The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It

CHAPTER SUMMARY
The Idea
: Self-control is influenced by social proof, making both willpower and temptation
contagious.
Under the Microscope
• 
Your social network.
Do other people in your social circle share your willpower
challenge?
• 
Who are you mirroring?
Keep your eyes open for any evidence that you are mirroring
other people’s behavior.
• 
Who are you most likely to catch something from?
Who are your “close others”? Are
there any behaviors that you’ve picked up from them, or that they have caught from you?
• 
But Ma, everyone else is doing it!
Do you use social proof to convince yourself that your
willpower challenge is no big deal?
Willpower Experiments
• 
Strengthen your immune system.
To avoid catching other people’s willpower failures,
spend a few minutes at the beginning of your day thinking about your goals.
• 
Catch self-control.
When you need a little extra willpower, bring a role model to mind.
Ask yourself: What would this willpower wonder do?
• 
The power of pride.
Go public with your willpower challenges, and imagine how proud
you will feel when you succeed at them.
• 
Make it a group project.
Can you enlist others in a willpower challenge?

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NINE
Don’t Read This Chapter: The Limits of “I Won’t” Power
T
he year was 1985, and the scene of the crime was a psychology laboratory at Trinity University, a
small liberal arts school in San Antonio, Texas. Seventeen undergraduates were consumed with a
thought they couldn’t control. They knew it was wrong—they knew they shouldn’t be thinking about it.
But it was just so damn captivating. Every time they tried to think of something else, the thought
bullied its way back into their consciousness. They just couldn’t stop thinking about 
white bears
.
White bears were hardly a regular concern of these college students, whose minds were more
typically preoccupied by sex, exams, and the disappointment of New Coke. But white bears were
irresistible to them at that moment—and all because they had been given the instruction “For the next
five minutes, please try not to think about white bears.”
These students were the first participants in a series of studies by Daniel Wegner, who is now a
psychology professor at Harvard University. Early in his career, Wegner had come across a story
about Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. A young Tolstoy had been told by his older brother to sit in a
corner until he could stop thinking about a white bear. His brother returned much later to discover
Tolstoy still in the corner, paralyzed by his inability to stop thinking about a white bear. Wegner soon
found that he couldn’t get this story, and the question it raised, out of his mind: Why can’t we control
our thoughts?
Wegner set up a study nearly identical to Tolstoy’s childhood test of mental control, asking
participants to think about anything they wanted, except for a white bear. The following partial
transcript from one woman thinking aloud reveals how difficult this was for most people:
I’m trying to think of a million things to make me think about everything but a white bear and I
keep thinking of it over and over and over. So . . . ummm, hey, look at this brown wall. It’s like,
every time I try and not think about a white bear, I’m still thinking about one.
This went on, with little variation, for fifteen minutes.
The inability to stop thinking about white bears might not strike you as the worst willpower failure
in the world. But as we’ll see, the problem with prohibition extends to any thought we try to ban. The
latest research on anxiety, depression, dieting, and addiction all confirm: “I won’t” power fails
miserably when it’s applied to the inner world of thoughts and feelings. As we enter that inner world,
we will find we need a new definition of self-control—one that makes room for letting go of control.

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