

When I’m in front of the cookie and the apple, while I ultimately get to decide using willpower which one I choose, I don’t decide to crave the cookie, to take a deep breath and smell the cookie, to imagine the cookie’s taste, or to notice how there’s a cookie-size hole in my stomach. I don’t decide to imagine how disappointed I will be later when I remember how I broke my diet, etc.

From my computer science background, if that truly comes from a separate part of the mind, it’s an elegant way to solve complex dynamical problems and calculate trade-offs. Instead of a single centralized algorithm, we have a distributed multi-process approach. We have an ecology of agents trying their best to achieve their goals. Every agent is doing the best it can with its given capacities. This creates a very flexible system that accommodates a lot of novelty, in the same way that a group is better at problem-solving than an individual. That’s something that is insanely hard to do with a computer program. It’s called the frame problem I think.

Easy or hard

When there’s a lot of force toward something that we want to do, we call it motivation. When there’s a lot of force for something that we don’t want to do, we call it compulsion or temptation. When we fight that force and the rational part of ourselves loses we call that procrastination or poor self-control.

Willpower comes in when we want to allow a lesser desire to win over a stronger desire, it’s the effortful suppression of the strongest desire.

In his very interesting paper Willpower with and without effort, Ainslie discusses why willpower is sometimes effortful, and sometimes not really and I believe he’s right.

It comes down to confidence. If I’m internally confident that my action will succeed, I can more easily deploy willpower without much effort. Low confidence, in turn, requires more moment-to-moment effortful suppression.

If I have been on a diet for months, then I can easily avoid one more cookie. If I just started my diet, and I have a history of not really sticking to my diets, then I will need a lot of effort to avoid the cookie. The logic being that not eating one cookie is pointless. It’s like going to the gym once. It only works if I can do it consistently. Why would I prevent myself from eating a cookie if I’m going to eat a whole pack of oreos in 2 days? Why am I the sucker now and depriving myself of this delicious cookie if it won’t even matter? It becomes a kind of temporal prisoner’s dilemma with your future self.

Wrapping up for today

Anyway, is that right or wrong? I don’t know. It feels true enough to me.

I’ll continue this in part 2 next week!