Ego depletion and freewill

[itsnotadamdavis]

So I'm finishing reading this book called Willpower: Rediscovering The Greatest Human Strength. Good read on the whole, but I think the most important takeaway is that Willpower is (A.) Real and (B.) limited. When you exercise self-control you are using some of your willpower which will eventually deplete, rendering you impulsive. And

Comments

[itsnotadamdavis]

A little bit....There is a big chapter on raising your kids to have self-control and they end up testing children in Trinidad to see if the stereotype is true that the black people there have less willpower than the Indian people, and that was what they found, but it turned out that the most important indicator was which children (of either race) were raised with their father in the home. (Explained that being monitored increases willpower, extra parent= extra monitor) But then like good social scientists they considered that maybe the blacks in Trinidad had their fathers around less because they were genetically more likely to leave because they have less self-control so they looked at children raised without fathers not because the father abandoned them voluntarily (ie gets killed) and found that (like everything) its a cross between environment and genetics.

And yes the marshmallow test and fast and slow thinking are mentioned. It's a recent book, you have heard of it.

[itsnotadamdavis]

I think poor vs. not-poor matters a lot more than rich vs. not-rich.Being poor means expending will power for even the most basic decisions. If you're out and you're hungry and you want to grab Chipotle that could ruin your budget for the week. You need to constantly exercise self-control to restrain your impulses for the things you want. If you're middle class there are still a million things you can't have, but you don't sweat at all over a six dollar burrito.