The Willpower Muscle

I read a good book called Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister. It has some fascinating discussion about willpower being a muscle that can fatigue and can be strengthened.

He starts the book with the famous marshmallow experiment by Walter Mischel of Stanford.  Children were left in a room with a marshmallow on the table and told they could eat the marshmallow now, if they wanted, or if they waited until the experimenter returned, they would get two marshmallows.  Some children ate the marshmallow right away.  Others tried to hold out by distracting themselves.  The children were followed for many years after the original experiment.  Mischel found that the children, who were able to exercise self-control, had much better life outcomes than the children who were immediate gratifiers.

Baumeister conducted similar experiments and found that willpower is a muscle that can be fatigued.  He left people in a room with a plate of cookies and a plate of radishes.  Afterwards, he asked them to hold their hands in ice water.  The people who were told they could eat the cookies could hold their hands in the water longer than those who were told they could only eat the radishes.

He did a similar experiment to deplete the willpower muscle then gave two groups of people either lemonade with sugar or lemonade with sweetener.  He found that those who were given the sugary lemonade worked longer on difficult puzzles after the willpower depletion.

This led to an interesting finding about dieters.  They need to eat food to have the willpower to avoid eating food.  It is a Catch-22.

Baumeister found that judges made the more difficult decision to grant parole after they had eaten lunch or a snack.  They reverted to the default decision not to grant parole when they were tired and hungry.

He found that decision making is fatiguing.  When car dealers asked their clients to make decisions about the features they wanted in their new car, he found that if the dealers started with difficult decisions with many choices, the clients paid for more expensive features compared to when the decisions the clients started with were simpler with few choices.   Baumeister hypothesized that this is the reason why politicians seem to make such bad choices in the personal lives, after work, because their willpower is fatigued from a long day of making decisions.

Baumeister also found that sleep is important to increase willpower.  Tired people have less willpower than rested people.

The good news is that willpower can be strengthened.  He related how Korean parents can teach their children self-control.  Although, east Asians represent only 4% of the population in North America, 25% of the students in college are east Asian.  After they graduate, they also receive 25% higher salaries.

Baumeister suggests that self-control can be improved by setting “bright lines” in behaviour (i.e. having clear, simple, unambiguous rules).  You should plan ahead to avoid impulsive decisions: “if x happens, then I will do y”.  You should never say “never”; instead say “not now but later”.  You should pre-commit to your resolutions by making your commitments public or signing an agreement ahead of time as to what you will do (e.g. donate to a charity) if you don’t meet your commitments.  To avoid procrastination, reflecting on what you have done will make you happier but reflecting on what you have to do will make you more productive.  Another way to avoid procrastination is to tell yourself you will not do the desired work, instead you will do nothing.  This is because procrastination is not doing nothing but doing lower priority tasks.  You should make only one New Year’s resolution because when you make many resolutions, there is a good chance that some of these resolutions will be conflicting.

Baumiester suggests that your willpower muscle can be strengthened by conscious habits such as concentrating on standing and sitting with good posture at all times or taking time to record everything you eat.  Maintaining good personal hygiene is very useful for improving willpower.  He found that students, who were fatigued from studying, invariably wore dirty socks.  Those who took better care of their hygiene did better on their essays and exams.

Baumeister suggests that we should look for symptoms of willpower muscle depletion.  We should pick our battles to avoid wasting energy on trivial things.  We should pre-commit to a to-do list but beware of the planning fallacy.  We should employ positive procrastination with the “do nothing offense”.

How Not To Be Wrong

I read a good mathematics book by Jordan Ellenberg called “How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking”.  The book covered just four topics: linearity, expectation, regression to the mean, and inference.

The book opened with a discussion of a World War II mathematician who was asked to analyze the bullet holes in the fuselage of bomber planes to determine where to put extra armor.  He looked at that bullet holes in the returning planes and told the air force they should put the armor where the bullet holes weren’t because planes hit in those places didn’t return.  This was an example of the power of mathematical thinking.

In the linearity section, Ellenberg described the Laffer curve in political economy.  The statement was made by a right-wing journalist in United States: Why would the United States want to be more like Sweden when Sweden wants to be more like United States?

The fallacy in this argument is the assumption of linearity.  The economist, Arthur Laffer, explained it on the back of a napkin to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld at an afternoon meeting during the Ford administration.  The Laffer curve explains the value of taxation policy from left leaning countries (high taxes and many government services) to right leaning countries (low taxes and few government services).  The curve has a hump in the middle.  He explained that the United States may be too low on the curve and should move towards the middle in the direction of Sweden while Sweden might be too high on the curve and should move towards the middle in the direction the United States.  Since the curve has a hump in the middle, the optimal amount of taxes and government services is between the amounts in the United States and Sweden.

To explain expectation, Ellenberg describes the expected winnings in lotteries.  He tells about a mathematician at Stanford who has won four major lotteries by knowing the distribution of winning "scratch and win" ticket sales.  He also describes a syndicate who could obtain a positive expected winnings by buying all the tickets in the Virginia lottery when the pot got high enough because of roll-over.  He also talked about the law of very large numbers where if you have enough observations almost anything can happen.  With all of the lotteries in the world every week, it is not unusual for somewhere at sometime to have the same set of numbers come up twice in a row.  When this actually happened in Bulgaria, the government conducted an investigation into whether the lottery was fixed.

In the inference section, Ellenberg talked about how medical treatments are studied for their effectiveness.  He described hypothesis testing and how there are many unreplicable studies because of false positive results.  One of the items he discussed was mutual fund performance and survivor bias.  All mutual fund results look good because poor performing funds are subsumed into more successful funds. Thus only data on survivors is available.

Finally, Ellenberg talked about regression to the mean.  He described a study at the turn of the century in which a business analyst studied many successful firms and then 30 years later found that these firms were no longer successful while firms that were not very successful in the earlier time might now be successful.  He tried to publish his finding as a remarkable law of business.  The study was reviewed by a famous mathematician who tried to explain that the finding was nothing more than regression to the mean and the success of the firms in both periods was probably luck not business acumen.

Later after reading “How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking”, I heard an interview with the author.  He said he had written a book proposal with thirteen sections.  But after four sections, he had written 300 pages.  So he asked for permission to stop there and save the rest of the topics for future books.  I look forward to reading volume II and III, etc.

Delay and Immunity

Nickolas Epley in his book Mindwise discusses how to encourage people not to lie. 

He notes a clever experiment by Daniel Gilbert (the author of Stumbling on Happiness ) that showed people were more willing to admit to having done something wrong in the face of evidence when confronted sometime after the event than when questioned immediately after the event.

Epley discusses the investigation into the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, the largest oil spill in history.  The rig workers said they feared reprisals for reporting safety concerns.  One worker said “the company was always using fear tactics”.  Apparently, not only would they kept quiet about their concerns, they would fake data in the company’s safety system.  Epley felt strongly that if the company’s executives had not threatened the workers' with reprisals if they reported safety concerns, the disaster could have been averted.

Epley also describes a University of Michigan hospital that began a medical-error-disclosure program.  The doctors were encouraged to “openly admit their medical mistakes in meetings with patients, explain what led to the mistake, and then offer fair compensation.”  This policy resulted in a reduction in malpractice lawsuits from 39 per year to 17 per year and reduced overall liability costs by 60%.

According to Epley, the problem was caused by requiring the patients to imagine what their doctors were thinking rather than allowing doctors to explain how a mistake happened, then encouraging doctors to share their experiences to ensure the same mistake doesn’t ever happen again in the future.

Know Thyself

I just finished reading the book Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nickolas Epley. 

He suggests we conduct a simple experiment on ourselves.  He wants us to think of an important task we want to complete in the next few weeks.

Then write down on a piece of scratch paper our most accurate prediction of when (date and time) we are going to complete this task. 

Then write the best-case scenario if everything goes as quickly as possible.

Finally, estimate the worst-case scenario, if everything goes as badly as it possibly could.

Then he bets us that we will not make our worst-case scenario.

One case Epley describes is students working on their honours thesis.  The students’ predictions were on average 27 days in the best-case, 34 days in the realistic case and 49 in the worst-case.

The actual average turned out to be 55 days.

In another experiment, only 45% of the projects were done by the time they were predicted, with 99% certainty, to be completed.

Epley believes that the most interesting thing about the planning fallacy is that “despite having so much experience committing it ourselves, we so consistently think that our own mistakes are things of the past rather than the present.”