Willpower, the Key to Success
We all have experienced busy and stressful days in McGill, especially exam times. In those crazy time of the year, small changes can happen but go unnoticed. Think carefully, is resisting Facebook, Instagram, etc. harder during those days? Is it harder to keep up your good habits like going to gym or eating healthy? These shortcomings can be explained by one common denominator, will power. Willpower is a limited mental energy that people rely a lot during the day and when depleted, they lose self-control. That is why students struggling with exams and projects, find it hard to resist temptations like chocolate, internet and food, and it gets harder to keep up the good habits like wearing clean sucks and going to gym. When we do many tasks at the same time, our performance will suffer in many of them.
There are many different and creative ways to test the willpower. One of these tests is called, The Radish Experiment which was developed by Baumeister, one of the field’s leading researchers. In his paper, Baumeister explained that hungry psychology students walked into his lab and faced three types of food on a table: warm cookies, some pieces of chocolate and a bowl of radish. However, they were assigned to eat only one of those foods. Then, they were asked to work on geometry puzzles. The puzzles were actually unsolvable and the test was to see how long they would work on the puzzles before giving up. It was shown that those who were assigned to eat the radishes, were able to stick to their assigned food but they gave up on the puzzles sooner than the students who ate the cookies and chocolates. This suggested that their willpower was depleted by their early resistance to cookies, so they had less mental power to work on the puzzles.
As interesting as this experiment is, I think there are still few things that can improve the experiment. People have different amount of self-control/will power, but this was not taken into account and thus, this factor was not controlled in this experiment. Having a measure of participant’s self-control before study can improve the interpretation of data. Also, there is a huge difference between radish and chocolate/cookie, and since all the participants were psychology students and familiar with the psychology experiences, this huge difference could capture their attention, provide some hint and cause them to make assumptions and behave accordingly. Therefore, if radishes were replaced by a less obvious food, it could improve the internal validity of the experiment.
The Article: Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (January 01, 1998). Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 5, 1252–65.
