From 2019: Studies suggest that relying on will power is hopeless. Instead, we must find strategies that don’t require us to be strong.
Several years ago, I bought a smartphone and soon came to love it. Being able to send an e-mail, look up a fact, or buy something no matter where I was meant a previously unimaginable gain in productivity. Every time I got an e-mail, the phone emitted a ping and I would deal with whatever it was, priding myself on my efficiency. Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched.
Few of us like to think of ourselves in such passive terms. What about will power? Marketers flatter our sense of agency with slogans like “Just Do It” and “Declare Your Path” . Much popular psychology, too, bolsters our belief in self-control. In the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, devised by Walter Mischel, in the nineteen-sixties, children were seated alone in front of a marshmallow and were scored on whether they resisted gobbling it down.
This explains why conscious knowledge is not in itself enough to change behavior, and why public-health initiatives that educate people about healthy choices tend to fail. In 1991, the National Cancer Institute determined that only eight per cent of Americans were aware of the recommendation to eat at least five servings of fruit and vegetables daily. A national campaign was declared: 5 a Day for Better Health.
The central force for eliminating bad habits, according to Wood, is “friction”: if we can make bad habits more inconvenient, then inertia can carry us in the direction of virtue, without ever requiring us to be strong. She cites the ways in which increased friction has produced a decline in smoking: laws that ban it in restaurants, bars, airplanes, and trains; taxes that have helped triple the price of cigarettes in the U.S.
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