3 ms·

I seem to believe more and more that there are 2 kinds of willpower: 1. "make yourself do something" type of willpower - and this type is depleteable, finite b

by nnq 14y ago

I seem to believe more and more that there are 2 kinds of willpower: 1. "make yourself do something" type of willpower - and this type is depleteable, finite because every time you use it you accumulate some kind of latent stress, frustration 2. "make/think yourself you WANT TO DO something", and then obviously do it because you want to - this type is not depleateable and the more you believe in it the more you have it (I think religious or mystical people tend to have more of this - maybe this partly explains the amazing feats of some monks and things like these...) I believe more and more that "willpower" is an umbrella term that covers very distinct concepts that we have not yet separated and that these (the ones concluding for either "finite" or "infinite" willpower) studies will be later looked upon as either wrong (some) or "unfalsifiable" (unable to prove they are false) because they are too ambiguous, same as it happened to freudian psychology and then it really went out of fashion never to came back in full strength again...

cema 14y ago
An interesting idea. Did you come up with it on your own or have you seen it discussed somewhere? Any clinical studies, perhaps? Thanks!
- nnq 14y ago
  These are mostly "personal intuitions" and should be take only as inspiration and with a big grain of salt, as I gravitated towards this subject mainly from a selfish interest for self improvement, I must admit. If I were a sociologist I would've probably kept this ideas to myself, formulated a proper theory or set of theories and designed experiments to prove or select the best theory... but I'm not in the field so it's probably better to just pass the ball and let someone with more skill in the field put it in the basket :) The base of the ideas are Muraven's idea of "willpower as a muscle" and "not as a skill" (google for his articles starting from '98 http://scholar.google.ro/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=mark+muraven+willpower http://scholar.google.ro/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=... ), but I think (more like "my intuition says") he only got half of the problem right: there's a "muscle" type of willpower (the "make yourself do smth" willpower) and a "skill" type of willpower (the "make yourself want to do something" type) and maybe his experiments just created the conditions that favored people exerting the first type (I'll really have to reread his articles to arrive at a "based" conclusion about this... like in... read more than the abstracts and conclusions for some, shame on me :| ). And the other source of the intuition is my recent very unstructured approach to try and understand some aspects of buddhist philosophy and meditation... (But again, I'm not in the field of sociology and the only contact with academic research I had is a past "involvement" with clinical medical research (surgery and oncology...) and some aspects of biomedical statistics, so this really is not my field...)

by nnq 14y ago

cema 14y ago

An interesting idea. Did you come up with it on your own or have you seen it discussed somewhere? Any clinical studies, perhaps? Thanks!

nnq 14y ago
These are mostly "personal intuitions" and should be take only as inspiration and with a big grain of salt, as I gravitated towards this subject mainly from a selfish interest for self improvement, I must admit. If I were a sociologist I would've probably kept this ideas to myself, formulated a proper theory or set of theories and designed experiments to prove or select the best theory... but I'm not in the field so it's probably better to just pass the ball and let someone with more skill in the field put it in the basket :) The base of the ideas are Muraven's idea of "willpower as a muscle" and "not as a skill" (google for his articles starting from '98 http://scholar.google.ro/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=mark+muraven+willpower http://scholar.google.ro/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=... ), but I think (more like "my intuition says") he only got half of the problem right: there's a "muscle" type of willpower (the "make yourself do smth" willpower) and a "skill" type of willpower (the "make yourself want to do something" type) and maybe his experiments just created the conditions that favored people exerting the first type (I'll really have to reread his articles to arrive at a "based" conclusion about this... like in... read more than the abstracts and conclusions for some, shame on me :| ). And the other source of the intuition is my recent very unstructured approach to try and understand some aspects of buddhist philosophy and meditation... (But again, I'm not in the field of sociology and the only contact with academic research I had is a past "involvement" with clinical medical research (surgery and oncology...) and some aspects of biomedical statistics, so this really is not my field...)