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

WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: CATCH SELF-CONTROL
Research shows that thinking about someone with good self-control can increase your own
willpower. Is there someone who can serve as a willpower role model for your challenge?
Someone who has struggled with the same challenge and succeeded, or someone who
exemplifies the kind of self-control you would like to have? (In my class, the most frequently
nominated willpower role models are accomplished athletes, spiritual leaders, and politicians,
though family members and friends may provide even more motivation, as you’ll see in a little
bit.) When you need a little extra willpower, bring your role model to mind. Ask yourself: What
would this willpower wonder do?

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WHY PEOPLE YOU LIKE ARE MORE CONTAGIOUS THAN STRANGERS
In cold or flu season, you can catch a virus from any person you come into contact with—the
coworker who coughs without covering her mouth, the cashier who swipes your credit card and hands
it back teeming with germs. This is what epidemiologists call 
simple contagion
. With simple
contagion, it doesn’t matter who introduces the infection. The germs of a total stranger have just as
much influence as the germs of a loved one, and one exposure is enough to infect you.
The transmission of behaviors doesn’t work this way. Social epidemics—like the spread of obesity
or smoking—follow a pattern of 
complex contagion
. It is not enough to come into contact with a
person who is a “carrier” of the behavior. Your relationship to that person matters. In the Framingham
community, behaviors weren’t spreading over fences and backyards. The social epidemics spread
through networks of mutual respect and liking, not the orderly network of a street grid. A coworker
didn’t have anywhere near the effect of a close friend, and even the friend of a friend’s friend had
more influence than a person you saw every day, but didn’t like. This kind of selective infection is
almost unheard-of in the world of diseases—it’s as if your immune system could only defend itself
against a virus you caught from someone you didn’t know or didn’t like. But that’s exactly how
behaviors spread. Social closeness matters more than geographic closeness.
Why are behaviors so contagious within close relationships? To stretch the immune system analogy
a little further, we could say that our immune system only rejects the goals and behavior of other
people 
if it recognizes those other people as “not us.”
After all, our physical immune system
doesn’t attack our own cells; what it recognizes as us, it leaves alone. But what it recognizes as
other
, it treats like a threat—isolating or destroying that virus or bacteria so you don’t get sick. It
turns out that when we think about people we love, respect, and feel similar to, our brains treat them
more like us than like 
not us
. You can see it in a brain scanner, watching adults think first about
themselves, then about their mothers. The brain regions activated by self and mom are almost
identical, showing that who we think we are includes the people we care about. Our sense of self
depends on our relationships with others, and in many ways, we only know who we are by thinking
about other people. Because we include other people in our sense of self, their choices influence our
choices.