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

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: WHO’S MANIPULATING
YOUR DOPAMINE NEURONS?
Look for how retailers and marketers try to trigger the promise of reward. Make it a game when
you go to the grocery store or watch advertisements. What do you smell? What do you see? What
do you hear? Knowing that cues have been carefully chosen to tempt you can help you see them
for what they are and resist them
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PUTTING DOPAMINE TO WORK
When I discuss neuromarketing in class, some student will inevitably propose that we make certain
kinds of advertising and undisclosed retail manipulation illegal. This impulse is understandable, but
almost certainly impossible. The number of restrictions that would have to be put in place to create a
“safe” environment is not only implausible, but to the vast majority of people, unappealing. We want
to 
feel
our desires, and—for better or worse—we delight in a world that puts them on constant
display for us to dream about. That’s why people love window-shopping, flipping through luxury
magazines, and touring open houses. It’s difficult to imagine a world where our dopamine neurons
aren’t being constantly courted. And even if we were “protected” from dopamine stimulants, we’d
most likely start looking for something to stimulate our desires.
Since it’s unlikely we’ll ever outlaw the promise of reward, we might as well put it to good use.
We can take a lesson from neuromarketers and try to “dopaminize” our least favorite tasks. An
unpleasant chore can be made more appealing by introducing a reward. And when the rewards of our
actions are far off in the future, we can try to squeeze a little extra dopamine out of neurons by
fantasizing about the eventual payoff (not unlike those lotto commercials).
Some economists have even proposed dopaminizing “boring” things like saving for retirement and
filing your taxes on time. For example, imagine a savings account where your money is protected, and
you can take it out whenever you want—but instead of getting a guaranteed low interest rate, you are
entered in lotteries for large cash prizes. People who buy lottery tickets but don’t have a dollar in the
bank might be much more enthusiastic about saving their money if every deposit they made gave them
another chance to win $100,000. Or imagine if by filing your taxes on time and honestly reporting all
income and deductions, you had a shot at winning back the entire year’s taxes. Wouldn’t this motivate
you to beat the April 15 deadline? While the IRS may be a little slow to move on this proposal, it’s
something that a business could easily implement to motivate on-time expense reports.
The promise of reward has even been used to help people overcome addiction. One of the most
effective intervention strategies in alcohol and drug recovery is something called the fish bowl.
Patients who pass their drug tests win the opportunity to draw a slip of paper out of a bowl. About
half of these slips have a prize listed on them, ranging in value from $1 to $20. Only one slip has a
big prize, worth $100. Half of the slips have no prize value at all—instead, they say, “Keep up the
good work.” This means that when you reach your hand into the fish bowl, the odds are you’re going
to end up with a prize worth $1 or a few kind words. This shouldn’t be motivating—but it is. In one
study, 83 percent of patients who had access to fish bowl rewards stayed in treatment for the whole
twelve weeks, compared with only 20 percent of patients receiving standard treatment without the
promise of reward. Eighty percent of the fish bowl patients passed all their drug tests, compared with
only 40 percent of the standard treatment group. When the intervention was over, the fish bowl group
was also far less likely to relapse than patients who received standard treatment—even without the
continued promise of reward.
Amazingly, the fish bowl technique works even better than paying patients for passing their drug
tests—despite the fact that patients end up with far less “reward” from the fish bowl than they would
from guaranteed payments. This highlights the power of an unpredictable reward. Our reward system
gets much more excited about a possible big win than a guaranteed smaller reward, and it will
motivate us to do whatever provides the chance to win. This is why people would rather play the

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lottery than earn a guaranteed 2 percent interest in a savings account, and why even the lowest
employee in a company should be made to believe he could someday be the CEO.