Problem
Answer this question in two paragraphs citing the book, including a page number, one time:
• Where does willpower come from? (E.g. Think of the marshmallow test revisited. Is it nature or nurture according to the theories from the books?)
• Explain using at least one piece of information from the book. To get full points you must cite the book's page number as well.
Willpower and Decision Fatigue
Many people have an intuitive sense that their willpower fluctuates and so their self- control may get stronger or weaker at different points in the day. But did you know that making decisions also takes willpower? Exerting self-control and making hard choices thus depend on the same supply of energy, and either can affect the other.
One sign that making decisions depletes willpower is that people have poorer self- control after making choices. A series of studies showed that people who made a series of choices later performed worse at self-control.133 For example, choosing what consumer products they might want caused people to give up faster on a test that required holding one's hand in ice water-a classic lab test of self-control. In a similar vein, students who made choices about what courses to take in the future, or choices about their current course (such as what topics to cover and what educational films to show) did worse there- after on various lab tests of self-control, such as persevering in solving anagrams.
Such information may have practical consequences. People who have to make many decisions during the day may deplete their willpower, leaving them prone to do things they will regret in the evening, such as eating or drinking too much, or even engaging in sexual or aggressive misbehavior.
Depleted willpower can impair decision making too.134 When energy is low, decision making changes in various ways, mostly designed to avoid effort. People may prefer to postpone decisions, in effect "deciding not to decide." Their choices are more subject to bias, because they don't think carefully enough to rule out irrelevant factors that could distort the decision. Depleted decision makers also show less tendency to compromise, instead adopting simpler, rigid criteria.
When you have many decisions to make, it is useful to conserve your willpower so as to be able to make the later ones effectively. For example, when you buy a new car, you often must make a long series of decisions. Research has shown that people become increas- ingly likely to take the standard or default option as they go along, regardless of what the order of decisions is.135 That is, on the early choices they think hard and choose just what they want, but on the later decisions they tend to take whatever the manufacturer recom- mends-which can end up increasing the cost of the car significantly. They seemed to suffer from a kind of decision fatigue: Having used up their energy on early choices, they took the easy way out on the later ones.
Indeed, a recent study of just this sort of decision fatigue among parole judges raised some disturbing questions about fairness in the legal system. A long-running joke among lawyers asks, "What is justice?" and answers, "Whatever the judge had for breakfast!" Re- searchers went through the records of parole judges in Israel. These are decisions about whether a particular convict should be released into the community (presumably because he has atoned and reformed) or sent back to prison. The easy and safe decision is simply to send him back to prison, because the judge's reputation is at risk if he approves pa- role and the released convict commits another crime. Nonetheless, some prisoners have earned the right to be paroled, and the judge must decide.
The researchers found a remarkable pattern.136 As the day wore on, the judge's deci- sions became increasingly simple and harsh. The prisoners who came before the judge early in the day, when the judge's willpower was high thanks to a good night's sleep and breakfast, had pretty good odds of being granted parole. Those who came before him(all judges and prisoners were men in this study) late in the day were generally sent back to prison. The only exceptions came right after the judge was able to replenish his energy: after a mid-morning snack break and especially after lunch.