Psyche, Science, and Society

Self-control takes effort, but can be strengthened

The concept of “psychic energy,” once popular, has been decidedly unpopular in recent years. Yet it is having a small revival. The cause of this is the work of personality-social psychologist Roy Baumeister. This week the New York Times had an Op-Ed that referred to Baumeister’s work on self-control, part of his broader research program in this area. The take home message is that self-control is difficult and that its exercise in one area makes it more difficult to exercise in another. Yet the message is that one’s capacity for self-control can be strengthened. Self-control, by the way, is a central component of what psychoanalysts used to call “ego control”:

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind

By Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang

DECLINING house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years. With a relatively long recession looking increasingly likely, many American families may be planning to tighten their belts.

Interestingly, restraining our consumer spending, in the short term, may cause us to actually loosen the belts around our waists. What’s the connection? The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.

In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.

Other activities that deplete willpower include resisting food or drink, suppressing emotional responses, restraining aggressive or sexual impulses, taking exams and trying to impress someone. Task persistence is also reduced when people are stressed or tired from exertion or lack of sleep.

What limits willpower? Some have suggested that it is blood sugar, which brain cells use as their main energy source and cannot do without for even a few minutes. Most cognitive functions are unaffected by minor blood sugar fluctuations over the course of a day, but planning and self-control are sensitive to such small changes. Exerting self-control lowers blood sugar, which reduces the capacity for further self-control. People who drink a glass of lemonade between completing one task requiring self-control and beginning a second one perform equally well on both tasks, while people who drink sugarless diet lemonade make more errors on the second task than on the first. Foods that persistently elevate blood sugar, like those containing protein or complex carbohydrates, might enhance willpower for longer periods.

In the short term, you should spend your limited willpower budget wisely. For example, if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.

On the other hand, if you need to study for a big exam, it might be smart to let the housecleaning slide to conserve your willpower for the more important job. Similarly, it can be counterproductive to work toward multiple goals at the same time if your willpower cannot cover all the efforts that are required. Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success.

Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another.

In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.

No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.

Whatever the explanation, consistently doing any activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower — and the ability to resist impulses and delay gratification is highly associated with success in life.

Sandra Aamodt, the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”

Add comment April 6th, 2008

Social psychology of racial equality: Unequal perspectives

The Washington Post today has an interesting exploration of new results on the social psychology of race relations. Whites, they report, think more about how far we’ve come from the bad old days, and think things are nearly fine. Blacks, however, think of how far we are from true equality and are profoundly disturbed. Whites claim they would be willing to be born black for a mere $5,000:

Unequal Perspectives on Racial Equality

By Shankar Vedantam

Imagine that you are waiting in line to be born . . . Presently, you are scheduled to be born white. However, you are offered an alternative arrangement. In exchange for a cash gift, to be deposited in a bank account for you when you are born, you can choose to instead be born black.

Social psychologists Philip Mazzocco and Mahzarin Banaji once asked white volunteers how much money would cover the “costs” of being born black instead of white. The volunteers guessed that about $5,000 ought to cover the lifetime disadvantages of being an average black person rather than an average white person, in the United States. By contrast, when asked how much they wanted to go without television, the volunteers demanded a million dollars.

Mazzocco and Banaji were taken aback: The average black person in America is 447 percent more likely to be imprisoned than the average white person, and 521 percent more likely to be murdered. Blacks earn 60 cents to the dollar compared with whites who have the same education levels and marital status. The black poverty rate is nearly twice the white poverty rate. Blacks tend to die five years earlier than whites; the infant mortality rate among black babies is nearly 1 1/2 times the rate among white babies. And because of long-standing patterns of inheritance, blacks and whites begin life with substantial disparities in family wealth.

“The point we were making is, whatever the cost of being black might be, whites are vastly underestimating it,” said Mazzocco, of Ohio State University at Mansfield. “You throw in the 5-to-1 wealth gap . . . if you wanted to put a dollar-and-cents value on the difference, you would come up with a number much larger than $5,000.”

The unusual experiment is one of dozens that have found that whites tend to have a relatively rosy impression of what it means to be a black person in America. Whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to believe that the position of African Americans has improved a great deal. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to believe that conditions for African Americans are growing worse.

This long-standing war of perceptions created the perfect storm last week after sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — former pastor of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) — painted a picture of stark inequality at odds with white perceptions.

Mazzocco and Banaji, who teaches at Harvard, found that when volunteers learned about the disparities, they started to demand much larger sums of money.

“Many whites assume blacks are making use of old crimes to gain present-day benefits that are unearned,” Mazzocco said. “Underlying this is a misunderstanding and ignorance about black costs and white privilege.”

But knowledge about disparities is not the only reason whites and blacks have different perceptions about racial equality. Social psychologist Richard Eibach at Yale University has shown that whites and blacks often employ different yardsticks to measure racial equality. Whites tend to measure progress by comparing the present and the past — and America has made giant strides since the Jim Crow era. Nonwhites, Eibach found, are likely to evaluate racial equality in comparison with an idealized future. These yardsticks create entirely different perceptions.

When Eibach asked each group to use the other’s yardstick — whites to focus on the future and nonwhites to think about the past — the differences disappeared. Now, everyone agreed the country had come a long way — and had a long way to go.

In a speech last week, Obama similarly argued that his former pastor had failed to acknowledge how America had changed for the better. But Wright’s critics, Obama added, were also wrong — because true equality is still remote.

The intriguing question prompted by Eibach’s study is why whites and blacks are unconsciously drawn to different yardsticks. Eibach said one reason might be that racial equality means different things to whites and blacks: Whites see it as an ideal, blacks as a necessity. When people evaluate progress toward idealistic or optional goals — saving for a vacation — they tend to focus on progress made. But when people think of necessities — paying the rent — they focus on how much they are short.

In another set of experiments, social psychologist Amanda Brodish at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research showed that prejudice may play a role, too. Whites with high levels of prejudice — who think blacks are not as smart as whites, who think blacks and whites are inherently unequal, and who reported being uncomfortable with a black roommate — invariably evaluated racial equality only in comparison with the past.

By contrast, said Brodish’s co-author, Patricia Devine of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, low-prejudice whites were equally willing to apply the yardsticks of both past and future.

While comparisons with a dreadful past and an ideal future produce glass-is-half-empty-vs.-half-full perceptions, the choices are not equivalent. Each perception is accurate, but Eibach said that progress toward true equality required whites to focus on where the country ought to be instead of becoming complacent about how far the country had come.

“There is a disconnect between whites and blacks about what it feels like to be a victim of mundane discrimination,” Eibach concluded. “There is a tendency to say, ‘These mundane things are nothing like the past,’ but the lived reality of bearing that weight — the frustrations and indignities — that is a major source of the disconnect.”

Add comment March 24th, 2008

Chris Hedges: A culture of atrocity

Chris Hedges reminds us that a war of occupation is itself:

A Culture of Atrocity

by Chris Hedges

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms “atrocity-producing situations.” In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing-the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm-to murder-the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.

The American killing project is not described in these terms to the distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract of glory, honor and heroism, of the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. The press, as in most wars, is slavishly compliant. The reality of the war-the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis-is not transmitted to the American public. The press chronicles the physical and emotional wounds visited on those who kill in our name. The Iraqis, those we kill, are largely nameless, faceless dead. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a regrettable but necessary virtue.

The reality and the mythic narrative of war collide when embittered combat veterans return home. They find themselves estranged from the world around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation.

Tina Susman in a June 12 article in the Los Angeles Times gave readers a rare glimpse into this side of the war. She wrote about a 17-year-old Iraqi boy killed by the wild, random fire unleashed by American soldiers in a Baghdad neighborhood following a bomb blast. These killings, which Iraqis say occur daily, are seldom confirmed, but in this case the boy was the son of a local Los Angeles Times employee.

Iraqi physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study last year in the British medical journal The Lancet. The study estimated that 655,000 more people than normal have died in Iraq since coalition forces invaded the country in March 2003. This is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech last December.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence. The remaining deaths occurred from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 additional violent deaths per day throughout the country.

Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated last year that U.S. troops had killed “tens of thousands” of innocent Iraqis through accidents or reckless fire.

Official figures have ceased to exist. The Iraqi government no longer releases the number of civilian casualties and the U.S. military does not usually give reports about civilians killed or wounded by U.S. forces.

“It’s a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance,” Alaa Safi told the Los Angeles Times. He said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.

War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in primal impulses we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to give or annihilate life. Armed units become crazed by the frenzy of destruction. All things, including human beings, become objects-objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.

Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighborhoods with high-powered explosives, and convoys tear through Iraq, speeding freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in firepower that obliterates landscapes and villages. The moral universe is turned upside down. No one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of barbarity, pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence.

It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men and women into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy. All feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist gratuitous slaughter. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.

Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war and speak the truth. Besides, the public has little desire to puncture the mythic, heroic narrative. The essence of war, which is death, is carefully masked from view. The few lone journalists who attempt to speak the truth about war, to describe the experience of constantly being on the receiving end of American firepower, soon become pariahs, no longer able to embed with the military, dine out with officials in the Green Zone or get press credentials. And so the vast majority of the press lies to us, although not overtly; it is the lie of omission, but it is a lie nonetheless.

The veterans who return, even if they do not speak about the atrocities they have committed or witnessed in Iraq, will spend the rest of their lives coping with what they have done. They will suffer delayed reactions to stress. They will endure, as have those who returned from Vietnam, a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The high priests of our civic religion, from politicians to preachers to television pundits, who promised them glory and honor through war betrayed them.

War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal is seeping into the ranks of the American military. It is bringing us a new wave of enraged and disenfranchised veterans who will never again trust the country that sent them to war.

We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds. We give them uniforms with colored ribbons for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our demented civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself.

Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits-there are few people in pulpits worth listening to. The prophets are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and find the courage to speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must hear and digest in order to know ourselves. These veterans, the ones who dare to tell the truth, have seen and tasted how war plunges us into barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies, if we take the time to listen, which alone can save us.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

Add comment June 18th, 2007

Milgram’s Obedience

Obedience, the classic film on the Milgram experiments on obedience to authority has just become available online on Google video. Watch it here:

Or else go to Google video.

1 comment May 19th, 2007

Bad Apples and Bad Barrels: Bad Metaphors and Blind Spots Regarding Evil?

An interesting commentary on Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect from the American Psychological Society’s APS Observer (vol. 20, #5, May):

Bad Apples and Bad Barrels: Bad Metaphors and Blind Spots Regarding
Evil?
by Vladimir J. Konecni
University of California, San Diego

The subtitle of Philip Zimbardo’s (2007) book, The Lucifer Effect, (reviewed by Wray Herbert, Observer, April 2007) is Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. The book follows Zimbardo’s talk of the same name at the 2006 APS convention, the crux of which, according to writer Eric Wargo (2006), was on the transformation of “good, ordinarypeople into perpetrators of evil” by situational pressures, using the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib as a case in point .

Even someone fully convinced of the sufficient applicability of the empirical results marshaled by Zimbardo, and of the value of invoking explanations post hoc, is presumably forced by the existence of guards who did not misbehave” to admit that a pure situational explanation cannot be at issue, but rather one involving the interaction of situational factors with those of the personality, attitudes, and expectations of convicted Abu Ghraib guard Sgt. Frederick and other perpetrators.

The point is important because the question arises as to why the battery of tests given to Frederick at Zimbardo’s request (personal communication, October 8, 2006) did not pick out any predispositions to react to the situational factors in a pathological manner. The answer must be that the predispositions to respond to situational factors in an “evil” manner were not appropriately measured. Why?

Is it possible that American social scientists have a “blind spot” for the behaviors and attitudes that might be good predictors, but seem to them unremarkable? For example, is volunteering for the Army or the Army Reserve “normal”? Is the belief that one’s country is the best in everything, and, especially, having a condescending attitude toward other peoples and countries, normative? Do such attitudes distinguish volunteers from draftees, and among the various groups of volunteers? Are future torturers more likely to subscribe to the “premise… that America possesses absolute power,” as the London Times columnist Simon Jenkins (2006) has put it?

The United States is not among the 104 signatories (including the United Kingdom) of the International Criminal Court Treaty, and it has used controversial incarceration and trial procedures with no international oversight. Arguably, a considerable majority of Americans does not agree with such policies despite 9/11: The question is whether Army volunteers agree with them to an unusually high degree — even before they enlist.

Have Frederick et al. been asked this simple question: “Do you believe that the wartime behavior of U.S. soldiers and occupation troops should be judged by an objective international court?”

Finally, one might ask: Why do American psychologists generally become motivated to explain “evil” in situational terms only when Americans commit the atrocities (Konecni, 2005)? Unlike Zimbardo in Frederick’s trial, no American psychologist with a “situational” worldview was a defense expert witness, for example, at the Hague trials of not just Milos?evic, but also of his subordinates. Even the “situational” defense of a civil war having taken place (with all the “evil” that civil wars usually involve) was denied to these defendants by the Hague prosecutors. Victor’s justice tends to impute exclusively “internal”causes to enemy atrocities.

Wargo (2006) quotes Zimbardo: “It’s time we asked the big questions like the nature of evil.” However, we seem to be no closer to a profound answer than the ones given by Dostoevsky, Robert Musil, and Hannah Arendt.

References

Jenkins, S. (2006, November 12). America gets real, but Britain is still lost in military fantasy land. The Sunday Times (London).

Herbert, W. (2007, April). The Banality of Evil. Observer, 20, 11-12.

Konecni, V.J. (2005, March 25). Abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib [Letter to the editor]. Science, 307, 1873.

Wargo, E. (2006, August). Bad apples or bad barrels? Zimbardo on ‘The Lucifer effect.’ Observer, 19, 33-34, 45.

Zimbardo, P.G. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil.New York: Random House.

1 comment May 7th, 2007