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> Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources. Like many things in psychology, this is basically unfalsifiable. Our brains have po

> Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources. Like many things in psychology, this is basically unfalsifiable. Our brains have pools of resources? How do you even differentiate between willpower and cognitive processing at a neurological level? It's one model, but there are other equally valid but also unfalsifiable explanations. What about anxiety goes up after working on a hard problem (memorizing a 7-digit number, apparently) - maybe you can test this by measuring cortisol levels - and so you choose the (stereotypically) more satisfying and rewarding dessert (cake) as a form of emotional eating and also, you know, rewarding yourself for a job well done? I mean, it's basically just saying, "Use your brain, and your brain will get tired. Both solving problems and doing something you don't want to do count as using your brain." Sure, but I hardly need an experiment to tell me that. Also, what about people who perform better under stress? Since it requires willpower to work hard and meet a deadline, and since the quality of your cognitive processing also goes up (for an initial period), doesn't that defeat the "competing for the same pool of resources" claim? Psychology is great and a lot of the unfalsifiable stuff is valuable but it's irritating when it's dressed up as science.

vidarh 13y ago
> How do you even differentiate between willpower and cognitive processing at a neurological level? It's one model, but there are other equally valid but also unfalsifiable explanations. What about anxiety goes up after working on a hard problem This may matter for some things, such as if you're doing research in the field. But there are plenty of situations where it is irrelevant, such as in the context of this article, where what matters is the overall point: Added cognitive load has been shown to result in reduced willpower. Whether or not explanation given is correct may be interesting to discuss, but it is not important to the point of the article. > I mean, it's basically just saying, "Use your brain, and your brain will get tired. Both solving problems and doing something you don't want to do count as using your brain." Sure, but I hardly need an experiment to tell me that. No, it is saying more than that. It also says that exercising willpower affects the same. That is, maintaining decisions that you do want, such as keeping to a diet, is also affected, and so counteracting desires to stick to what you consciously have decided you ant gets progressively harder if you have "used your brain" on pretty anything else. More importantly, when you say "your brain will get tired", it is misleading: Many people feel energized after spending time thinking about a puzzle, or playing a complicated game, for example. Yet as far as I remember, even when people feel they are relaxing, if they impose cognitive load, those actions will still measurably reduce your willpower for some time afterwards. You may not have needed an experiment to tell you that, but a lot of people have needed experiments to tell them that. More people should be aware of that tooo, as it makes a big difference in strategies to ensure you stick to your goals: For example, you may get better results if you make sure you go to the store when relaxed to reduce the chance of impulse buying stuff that messes up your diet. Many who diet avoid shopping for food when hungry, but few avoid shopping for food when they've spent a lot of time solving problems. In general, rest before you put yourself in situations that test your willpower, and be aware that playing your favourite mind puzzle game is not the right type of rest, even if it's fun and you feel energized afterwards. > Also, what about people who perform better under stress? Since it requires willpower to work hard and meet a deadline, and since the quality of your cognitive processing also goes up (for an initial period), doesn't that defeat the "competing for the same pool of resources" claim? You're making assumptions here that you have not justified: That it requires willpower to work hard and meet a deadline, as opposed to that it can be a total failure of willpower to allow things to wait that long in the first place and be motivated by stress; that the quality of your cognitive processing goes up (as opposed to that you actually sit down and try to do the work). Maybe you're right, but you fall straight into the same trap you accuse the psychologists behind research into willpower of doing: Ignoring other factors like anxiety.
- simula67 13y ago
  > Added cognitive load has been shown to result in reduced willpower. Has it, though ? What has been shown is that added cognitive load correlates with reduced will power within these experimental conditions.(Edit: Response to comment below, this is wrong) >You're making assumptions here that you have not justified: That it requires willpower to work hard and meet a deadline, as opposed to that it can be a total failure of willpower to allow things to wait that long in the first place and be motivated by stress You are saying that it is possible for someone to do quality work in a fit of anxiety and in the absence of will power. This is unfortunately not obvious to me :(
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    Correlates? Are you trying to imply that it's not causation? The experiment randomly assigned people to groups and then increased the cognitive load on one group. Then it found a statistically significant difference between groups in a particular measurement. That's the most basic way of showing cause and effect. Go ahead and talk about how it's not that simple in the real world, but don't imply that such a correlation isn't because of causation.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      For what it's worth, I wasn't disputing the results of the experiment, I was disputing the claim about the internal model of the brain. Yes, people chose cake more frequently if they memorized a 7-digit number and there is causation there. This might even happen if the sample represents all of humanity. But the explanation as to the mechanism for this in the brain is hand-waving.
    - Zimahl 13y ago
      I'm with foobarbazqux. The experiment randomly assigned people to groups and then increased the cognitive load on one group. Then it found a statistically significant difference between groups in a particular measurement. This sentence is true. So as cognitive load increased, there was a significant difference in the choice of the two groups. What it doesn't seem to justify is whether or not it was related to willpower. We also don't know how many chose cake in group A (2-digit group). If it was two in group A and 3 in group B (the 7-digit group), then there's your 50% increase.
stephengillie 13y ago
I'm starting to think of these in terms of calories each has burned and their effect on our blood sugar. Memorizing a 7-digit number, may be more draining on our mental computing resources, requiring them to burn more sugar, which leads to you wanting something that will raise blood sugar faster. I don't know how accurate this is, but to me it's more feasible than having "pools" of willpower and other cognitive resources that we are depleting.
- GregBuchholz 13y ago
  An interesting place to start the investigation is "Glucose Is Not Willpower Fuel". http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-design/201108/glucose-is-not-willpower-fuel http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-design/201108/gluco...
  - rswinkle 13y ago
    Yes and no. It is willpower/decision making fuel but there is no change in energy use. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all& http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-fro...
vacri 13y ago
Sigh, another comment making a strawman about claims made in psychology, then claiming it's not a science.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Can you elaborate? We probably don't actually disagree. Did you mean because I extrapolated to all of psychology?
MarkMc 13y ago
I don't understand why it is unfalsifiable. Let's say I run the experiment and find that students who memorized seven digits were just as likely to choose cake as students who memorized 2 digits. Wouldn't that be evidence against the theory that "Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources"? And if we get enough such evidence, couldn't we label the theory 'false'?
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  No, because you can just explain it away by saying there's another rule specifically about cake that undoes the effect.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    Everything has exceptions. Look at how balloons fall up! I do not understand why you think "increased cognitive load lowers willpower" is something that can't be objectively measured and shown to be true or false.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      How do you measure cognitive load and willpower directly? I can only think of indirect methods.
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        Cognitive load is hard to measure, but you don't have to measure that part, only induce it. There are plenty of ways to get one group performing easy tasks without much thought, and another performing tasks with a lot of thought. With willpower you can be more clever. You don't actually care about an abstract willpower meter, you care about the application of willpower to make good choices. Application is downright trivial to measure in a narrow way: just provide a tempting choice. Do the same thing with as many different choices as you can think of and you've shown that willpower is impacted.
ronaldx 13y ago
> Like many things in psychology, this is basically unfalsifiable. Your comment doesn't make much sense. "basically unfalsifiable"? By which you mean, it is falsifiable but hard. In fact, you later make a fair attempt to falsify it, indicated by the word "defeat". I would rather compare this model to a physics model of the universe - it's a model that may be right, or wrong: we can use it to make predictions, identify discrepancies, and refine our model. The biological model that you present (stress = cortisol = cake) does not contradict any psychological model - they can both be true. Biology and psychology are evolutionarily dependent on each other.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  I just mean that the claim can't be tested directly because the brain is more-or-less a black box.
  - tedsanders 13y ago
    That may be true, but you can still make models and qualitative explanations. Something can still be valuable without being precise.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      Yeah, I agree, I just don't like it when people aren't clear that something is only a model and we actually have no way of knowing. (At least presently.)
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - oblique63 13y ago
        You mean like gravity? As far as I'm aware, that hasn't exactly been fully understood yet either... Modern psychology is very much a science today, and if anything, it's like the relativity to neurology's QM. Both are useful and ultimately related aspects, we're just still in the middle of working out the details right now. It's disingenuous to deem either more/less valuable than the other so prematurely.
chalst 13y ago
I agree that the experiment as described does not prove that conclusion: first, Kathy really describes a metaphor, rather than a quantitative or realised model. Second, there are lots of potential confounding factors: you gave a potential alternative explanation, and when I read the post, I thought that possibly people are more likely dissuaded by the propsect of appearing greedy, so they will only take the cake if they think they appear to have deserved it. Possibly, considerations of calorie control or significant for a small proportion of the test subjects. But this kind of discussion really needs to address the original article, not kathy's summary: the PDF can be downloaded from a link at http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/209563 http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/209563 - from my quick glance, the paper does deal with the suggestion aboutit being just social context (the student-drawn subject pool did indicate that they thought one should generally avoid cake), and the background for the study did cite research into neurological underpinnings of the model.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Thanks for the link to the paper. It's definitely more interesting than speculating about one sentence. Cherry-picking to support my point, at the end they say that they cannot know if people actually made the food choice on the basis of affect or cognition, or if they thought about their choice when asked and rationalized it in terms of emotion or cognition. So at least they admit that. They also say that their foundational model "seems to be consistent with recent work by neuropsychologists", which again is fair enough, in that "seems to be" means they aren't making a hard claim.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
> What about anxiety goes up after working on a hard problem (memorizing a 7-digit number, apparently) - maybe you can test this by measuring cortisol levels - and so you choose the (stereotypically) more satisfying and rewarding dessert (cake) as a form of emotional eating and also, you know, rewarding yourself for a job well done? This. It pretty much exactly describes how I often feel. > Psychology is great and a lot of the unfalsifiable stuff is valuable but it's irritating when it's dressed up as science. Psychology is also full of ridiculously simple "experiments" done on "random" populations of N = 20-something that are supposed to explain complex phenomena of human reasoning.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Where "random" means American college students that have never participated in a psychology experiment (at least if the present experiment relies on deception) and are willing to do a psychology experiment for a tiny amount of compensation.

vidarh 13y ago

> How do you even differentiate between willpower and cognitive processing at a neurological level? It's one model, but there are other equally valid but also unfalsifiable explanations. What about anxiety goes up after working on a hard problem This may matter for some things, such as if you're doing research in the field. But there are plenty of situations where it is irrelevant, such as in the context of this article, where what matters is the overall point: Added cognitive load has been shown to result in reduced willpower. Whether or not explanation given is correct may be interesting to discuss, but it is not important to the point of the article. > I mean, it's basically just saying, "Use your brain, and your brain will get tired. Both solving problems and doing something you don't want to do count as using your brain." Sure, but I hardly need an experiment to tell me that. No, it is saying more than that. It also says that exercising willpower affects the same. That is, maintaining decisions that you do want, such as keeping to a diet, is also affected, and so counteracting desires to stick to what you consciously have decided you ant gets progressively harder if you have "used your brain" on pretty anything else. More importantly, when you say "your brain will get tired", it is misleading: Many people feel energized after spending time thinking about a puzzle, or playing a complicated game, for example. Yet as far as I remember, even when people feel they are relaxing, if they impose cognitive load, those actions will still measurably reduce your willpower for some time afterwards. You may not have needed an experiment to tell you that, but a lot of people have needed experiments to tell them that. More people should be aware of that tooo, as it makes a big difference in strategies to ensure you stick to your goals: For example, you may get better results if you make sure you go to the store when relaxed to reduce the chance of impulse buying stuff that messes up your diet. Many who diet avoid shopping for food when hungry, but few avoid shopping for food when they've spent a lot of time solving problems. In general, rest before you put yourself in situations that test your willpower, and be aware that playing your favourite mind puzzle game is not the right type of rest, even if it's fun and you feel energized afterwards. > Also, what about people who perform better under stress? Since it requires willpower to work hard and meet a deadline, and since the quality of your cognitive processing also goes up (for an initial period), doesn't that defeat the "competing for the same pool of resources" claim? You're making assumptions here that you have not justified: That it requires willpower to work hard and meet a deadline, as opposed to that it can be a total failure of willpower to allow things to wait that long in the first place and be motivated by stress; that the quality of your cognitive processing goes up (as opposed to that you actually sit down and try to do the work). Maybe you're right, but you fall straight into the same trap you accuse the psychologists behind research into willpower of doing: Ignoring other factors like anxiety.

simula67 13y ago
> Added cognitive load has been shown to result in reduced willpower. Has it, though ? What has been shown is that added cognitive load correlates with reduced will power within these experimental conditions.(Edit: Response to comment below, this is wrong) >You're making assumptions here that you have not justified: That it requires willpower to work hard and meet a deadline, as opposed to that it can be a total failure of willpower to allow things to wait that long in the first place and be motivated by stress You are saying that it is possible for someone to do quality work in a fit of anxiety and in the absence of will power. This is unfortunately not obvious to me :(
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  Correlates? Are you trying to imply that it's not causation? The experiment randomly assigned people to groups and then increased the cognitive load on one group. Then it found a statistically significant difference between groups in a particular measurement. That's the most basic way of showing cause and effect. Go ahead and talk about how it's not that simple in the real world, but don't imply that such a correlation isn't because of causation.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    For what it's worth, I wasn't disputing the results of the experiment, I was disputing the claim about the internal model of the brain. Yes, people chose cake more frequently if they memorized a 7-digit number and there is causation there. This might even happen if the sample represents all of humanity. But the explanation as to the mechanism for this in the brain is hand-waving.
  - Zimahl 13y ago
    I'm with foobarbazqux. The experiment randomly assigned people to groups and then increased the cognitive load on one group. Then it found a statistically significant difference between groups in a particular measurement. This sentence is true. So as cognitive load increased, there was a significant difference in the choice of the two groups. What it doesn't seem to justify is whether or not it was related to willpower. We also don't know how many chose cake in group A (2-digit group). If it was two in group A and 3 in group B (the 7-digit group), then there's your 50% increase.

stephengillie 13y ago

I'm starting to think of these in terms of calories each has burned and their effect on our blood sugar. Memorizing a 7-digit number, may be more draining on our mental computing resources, requiring them to burn more sugar, which leads to you wanting something that will raise blood sugar faster. I don't know how accurate this is, but to me it's more feasible than having "pools" of willpower and other cognitive resources that we are depleting.

GregBuchholz 13y ago
An interesting place to start the investigation is "Glucose Is Not Willpower Fuel". http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-design/201108/glucose-is-not-willpower-fuel http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-design/201108/gluco...
- rswinkle 13y ago
  Yes and no. It is willpower/decision making fuel but there is no change in energy use. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all& http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-fro...

vacri 13y ago

Sigh, another comment making a strawman about claims made in psychology, then claiming it's not a science.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
Can you elaborate? We probably don't actually disagree. Did you mean because I extrapolated to all of psychology?

MarkMc 13y ago

I don't understand why it is unfalsifiable. Let's say I run the experiment and find that students who memorized seven digits were just as likely to choose cake as students who memorized 2 digits. Wouldn't that be evidence against the theory that "Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources"? And if we get enough such evidence, couldn't we label the theory 'false'?

foobarbazqux 13y ago
No, because you can just explain it away by saying there's another rule specifically about cake that undoes the effect.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  Everything has exceptions. Look at how balloons fall up! I do not understand why you think "increased cognitive load lowers willpower" is something that can't be objectively measured and shown to be true or false.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    How do you measure cognitive load and willpower directly? I can only think of indirect methods.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      Cognitive load is hard to measure, but you don't have to measure that part, only induce it. There are plenty of ways to get one group performing easy tasks without much thought, and another performing tasks with a lot of thought. With willpower you can be more clever. You don't actually care about an abstract willpower meter, you care about the application of willpower to make good choices. Application is downright trivial to measure in a narrow way: just provide a tempting choice. Do the same thing with as many different choices as you can think of and you've shown that willpower is impacted.

ronaldx 13y ago

> Like many things in psychology, this is basically unfalsifiable. Your comment doesn't make much sense. "basically unfalsifiable"? By which you mean, it is falsifiable but hard. In fact, you later make a fair attempt to falsify it, indicated by the word "defeat". I would rather compare this model to a physics model of the universe - it's a model that may be right, or wrong: we can use it to make predictions, identify discrepancies, and refine our model. The biological model that you present (stress = cortisol = cake) does not contradict any psychological model - they can both be true. Biology and psychology are evolutionarily dependent on each other.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
I just mean that the claim can't be tested directly because the brain is more-or-less a black box.
- tedsanders 13y ago
  That may be true, but you can still make models and qualitative explanations. Something can still be valuable without being precise.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    Yeah, I agree, I just don't like it when people aren't clear that something is only a model and we actually have no way of knowing. (At least presently.)
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - oblique63 13y ago
      You mean like gravity? As far as I'm aware, that hasn't exactly been fully understood yet either... Modern psychology is very much a science today, and if anything, it's like the relativity to neurology's QM. Both are useful and ultimately related aspects, we're just still in the middle of working out the details right now. It's disingenuous to deem either more/less valuable than the other so prematurely.

chalst 13y ago

I agree that the experiment as described does not prove that conclusion: first, Kathy really describes a metaphor, rather than a quantitative or realised model. Second, there are lots of potential confounding factors: you gave a potential alternative explanation, and when I read the post, I thought that possibly people are more likely dissuaded by the propsect of appearing greedy, so they will only take the cake if they think they appear to have deserved it. Possibly, considerations of calorie control or significant for a small proportion of the test subjects. But this kind of discussion really needs to address the original article, not kathy's summary: the PDF can be downloaded from a link at http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/209563 http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/209563 - from my quick glance, the paper does deal with the suggestion aboutit being just social context (the student-drawn subject pool did indicate that they thought one should generally avoid cake), and the background for the study did cite research into neurological underpinnings of the model.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
Thanks for the link to the paper. It's definitely more interesting than speculating about one sentence. Cherry-picking to support my point, at the end they say that they cannot know if people actually made the food choice on the basis of affect or cognition, or if they thought about their choice when asked and rationalized it in terms of emotion or cognition. So at least they admit that. They also say that their foundational model "seems to be consistent with recent work by neuropsychologists", which again is fair enough, in that "seems to be" means they aren't making a hard claim.

TeMPOraL 13y ago

> What about anxiety goes up after working on a hard problem (memorizing a 7-digit number, apparently) - maybe you can test this by measuring cortisol levels - and so you choose the (stereotypically) more satisfying and rewarding dessert (cake) as a form of emotional eating and also, you know, rewarding yourself for a job well done? This. It pretty much exactly describes how I often feel. > Psychology is great and a lot of the unfalsifiable stuff is valuable but it's irritating when it's dressed up as science. Psychology is also full of ridiculously simple "experiments" done on "random" populations of N = 20-something that are supposed to explain complex phenomena of human reasoning.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
Where "random" means American college students that have never participated in a psychology experiment (at least if the present experiment relies on deception) and are willing to do a psychology experiment for a tiny amount of compensation.