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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.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Your examples are indirect methods. For the claim "increased cognitive load lowers willpower" to be falsifiable you actually need to have meters with numbers on them that let you measure these things directly from the brain. How do we know the brain even has a willpower construct? I think you could probably substitute brain activity for cognitive load and measure it with MRI or something. edit: I realize that if all you are interested in is the phenomena that you've decided are proxies for our concepts of cognitive load and willpower, that this claim is falsifiable; the experiment did demonstrate causation there. But it's not falsifiable if you're saying that cognitive load in the brain causes willpower in the brain to go down. My primary concern is that the new hypothesis that is presented as the conclusion of the study is too far extrapolated from the experimental results, and untestable.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    > But it's not falsifiable if you're saying that cognitive load in the brain causes willpower in the brain to go down. That depends on how you define 'in the brain', which seems like a waste of time. If I run for a while I can say I've 'run out of energy', and I can do show it objectively, but the question of whether the body has an 'energy construct' is semantic at its root. Another way of putting it is: treat willpower as a measurement, not as something to be measured. Sorry that I can't force that thought into English better. I hope you figure out what I meant.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      But your body does have an energy construct, in the form of fats and sugars, and we can measure them, and we can relate their levels to the amount of force you're able to exert. We know that these things provide energy because we can measure the heat produced when we oxidize them. Compare with willpower - where is the physical thing that we can measure? It might be there, but presently we have no way of knowing.
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        The body has thousands of kinds of 'energy' levels we can measure, but combining them into an overall value is a matter of preferences, numerical weights, and semantics. I see willpower very similarly.
        foobarbazqux 13y ago
        Perhaps you're right, but if so, what is a single 'willpower' level the body has that we can measure? The comparison you made with energy is very appropriate. As an aside, and not related to the broader point here about this kind of psychology experiment, scientific fatalism rejects the notion of willpower altogether.
        Dylan16807 13y ago
        It doesn't matter what it 'truly' is. The colloquial definition is pretty easy to measure by proxy, and in reality every measurement every taken is a proxy of some sort. And as far as I know fatalism is only concerned with the abstract philosophical definition of willpower, not the practical definition that relates to desire and objective behavior.
        foobarbazqux 13y ago
        Science is only concerned with what things 'truly' are. Anything that is presently an untestable claim - such as the brain having explicit circuitry devoted to our concept of willpower - is not a scientific hypothesis. Measurements tell you about the thing you are measuring and you can do science with them. However they do not tell you the mechanism by which the thing you are measuring works internally. For example, when Newton discovered gravity he did not know how gravity worked, so gravity was a black box that he simply measured. It's now a much smaller black box thanks to better experimental methods. The problem is not making scientific claims about the behavior of the black box, the problem is extrapolating to the point where you're claiming that your model of what's in the box is the right model, with no way of checking. Hopefully as neuroscience makes progress we will be able to test our claims about the inside of the brain. I don't know how to make it clearer. As far as fatalism is concerned, some scientists believe that everything since the big bang is predetermined, and choice is an illusion. It's unfalsifiable, but the point is that's just as valid as the claim that we actually have willpower.

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.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
Your examples are indirect methods. For the claim "increased cognitive load lowers willpower" to be falsifiable you actually need to have meters with numbers on them that let you measure these things directly from the brain. How do we know the brain even has a willpower construct? I think you could probably substitute brain activity for cognitive load and measure it with MRI or something. edit: I realize that if all you are interested in is the phenomena that you've decided are proxies for our concepts of cognitive load and willpower, that this claim is falsifiable; the experiment did demonstrate causation there. But it's not falsifiable if you're saying that cognitive load in the brain causes willpower in the brain to go down. My primary concern is that the new hypothesis that is presented as the conclusion of the study is too far extrapolated from the experimental results, and untestable.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  > But it's not falsifiable if you're saying that cognitive load in the brain causes willpower in the brain to go down. That depends on how you define 'in the brain', which seems like a waste of time. If I run for a while I can say I've 'run out of energy', and I can do show it objectively, but the question of whether the body has an 'energy construct' is semantic at its root. Another way of putting it is: treat willpower as a measurement, not as something to be measured. Sorry that I can't force that thought into English better. I hope you figure out what I meant.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    But your body does have an energy construct, in the form of fats and sugars, and we can measure them, and we can relate their levels to the amount of force you're able to exert. We know that these things provide energy because we can measure the heat produced when we oxidize them. Compare with willpower - where is the physical thing that we can measure? It might be there, but presently we have no way of knowing.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      The body has thousands of kinds of 'energy' levels we can measure, but combining them into an overall value is a matter of preferences, numerical weights, and semantics. I see willpower very similarly.
      - foobarbazqux 13y ago
        Perhaps you're right, but if so, what is a single 'willpower' level the body has that we can measure? The comparison you made with energy is very appropriate. As an aside, and not related to the broader point here about this kind of psychology experiment, scientific fatalism rejects the notion of willpower altogether.
        Dylan16807 13y ago
        It doesn't matter what it 'truly' is. The colloquial definition is pretty easy to measure by proxy, and in reality every measurement every taken is a proxy of some sort. And as far as I know fatalism is only concerned with the abstract philosophical definition of willpower, not the practical definition that relates to desire and objective behavior.
        foobarbazqux 13y ago
        Science is only concerned with what things 'truly' are. Anything that is presently an untestable claim - such as the brain having explicit circuitry devoted to our concept of willpower - is not a scientific hypothesis. Measurements tell you about the thing you are measuring and you can do science with them. However they do not tell you the mechanism by which the thing you are measuring works internally. For example, when Newton discovered gravity he did not know how gravity worked, so gravity was a black box that he simply measured. It's now a much smaller black box thanks to better experimental methods. The problem is not making scientific claims about the behavior of the black box, the problem is extrapolating to the point where you're claiming that your model of what's in the box is the right model, with no way of checking. Hopefully as neuroscience makes progress we will be able to test our claims about the inside of the brain. I don't know how to make it clearer. As far as fatalism is concerned, some scientists believe that everything since the big bang is predetermined, and choice is an illusion. It's unfalsifiable, but the point is that's just as valid as the claim that we actually have willpower.