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

WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: STRENGTHEN YOUR
IMMUNE SYSTEM
We don’t always catch other people’s goals. Sometimes seeing someone else give in to
temptation can actually enhance our self-control. When you are firmly committed to a goal (e.g.,

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losing weight), but aware that you have a conflicting goal (e.g., enjoying a deep-dish pizza),
seeing someone do something that conflicts with your strongest goal will put your brain on high
alert. It will activate your dominant goal even more strongly and start generating strategies to
help you stick with it. Psychologists call this 
counterac-tive control
, but you can think of it as an
immune response to anything that threatens your self-control.
The best way to strengthen your immune response to other people’s goals is to spend a few
minutes at the beginning of your day thinking about your own goals, and how you could be
tempted to ignore them. Like a vaccine that protects you from other people’s germs, reflecting on
your own goals will reinforce your intentions and help you avoid goal contagion.

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CATCHING THE GOAL TO LOSE CONTROL
Sometimes we don’t catch specific goals—eat a snack, spend money, seduce a stranger—but the more
general goal to follow our impulses. Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands
have shown this in a variety of real-world settings, using unsuspecting passersby as their subjects.
They plant “evidence” of people behaving badly—for example, chaining bicycles to a fence right next
to a prominent “No Bicycles” sign, and leaving grocery carts in a parking garage with a “Please
Return Your Carts to the Store” policy. Their studies show that rule-breaking is contagious. People
who stumble into the researchers’ setup take their cues from what other people have done, and ignore
the signs. They, too, chain up their bikes and leave their carts in the garage.
But the consequences go further than that. When people saw a bike chained to a no-bicycles fence,
they were also more likely to take an illegal shortcut through the fence. When they saw carts in a
parking garage, they were more likely to dump their trash on the floor of the garage. The contagious
goal was bigger than the goal to break a specific rule. They caught the goal to do whatever they
wanted, rather than what they were supposed to do.
When we observe evidence of other people ignoring rules and following their impulses, we are
more likely to give in to 
any
of our own impulses. This means that anytime we see someone behaving
badly, our own self-control deteriorates (bad news for fans of reality television, where the three rules
of high ratings are: Drink too much, pick a fight, and sleep with someone else’s boyfriend). Hearing
about someone cheating on their taxes might make you feel freer to cheat on your diet. Seeing other
drivers go over the speed limit might inspire you to go over your budget. In this way, we can catch
willpower weakness from others—even if our personal weakness is very different than the giving in
that we observe. Importantly, we don’t even need to see people in action. Like germs that linger on a
doorknob long after a sick person passed through, an action can be passed on to us when we merely
see evidence that others have done.