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

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE : WHEN SETBACKS HAPPEN
This week, pay special attention to how you handle any willpower failure. Do you criticize
yourself and tell yourself that you’ll never change? Do you feel like this setback reveals what is
wrong with you—that you’re lazy, stupid, greedy, or incompetent? Do you feel hopeless, guilty,
ashamed, angry, or overwhelmed? Do you use the setback as an excuse to indulge further?

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BREAKING THE WHAT-THE-HELL CYCLE
Two psychologists—Claire Adams at Louisiana State University and Mark Leary at Duke University
—set up a study guaranteed to trigger the what-the-hell effect. They invited weight-watching young
women into the laboratory, then encouraged them to eat doughnuts and candy in the name of science.
These researchers had an intriguing hypothesis about how to break the what-the-hell cycle. If guilt
sabotages self-control, they thought, then maybe the opposite of guilt would support self-control.
Their unlikely strategy: Make half these doughnut-eating dieters feel 
better
about giving in.
The women were told that they would be participating in two separate studies: one on the effect of
food on mood, and a taste test of several different candies. In the first study, all of the women were
asked to choose either a glazed or chocolate doughnut and finish the whole thing within four minutes.
They were also asked to drink an entire glass of water—the researchers’ trick to make sure they felt
uncomfortably full (a tighter waistband is good for inducing guilt). Then the women filled out surveys
about how they felt.
Before the candy taste test, half of the women received a special message designed to relieve their
guilt. The experimenter mentioned that participants sometimes felt guilty about eating a whole
doughnut. The experimenter then encouraged each participant not to be too hard on herself, and to
remember that everyone indulges sometimes. The other women got no such message.
Then came the test of whether self-forgiveness would break the what-the-hell cycle. The
experimenter served each dieter three large bowls of candy—peanut-butter-and-chocolate Reese’s
Poppers, fruit-flavored Skittles, and York Peppermint Patties—chosen to appeal to any sweet tooth.
The women were asked to sample each candy in order to rate it, and were invited to eat as much or as
little as they liked. If the women still felt guilty about eating the doughnut, they should say to
themselves, “I already broke the diet, so what does it matter if I inhale these Skittles?”
After the taste test, the experimenter weighed the candy bowls to find out how much each
participant had eaten. The self-forgiveness intervention was a clear success: The women who
received the special message ate only 28 grams of candy, compared with almost 70 grams by women
who were not encouraged to forgive themselves. (For reference, a single Hershey’s Kiss is 4.5
grams.) Most people are surprised by this finding. Common sense says that the message “Everyone
indulges sometimes; don’t be too hard on yourself” will only give dieters permission to eat more.
And yet getting rid of guilt kept the women from overindulging in the taste test. We may think that guilt
motivates us to correct our mistakes, but it’s just one more way that feeling bad leads to giving in.

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