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→Researchers and psychologists who view self-control and willpower as being different
*A limited resource that can be depleted<ref>[https://positivepsychology.com/psychology-of-willpower/ What Is Willpower? The Psychology Behind Self-Control]</ref>}}
*A limited resource that can be depleted<ref>[https://positivepsychology.com/psychology-of-willpower/ What Is Willpower? The Psychology Behind Self-Control]</ref>}}
== Data indicating ego depletion theory concerning self-control is invalid ==
See also: [[Mindset]] and [[Growth mindset]] and [[Motivation]]
Jeremy Sutton Ph.D. writes:
{{Cquote|“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.” - Henry Ford (Goodreads, n.d.).
For a long time, psychologists thought of willpower as a limited resource—known as the ‘ego-depletion theory’ (American Psychological Association, 2012).
Work by Roy Baumeister led to the view that willpower is finite and–just like energy when muscles are overworked–can be used up. In his famous ‘cookie’ experiment, people who could resist eating them right away (called delayed gratification) had a more challenging time controlling temptation later in other tasks (Baumeister & Tierney, 2011).
The theory suggests that if you set more than one self-improvement goal, you may draw on willpower reserves, leaving you depleted and risking failure (Baumeister & Tierney, 2011).
And if willpower is a limited resource, we must use it wisely to achieve long-term goals (American Psychological Association, 2012).
And yet, recent and contradictory psychological research and theory suggest there isn’t a fixed amount of willpower. “Instead of thinking of willpower as the amount of petrol in a car…think of it as the car’s battery,” says Krishna Savani from Nanyang Technological University (Jarrett, 2018, para. 3).
Savani believes that with the right [[mindset]] and [[motivation]], we can ‘own’ our self-control and willpower. And this is backed up by data. Studies show that people are less likely to quit a task when told their resolve is not fixed but unlimited.
While building willpower is not easy, psychology suggests that “a huge part of the solution is simply believing that you can do it” (Hollins, 2021, p. 36).
So, what happens when we do and don’t get things done?
It seems that mindset is crucial. Students coming up to exams that were told willpower was unlimited experienced less stress, fewer bad moods, and could step up their efforts. If we ‘believe’ we have the reserves available to tackle the challenges ahead, we increase our chances of future success (Jarrett, 2018).<ref>[https://positivepsychology.com/psychology-of-willpower/ What Is Willpower? The Psychology Behind Self-Control]</ref>}}
See also: [[Growth mindset]]
The abstract for the 2017 journal article ''Reverse Ego-Depletion: Acts of Self-Control Can Improve Subsequent Performance in Indian Cultural Contexts'' published in the journal ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology'' indicates:
{{Cquote|The strength model of self-control has been predominantly tested with people from Western cultures. The present research asks whether the phenomenon of ego-depletion generalizes to a culture emphasizing the virtues of exerting mental self-control in everyday life. A pilot study found that whereas Americans tended to believe that exerting willpower on mental tasks is depleting, Indians tended to believe that exerting willpower is energizing. Using dual task ego-depletion paradigms, Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c found reverse ego-depletion among Indian participants, such that participants exhibited better mental selfcontrol on a subsequent task after initially working on strenuous rather than nonstrenuous cognitive tasks. Studies 2 and 3 found that Westerners exhibited the ego-depletion effect whereas Indians exhibited the reverse ego-depletion effect on the same set of tasks. Study 4 documented the causal effect of lay beliefs about whether exerting willpower is depleting versus energizing on reverse ego-depletion with both Indian and Western participants. Together, these studies reveal the underlying basis of the ego-depletion phenomenon in culturally shaped lay theories about willpower.<ref>[https://www.krishnasavani.com/CV_files/Savani_Job_2017.pdf ''Reverse Ego-Depletion: Acts of Self-Control Can Improve Subsequent Performance in Indian Cultural Contexts'']. ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology''. 2017, Vol. 113, No. 4, 589 – 607</ref>}}
[[File:India location.png|thumbnail|right|200px|Indians tend to believe that exerting willpower is energizing.<ref>[https://www.krishnasavani.com/CV_files/Savani_Job_2017.pdf ''Reverse Ego-Depletion: Acts of Self-Control Can Improve Subsequent Performance in Indian Cultural Contexts'']. ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology''. 2017, Vol. 113, No. 4, 589 – 607</ref>]]
The New Scientist article
{{Cquote|Baumeister recently revised his theory to take this into account. In a book chapter published last year with his colleague Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota, he argues that while there is a limited resource behind self-control, it rarely, if ever, runs dry. According to the revised theory, whether we are able to maintain self-control comes down to our judgement about how much willpower juice we have left and how we choose to allocate these reserves. As with physical effort, in which our muscles feel tired long before they are close to collapse, how long we can keep going is all about how much energy we think is left...
Savani and Job wanted to see if the cultural belief that effort is energising would influence the way ego depletion works in India. If prompting people to think of exerting self-control as energising eliminates the ego-depletion effect, as Job’s earlier research showed, then perhaps people in India might be immune to ego depletion. In fact, when they repeated Baumeister’s experiments with hundreds of Indian participants, they actually showed a “reverse ego depletion” effect. When the first task was harder, they tended to perform better on the second task. Savani concluded that ego depletion is by no means an inevitable feature of human psychology.
“We no longer have an excuse for being lazy, saying ‘Oh, I have worked so hard, I need a break’,” he says. “No matter how mentally tired you are, you always have mental capacity to concentrate on and work on a given task.” For his part, Baumeister told us that this new “profoundly important” research from India is “truly fascinating” and he acknowledged that “if born out by further work [it] could really bring about major revisions to our understanding”.
If replicated – and we still don’t know whether this effect also applies to tests of self-control based on temptation as well as mental concentration – it could mean that seemingly superhuman powers of willpower and self-control may be within our reach, given the right mindset and a little practice. Taken with the other findings, it seems that there is a powerful psychological component to how much willpower we can muster in any given situation. See mental challenges and resistance to temptation as energising rather than draining, and your beliefs may well become self-fulfilling.
It may well be worth the effort. According to a recent survey of university students, those who believed that willpower is unlimited were not only happier, but suffered less from stress and bad moods when exam time approached. Diaries that the students kept suggested this was because they were able to step up their efforts to meet increasing challenges. Another survey of contributors to a stress and burnout online forum found that those who endorsed the “willpower is unlimited” idea were happier and less stressed.<ref>[https://archive.ph/BqFTr Don't quit now: Why you have more willpower than you think], New Scientist, 2017</ref>}}
== Quotes on self-control ==
== Quotes on self-control ==