The Cutting-Edge Science of Self-Control (and what to do about it) | Michael Inzlicht, PhD

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Episode Transcript:

Michael Inzlicht: [00:00:00] So my mission is to look at the people who got high self-control, the high trait self-control, and try to understand what are they doing, what actions are they engaging in to bring about the good outcome? Because I don’t think it’s magic. I don’t think it’s just like they’re born with high self-control and therefore they don’t do anything. And all of a sudden they get all the good stuff later in life, like longevity, health, etc. they see the world differently and they engage in actions in accordance with how they view the world. You can start reflecting on your goals and start asking yourself, how do these goals align with my personal values? To get at autonomy, how does it connect with other people for relatedness? And how do I feel a sense of competence and mastery and self-efficacy from these? So kind of rethink it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:46] So have you ever found yourself staring down a piece of chocolate cake, or a cookie or some yummy treat, knowing you really shouldn’t indulge, but feeling almost powerless to resist it’s siren call? Or how about hitting the snooze button one too many times. Instead of dragging yourself out of bed for that planned early morning workout, I know I have been there more times than I can count. We set these ambitious goals for ourselves, but then our willpower or self-control seems to crumble in that moment of truth. Why is summoning up self-control so fiendishly difficult sometimes? What if I told you that much of what we think about willpower and self-discipline and self-control is turned on its head by cutting edge research? My guest today has been at the forefront of upending our assumptions about self-control through groundbreaking studies, and his surprising findings reveal that maybe, just maybe, we’ve been thinking about this whole willpower thing all wrong. So my guest is Michael Ancelet, a professor at the University of Toronto who has been upending our assumptions about willpower and self-control through his research and in his work and play lab. In his work spanning social psychology and cognitive science and neuroscience, he has challenged the once prevalent theory of what’s become known as ego depletion, the idea that self-control is a limited resource that gets used up over the course of the day. Michael’s findings point to a surprising truth people with exceptional self-control don’t actually resist temptation more than others.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:23] Instead, their secret may lie in how they perceive and relate to those temptations in the first place. And his exploration of the psychology behind willpower reveals some powerful insights that could transform how we pursue our goals and live with more ease, including why using words like willpower and self-control might actually be a part of the problem. In this conversation, he shares the wisdom from over 175 peer reviewed publications. We dive into practical strategies for boosting Self-regulation, reframing our motivations, and striking the ideal balance of work and play. Because, as Michael reminds us, the path to our best life demands both effort and rest. So stay tuned as we unpick the mysteries of self-control and uncover a blueprint for living with more freedom and authenticity and purpose. So excited to share this conversation with you! I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

[00:03:27] Excited to really explore your work. I’ve been fascinated by what’s been coming out of your lab recently, especially the the paper. I guess it was earlier this year on on Self-control. It’s something that I’ve been just thinking about on so many different levels reading research on and trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not real. So I was fascinated by sort of like your approach to it before we dive into the actual work, I’m curious also, just on a personal level, what’s your draw to really deepen into and explore just the the world of self-control.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:03:57] Oh, that’s a good question. Um, I mean, my origin story is probably a bit convoluted. I got into the research because I started my career out being a social psychologist who was interested in prejudice and discrimination, and there was a very influential theory floating around in the late 90s, early 2000 that suggested that self-control was a limited resource that would run out after use. And I wondered if being a target of prejudice might be such a pressure that would deplete someone’s self-control and leave them. Leave people who are again targeted by stereotypes or stigma or oppression being a little more impulsive, a little bit less able to kind of regulate themselves. So that’s how I started. But then I quickly left the world of the psychology of prejudice, because I became fascinated by the psychology of self-control and self-regulation and executive function and effort. And I think what drives me now Is why they number one. I’m just a curious person. I’m a scientist. I just want to understand how this thing works. And I feel that we have lots of lay intuitions. So we have, like, you know, we’re all lay psychologists to some extent, and we all have ideas about self-control. And I feel some of them, many of them perhaps are wrong. And I think scholars themselves, people who I respect and admire, say things that I don’t think are actually true about self-control. So that’s number one. And number two is I want to help people. I mean, I actually want people to be able to reach their goals. So whatever your goal might be. Can self-control help? I’m not so sure anymore, to be honest. But I do want to help people reach their goals, and I want to give people the best advice that we have as a science multiple sciences. We got psychology, economics, neuroscience. And I want to make sure pointing people in the right direction.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:43] Let’s dive into some of the myth busting then, because as you described, you know, it’s really late 90s and early 2000. I think we came into this time with a certain idea and it felt a little bit hardened, I think to a lot of people. Like, this is just the way it works in the context of self-control, like willpower and this notion that it’s a depletable resource. I think it was commonly known as the ego depletion theory. Take me into this because I think it was such a prominent, sort of like mode of thought around self-control that you’re really challenging. So first lay out like, what was that concept? What was that all about?

Michael Inzlicht: [00:06:14] This was a theory proposed by Roy Baumeister, who is I consider a friend, even though we spar intellectually. So he wrote a book in the 19, I think it was 1994 when it was published, and it was on the topic of self-control. And at that point, this was not a big topic in, in social psychology and psychology more generally. And so he wrote this book, and then he published in the late 90s, a series of papers that made some really interesting points, really, you can think of the theory is making two broad points. Okay. This theory might be called the theory of ego depletion or the resource model of self-control. But the theory makes two broad points one, Not so controversial, one now controversial. The first point that it made was that self-control underlies many, many different things that we care about in our lives. So, um, dieting, exercising, being kind and not expressing prejudice and discrimination, being, you know, kind of cool in the face of adversity or pressure. There’s just, you know, drug abuse, of course, gambling. There’s so many issues in our society, behaviors that we engage in that we need to regulate. There’s a little bit too much of it, and it’s not so good for us. Or maybe we want more of something and we can’t reach our goals.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:07:24] So we said all these things are related to self-control. They all draw upon self-control. So self-control, you can think of it as a central resource. It’s and this gets into point number two. But you can think of it as some sort of central all access self-control. Draw on the central resource. Point number two, the controversial one. But the one that got everyone excited is that this central resource that powers all these different things, this resource, we call it self-control, is a limited resource. It runs out after use. So a metaphor we could use is the metaphor of fuel in your car. It doesn’t matter where you go. You want to go to place a, b, c, d, e, f, g. Doesn’t matter. You still need fuel. It’s essential resource that powers your car and with any depletable resource when you use it, you lose it. So it runs out after use. And we all know that because anyone who owns a car knows you’ve got to go to a gas station eventually and to fill up a bit more fuel in there. So the idea here, though, is that self-control is an essential resource. There are all kinds of things, and we run out of it. What this means is, like in the course of a day, you’re going to be less able to control yourself or regulate yourself at the end of the day versus the beginning of day of the day.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:08:31] And I think we all kind of we might know that a bit intuitively. We also get tired. We have circadian rhythms that kind of determine how we do things. But this theory stated is if you control yourself at time one, it’s really a theory about time. You control yourself at time one you’ll have less of this resource at time two and maybe this resource will even be depleted at time two. So I’ll just give you one example, because maybe it’s a bit abstract at this point. And there’s like I think last time anyone counted, there was about 600 studies of the kind that I’m about to tell you about. So a typical study brings someone to a lab and you have you bring people to lab and you have half the people regulate themselves. You have them engage in self control. So maybe, for example, they’re told to not eat too fast before they come into the lab, and then they smell the waft of delicious cookies being baked in the lab. These are real studies, by the way.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:18] A little bit evil also.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:09:20] Yeah, right. Really? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that smell of freshly baked cookies is irresistible. We all love it. And then the cookies. Not only is the smell in the room, but the cookies are on the table, okay? And half the people are told you can’t eat those cookies. Please do not eat the cookies. The other half the people are told, do you want to eat cookies? Eat cookies? Okay, so half the people are resisting. They’re engaging in self-control. Control that people are enjoying what’s in front of them. That afterwards everyone in both conditions of this experiment would do something else that might require self-control. So maybe they, for example, there are some famous tests in psychology called the Stroop test. This is a test where you read a bunch of literally color words the word red, green, yellow, and blue. But the trick is that these words are printed or presented on a screen in colors themselves. So sometimes the word red is printed in green, sometimes it’s printed in red. When the word red is printed in green is harder to say what the color of the word is, and that is thought to involve attentional control. You’ve got to kind of stop yourself from the word reading response, and replacing it with a color naming response. And a typical pattern would be a finding would be that those who resisted eating cookies did less well, did more poorly on the Stroop task right afterwards. Okay, but that’s just one study. It’s one dependent variable, meaning one way we measured self-control, but there’s countless number of ways.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:10:42] So sometimes people might be put in a situation where they might blurt out something inappropriate, like they’re giving something, some food that is, you know, not culturally what they might see on a in a menu in North America and they think is gross. But it’s kind of rude to say that because you don’t call other people’s cultures food gross. And after they have regulated themselves at time one, they’re more likely to blurt out, oh, disgusting. Like getting a soup with a with a chicken leg in it, for example. Which actually my I would see my grandmother make growing up and not something I liked, but I definitely saw it. But we know it’s inappropriate. So people lost control. And again, 600 studies of this variety. So that’s the kind of general idea it kind of it left psychology quickly went into the business school’s influence in economics and neuroscience. And probably the peak of its fame was when Barack Obama, when he was still president, quoted it in a famous interview. I think it was in vanity, Vanity Fair by the, uh, the famous author Michael Lewis. Obama suggested that he only wore the same suit other than one tan suit that everyone criticized him for. He’d always wear the same exact colored suit, because that way he would avoid having to think about what to wear that day. Thinking through things involved with decision making which might draw upon the same self-control resource. And that way he was fresh for for later in the day. So it really became popular and widely touted.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:04] Yeah. I mean, so the notion is if I have this right, that the assumption was that we start the day with a certain amount with a full tank of willpower as the day goes by, as we have to use that to resist this or to exert effort here, or it sounds like you’re also saying make decisions. It’s sort of like draws on that same full tank, like, you know, decision making, resistance, willpower, effort. It all starts to draw a little bit of fuel from that tank. And each time we we dip into it, it depletes it. So our willpower goes down or down down, down. Our ability to control, to self-regulate, goes down. So by the end of the day, or maybe at lunchtime, you kind of have nothing left in the tank. So of course you’re going to have, you know, like the, the shake along with and the fries along with, you know, like your salad and stuff like that because you have nothing left to actually stop you from doing that. Is that that’s sort of like the general theory.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:12:55] That’s exactly right. You know, this kind of explains why, at the end of the day, even though you had all these grand ideas of, you know, doing something that’s good for you, that requires effort and control, you end up plopping yourself on the couch and watching, you know, endless YouTube videos, for example.

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:10] And a lot of people, as you described, have probably like they’ve experienced their version of this, you know, it’s like it’s later in the day. It’s like, well, I’m supposed to be doing, you know, I told myself I was going to read like after dinner, but now I’m just binging, like whatever the latest show is. And I really don’t want to be doing that, but I feel like I literally have no ability to stop doing it, whatever their version of it may be. So how does this? Because your work definitely challenges it. But this theory started to be challenged. Also, before you’re sort of like your recent work, at least as far as I know. I remember reading one study and tell me if I’m getting this entirely wrong. I can’t remember who came out with it. That said, whether you see willpower as a depletable resource or not is actually more a factor of whether you believe it to be a depletable resource or not. So it’s much more. Talk to me a little bit about challenges, the downfall to this theory.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:14:01] Yeah, I’m going to say off the bat, what I’m going to ask you and your listeners to hold in mind is actually two things at once that are opposite. This is why it’s hard for people to grapple with this, because the theory itself might be right in some ways. It might be right in some ways, and in a very simple sense that we didn’t need. We’ve known this for over 100 years now that we get tired. Okay. And at the end of the day, when we are tired, just like our bodies are, need rest, our minds need rest and thinking is. And controlling ourselves and exerting effort is a product of the mind. And we’re less willing to do that, or less able even to do that when we’re tired. Okay. And that’s probably true. So it is probably true that in the day, especially if you’re if you’re not, if you’re like a morning person, you might be less able or willing to do the kinds of things you want to be doing. Okay. I’m pretty sure that’s true. There’s lots of evidence for that from the field and just common sense. While that’s true, it doesn’t mean that the lab experiments that have been reported to support the theory are good or accurate or reveal things to us that that they say they reveal. So. Okay. So the challenges to ego depletion are the theory of ego depletion are multiple. You’ve already mentioned one. But essentially what what ended up happening was a series of studies started getting published that made it appear that whether we were able to control ourselves or not is less a matter of fuel being in the tank, whether we are able to control ourselves because we’ve been depleted and it seemed to be more a matter of like our interpretation, our perception or reality.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:15:35] I like to say our willingness to exert effort. And there’s a series of studies. So for example, this was conducted by some of the proponents of the resource model who I don’t think understood what they stumbled upon, but a classic study that kind of described what we call the sequential task paradigm, this paradigm of doing something at time, one that does or does not involve control, and then everyone does something at time, two that does involve control. And the people who control themselves at time one are less able to control themselves at time two. That’s the general pattern. Okay, but a series of studies started getting published. So, for example, again by the proponents of the theory itself, they had a study where the same pattern is there, but now they pay people to control themselves at time two. So now we want you to do whatever task it is, a Stroop task or the, you know, a be kind task, whatever it might be. And now we’re paying you to do this task. Well, all of a sudden you’re able to do it, you’re able to to to perform as well as the non depleted person. I even softer version of that is when the experimenter is really, really nice. The person in that room acts extra generous, extra kind, and now you feel obligation to that person, and now you perform as well as the non depleted person.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:16:41] So now it seems to be less about an inability and maybe more about a lack of willingness. So when you control yourself at time one, maybe you’re like hey man, I’m like, I’ve done this work for you and I’m no longer willing. I want to get out of the experiment right now. That could be what’s what’s going on. But just to drive the point home of how deeply inconsistent those findings are with the resource model, again, let’s go back to our metaphor of the car. A car does, in fact run not on a metaphorical resource, but a real resource fuel. When I get to work and my work is rather far away from my home, I’ve got to drive about 40km away. Now, if I didn’t have that much gas to begin with, and I get there and my gas tank is on empty, guess what? No amount of motivation is going to move the car. I can put $1 million on the hood of my of my car and my car will still not move, right? The only thing that will help it move is to refuel it. And it’s the same thing. Whatever resource it is that’s underlying self-control has run out. Then how can money overturn it? So it can’t be a resource that’s run out. There are other studies like you mentioned one. So for example, people have different conceptions of self-control. They might think self-control is limited, or they might think it’s a renewable resource. And apparently there are important cultural differences here. So in the West we tend to think of control system that runs out.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:17:56] But in India, for example, they have different views of self-control, that it’s a kind of a self-replenishing resource. And depending on how you view things working, you know, exerting self-control at time one does not deplete you. If you believe it’s renewable, you think it’s fine. There’s another study, which I particularly liked on it. I think it was at the University of Indiana by Ed Hirt and Josh Clarkson. They gave people false feedback after the time, one task, and they gave them feedback that told them, hey, you look really tired right now. Maybe you want to take a little rest? Or they said, wow, you have from this exercise it looks like you have lots of energy. You must have had a good night’s sleep last night, right? And then afterwards they everyone again does this second self-control task. And guess what they find? They find that how people perform at time two is shaped by the feedback they got. So in other words, you have people who are quote unquote depleted, but yet believe they’ve got lots of energy. They perform that task just as well as someone who is not depleted, someone who is not depleted and was told they were tired. They all of a sudden acted as if they were depleted. So it seemed to be like something else was going on. It didn’t seem to be a resource that could explain things. So yeah, I trouble brewing, but they’re done another chapter, which is even more problematic. But if we’re sticking on the land of theory, this is these are the inconsistent findings.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:14] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. So we start to see things like belief or social norms or even just like external Eternal rewards can actually make somebody have willpower or self-control, where in theory, if this was just you don’t have the resource. Like none of that would matter if it’s if you’re depleted, you’re depleted. But now you’re saying, okay, but all these different things can actually allow you to behave in this way, that if the theory was right, it just wouldn’t be possible. So maybe we all do experience that sense of depletion, but there’s other things going on. There are other potential contributors and explanations. So you said there’s another chapter here. Take take me into that.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:19:55] And this is a darker chapter because it’s it affects not just ego depletion and resource, the resource model of self-control, but it impugns all of social psychology and all of maybe psychology more generally, but especially social psychology, my home discipline. And that’s what is commonly referred to as the replication crisis. It is when these movements start. But I think 2011 is an important date because a series of things happened I’m not going to get into I give a literally a two hour lecture on the replication crisis. I’m not going to do that now, but I’ll simply state that in the 20 tens, many people started discovering that we cannot replicate basic findings in our field. And of course, replication, as any high school science student would know, is kind of the hallmark of science. You find something. It’s not a true finding unless you can repeat it. And ideally not just you independent people who maybe aren’t, um, who have different motivations. They also replicate it. We need that. And for all kinds of reasons, replications weren’t happening in psychology. It appears like they don’t happen in a lot of sciences, which is a bad news for science and the other things. We also abused our analytic tools, so we misuse our statistics, I think mostly inadvertently. I just don’t think psychologists had enough of an understanding of the what was needed for correct scientific inference. And then the third problem is that, um, journals are incentivized to publish positive findings, findings that support the hypotheses of their authors.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:21:26] And we don’t. Journalists tend not to publish negative findings, but that’s a really bad problem because imagine ego depletion. I said, there are 600 studies that support it, and I’m just making up numbers here. What if I told you there were 3000 studies that were conducted in total, but only 600 worked? You might or might not be impressed by that by those set of findings anymore. So we don’t have that. You can think of it as the denominator. We have a numerator which is like how many worked but how many were tried in total. We just don’t know. And it’s a very difficult thing to estimate as well. So all these three things in combination led to a lot of hand-wringing, a lot of introspection, and then a lot of kind of systematic replications of work. And perhaps the area that was most targeted, I’m not sure was the right word, but received the most focus, maybe because it was so prominent was ego depletion, and ego depletion was tested by critics. It was tested by partisans. So people who believed in theory, such as myself and there’s been a series of these replications, a big multi lab around the world replications. And for the really big ones, both times that this was attempted, it turned out the effect could not be replicated.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:35] Mhm. I mean it’s so interesting. I had the pleasure of having taken Kahneman on the show a couple of years back, and we were talking about this to a certain extent because, you know, he was this iconic behavioral economist, psychologist and who wrote this book, Thinking Fast and Slow that has, you know, became this groundbreaking book. What I didn’t know or realize until that conversation he was sharing with me, he’s like, he’s like, there’s a chapter in the original version of that book that no longer exists in the book. It was a chapter on primes. He read the research. He believed it. He thought that this was legitimate. It came from like solid people who were well-intended and publishing this research enough to include an entire chapter in this book. And then when all of that started to get challenged and they were having all sorts of replication issues, he revisited. He’s like, oh, this. I actually can’t stand behind this enough so that he literally had to remove it from future versions of the book. So it is it’s fascinating how and again, like you said, like I think most of this is not malicious intended or it’s not driven by ego. It’s just, you know, it’s sort of like the state of how things were done or analyzed or looked at or the tools that were used in a particular way. And it’s just different now. There’s a lot more, I think, rigor that is going into the sort of like the exploration of replication, but ego depletion, this whole theory of willpower and self-regulation ends up on the chopping block because of this. Were there other sort of like major, major theories of self-control floating around and also that similarly fell, or was that really sort of like the dominant driver of thought around this whole thing at that point?

Michael Inzlicht: [00:24:05] That’s an excellent question. So I would say that because it excited so many people like ego depletion, I think was the only game in town for a while. And then other people, as it became more popular as a concept. People started saying, oh, we’re using different words, but we’re talking about similar things. So in cognitive psychology, there’s a concept of executive function or cognitive control, sometimes called or attentional control. If you look at the definition of cognitive control by some of the best people in the world, the definition is very similar to self-control. So then we’re like, oh, maybe there’s some some overlap here. There’s also a very famous work done by Walter Mischel, who is well known for his work on what is now referred to as the marshmallow study. Right, right. Which initially it was about one thing. Initially it was about, oh, here are some strategies that people could use. Children could use to regulate their impulses. But then they had the bright idea of following these children for 20, 30, 40 years and found, wow, this thing that we measured was being measured for your for your listeners who don’t know about the marshmallow studies, how long children could wait to eat a marshmallow sitting in a room just facing down the marshmallow. And it turns out the longer you could wait, the longer these kids could wait. Predicted all these things 20, 30, 40 years later, they became adults who had more self-control and then who reaped the benefits of having more self-control, despite that being really quite a popular finding now, it wasn’t as popular when I was in grad school because, you know, the 3040 years hadn’t passed yet, so we hadn’t seen this the power of traits here.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:25:32] But since it’s become very well known. But to be honest, it too has suffered from the replication crisis, but not not nearly in the same way as ego depletion. So it’s kind of like, okay, some effects don’t replicate, some don’t replicate, some do. The ones that do might not be as strong. But I think more problematic is and this is just normal science is our interpretation of those results is a little bit different now based on replications. So it turns out that kids who can wait have parents who have more money and have and are more educated, so they’re smarter. So are we saying anything about self-control or are we talking about wealth and intelligence? Okay, now that’s bad news for self-control. The good news for self-control is that there’s other research that’s even better. This is research done by Terry Moffat. But someone named I think his name is Avshalom Caspi is a major author and my friend and collaborator Ben Roberts is an author. And this paper is so cool. It’s a paper that has a very unique sample. It’s a sample. It’s called the Dunedin Samples, referring to Dunedin, New Zealand, a small town in New Zealand. And I believe, although I could be wrong in some of the details, they recorded every birth in the year 1972, which is the year of my birth, and they’ve been tracking these kids and now adults, now 52 year olds, for 52 years. And in a study published in 2011, they recorded children and then pre-teens.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:26:53] They recorded their level of self-control as children. And then they’ve been tracked. They track them for 40 years and found incredible things. So those who had higher self-control were healthier. They were more likely to be alive. They were less likely to abuse drugs. They had more money in the bank. They were less likely to be in debt. They were less likely to be convicted of a crime. Like the list goes on and on and on. Whatever positive things you can measure is associated with self-control. And here’s why even mention this. It controlled for intelligence. It controlled for family socioeconomic status. So it’s clearer why there is this association. So from this, at the very least, we should leave this conversation saying there’s something about people who have this trait, people who have what we might call self-control or willpower. That is like a superpower. I say that to my students when I teach this stuff. If you are expecting a child, given the research, we know you don’t want your child like you know, there’s debate about what traits you might want them to have. There’s pros and cons for practically every trait, but you would want your child to be smart. You’d want them to be conscientious or have lots of self-control because it just predicts the good life and all these kinds of dimensions. So a very, very powerful trait. And that’s why I haven’t given up on talking about self-control. Control, but I just want to make sure we talk about it in a in a correct way.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:13] Yeah. I mean it’s so fascinating. And you’ve used the word trade a number of times now. And the notion of self-control as a trait, I think is probably something that rubs people the wrong way. And maybe this is just my overlay, right? So when I think about a trait, I think about something that is a part of us, you know, probably from birth and is largely immutable, you know, like maybe you can kind of tweak it or maybe we can kind of move it, but it’s like if my eyes are green when I’m born, and that is a trait of mine. All the thinking in the world isn’t going to make them blue or green or brown, you know, like 20 years later, I can’t sort of there’s no intervention that I can do to change that. And I think when we think about physical traits, most of us are like, yeah, okay, I’m good with that. That’s the way it is. But then when we think about sort of like psychological dispositions as traits that are as immutable as eye color or height or something like that, We don’t want to believe that because we want to believe that like anything that is involved in our mindset and our psychology, especially if it’s something that we perceive not as an advantage, we want to believe we can do something that will change that. So when you speak about self-control and all the benefits that derive from it, I think we’ve all experienced that when we’ve had even flashes of self-control where you’re like, oh, this allowed me to do this thing or resist this thing, or like, yeah, that’s that’s great. I love that experience, this. But when you then sort of like position it as but this is a trade. It’s like there’s a friction that evolves. Like you almost don’t want to believe it.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:29:45] Yeah. Yeah. What you’re describing might be an especially American character trait or a reaction, I should say, to the notion of traits. And why do I say that? Because, you know, America’s founding ethos is, you know, the American dream, which is this notion of you can come here poor, disheveled masses and you can remake yourself to anything you like, and to some extent like that’s true. I mean, there’s more freedom and mobility in the United States compared to many, many other places. Some evolutionary psychologists call a blank slate view of the world. It fits really well with a notion of merit, of of a meritocracy. We believe that the United States, Canada, you know, we talk about Canadian Dream two as a meritocracy. And what does that mean? That means the outcome you receive in your life is based on, on on what you’ve done, how you behaved, how hard you’ve worked. And if now we tell you, well, how hard you work is not really up to you. That really, really represents the wrong way because it really undercuts our philosophy of our life and our countries. So it’s difficult. But I want to correct one thing that you said. So it’s true. Then we think about height and eye color. These are built into us. We can’t really do much about it. But it’s not true that we can’t do anything. So for example, not with eye color but with height. We know that nutrition matters like height is determined largely by genetics. I think it’s one of the most like the highest heritable traits.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:31:12] Sorry. Eye color and hair color are the most. A height is up there, but there’s also the environment that matters. Okay? And personality traits are even more so this way. So yes, we are born in the world with a blueprint for how we’re going to be as people. Most traits. So personality psychologists, they talk about five big traits. They call it the big five. So if you’re if you’re if your listeners don’t know, you can think of the the acronym Canoe. I’m in Canada so I got canoe in mind. So canoe so sees conscientiousness which we’ll talk about I think a little bit more in a little bit. A is agreeableness. So whether you’re kind polite empathic can do and is neuroticism. So how emotionally unstable you are, how much your life is dominated by negative emotion. Oh is openness to experience the extent to which you care about like, you know, learning new things and challenges, intellectual challenges especially, and then finally ease extraversion. It’s like how outgoing you are, how moved you are by rewards and your environment. The opposite of that, or the lower end of that would be, of course, introversion. Some others maybe a little bit shy, or someone who doesn’t isn’t stimulated to the same extent as extroverts and all these traits. You know, rule of thumb is all of them are heritable, about 50%, meaning that like 50% of the variance you experience will be based on your parents.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:32:26] That’s it. You can’t do anything about it. But the other 50% are, in fact, based on your environment. I think some people quickly say, oh, it’s you know, how your parents raise you. Yes, that plays some role. Some developmental psychologists argue not as much as you might think. Parents might not matter as much as you might think. For personality development, peers maybe matter more the kind of immediate home environment or like the city environment or wherever you live environment might be especially important. So those two things, the environment and genetics, will determine your degree of how much self-control you have. And again, yes, a story that a lot of people don’t like, but I don’t think it helps us by putting our head in the sand and saying, I don’t like this, so therefore it’s not true. So my mission is to look at the people, for example, who got high self-control, the high trait self-control, and try to understand what are they doing, what actions are they engaging in to bring about the good outcome? Because I don’t think it’s magic. I don’t think it’s just like they’re born with high self-control and therefore they don’t do anything. And all of a sudden they get all the all this good stuff later in life, like longevity, health, etc. they see the world differently and they engage in actions in accordance with how they view the world. So are there tips and tricks that we can help people with? And yeah, so that’s how I do it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:40] Yeah I mean it’s fascinating. So so then what you’re saying then, if I understand this right, is that you would view self-control and maybe self-control is and maybe we’ll tease this out a little bit. Also is either another word for conscientiousness or a subset of conscientiousness. And under the big five. But but you would view this as, as a trait. But as you’re describing that doesn’t mean that it’s fatalistic, that just like the other like sort of like personality based traits. Yes. Let’s own the fact that a certain amount of this is inherited, you know, like it kind of is what it is. But that’s not 100%. Maybe it’s closer to half to 50% somewhere in there. Right. So then what are the factors for the other 50% that may in some way, shape or form affect our ability to have this trait of self-control? Like what actually contributes to that? What enhances that in us is that is that right? Yeah.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:34:30] I think the other half is the environment. Early environment is really important. So childhood environment is really important. But later. So parents will play some role there. But it’s also like like I said it looks like peer environment is quite important. Peer influence is perhaps more important than parental influence. Some developmental psychologists argue it’s controversial. It’s not my area. But you know, just know that the environment matters. So the fact that we’re speaking now, we’re both in North America. We have a culture. We have a certain way of viewing things that shapes our personalities. If I grew up in Israel or Yemen, where my grandparents are from, I might have a different set of ideas, a different environment that would shape my personality in a different way. So despite me having the exact same DNA, if we.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:13] Were from the the assumption that this thing is partly it is what it is and the environment and culture and people, peers in particular have have a really healthy influence on how it shows up in us. The question is, how do we then construct a life that creates the optimal number and quality and frequency of these different inputs? That would give us this thing that, as you described, the research shows, leads to all these incredible outcomes. And we don’t need research to show that. I think to a certain extent, also, just like our own individual lived experiences. Like when I experience this thing, good things happen on the other end. But that also makes me want to tease out something else that you write about, which is this difference between the trait of self-control and the state of self-control?

Michael Inzlicht: [00:36:02] Yeah, I think you’re heading right in the right direction here. So I think for us to understand how to, let’s say, get someone who isn’t lucky enough to have the trait or we all have the trait, but we just have it in different quantities. If they don’t have sufficient quantities, what can we do to help a struggling student, for example, who can’t get their homework done on time? And we know that self-control is important there. And I don’t think I don’t think screaming at them saying, you know, just do it, just have more self-control. Put down the video game, put down TikTok. That’s not going to help them. So we want to know, like, what are the things that we can do. So that’s you know, I think it’s been implicit and implicit mission in the field for a while, but I don’t think we’ve quite spelled it out that way. So the first thought that many of us had was, well, people who are high in trait self-control, that’s, you know, by trait, I mean they’re a person who situation the situation. They seem to be high and self-control. They walk into various situations being the same kind of person. The first thought was that these people engaged in a lot of state self-control. By state self-control, I mean in the moment they’re controlling themselves. They’re saying no to alcohol. If they’re trying to abstain, they’re saying no to French fries. If they’re trying to diet, they’re essentially they’re saying no to themselves when they, you know, they want to go back to bed and instead of going jogging in the morning.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:37:15] Right. So they’re doing a lot of this resistance. So state self-control is defined as essentially any action, mental or physical, that you could take to take action in line with long term goals. Okay. When there’s conflict, me speaking to you right now doesn’t require any self-control because I’m enjoying this conversation. I don’t have any cognitive conflict about being here. Right. But sometimes in the afternoon, I face conflict. And again, I mean cognitive conflict because I’m hungry and I do like fruit and I eat fruit regularly, but sometimes my my wife might bring in some, like, baked goods, like a, like a croissant or a scone, which I, which I adore. And now I’m like, oh God, the apple or the scone, right? So I need self-control to stick to the apple. Okay, I need to can I say no to the scone? No to the croissant, and yes to the apple. That requires self-control. Right. So that’s what I mean by state self-control. Applying self-control in the moment. And our original thought was that the people who had this trait called self-control. And in a minute, maybe we should start thinking about calling it something else. We thought that they do a lot of controlling in their day to day life. That would make sense because that’s that’s what happens for every other trait. So, for example, I talked about extroversion as a trait, and I’m widely described as an extroverted person.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:38:28] What does that mean? That means I engage in lots of extroverted actions. So I say yes to parties. I’m stimulated by other people. I’m gregarious. I’m talkative. I do these actions that are consistent with what it means to be an extrovert. So it doesn’t the same thing happen for those who are high in self-control? Doesn’t that mean they’re controlling themselves a lot? It was so obvious that that would be the case, that we need to wait like 20 years before someone even bother asking the question and it was an incidental question. It was just like, oh, we just kind of threw this in there as almost like a check of sanity. And this is a first discovered by Wil Hoffman, who’s a friend of mine who’s a German social psychologist, published with Roy Baumeister, again, who I mentioned earlier in a paper in 2012. And what he discovered is really changed the field. And we’re still grappling with it. We’re still haven’t figured out what is going on here. But what we found is what we all found was that those who are high in in this trait, self-control, actually engaged in state self-control, not more, but less. They regulate themselves less. So like, what are they then? What are they doing? They’re not doing that thing. They’re. Well, they’re doing less of that thing. So what is it? And then people come up with ideas. An idea that Angela Duckworth, who’s another friend of mine who studies self-control and someone I admire a great deal.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:39:42] Her idea and others as well, is that, oh, what people who are high in trait self-control are doing is they are engaging in what she calls situation selection. They are crafting their environments such that they don’t face temptations, therefore they don’t need to regulate themselves as much. So an example would be let’s say someone’s dieting. They just don’t bring in the croissants to their house and therefore they’re not tempted by croissants and therefore they. If I ask them, hey, did you did you control yourself right now? They would say no because they aren’t tempted. Okay, I think that’s probably explains some of it, but I also think that that that fails for two reasons as an explanation. The first reason is we live in a world that is full of temptations, and we don’t live in a bubble. We don’t live only in our houses. Even during Covid, we leave the house. I live in downtown Toronto and I leave the house. Okay, sure, my wife didn’t buy croissants, but guess what? I walk five minutes away. I’ve got five bakeries, I’ve got all manner of restaurants. I’ve got fast food places. If I want to eat junk food, it would be very easy for me. I would be tempted if I’m. If I want junk food, it’s there and I’m tempted. I have to regulate myself. Okay, people who are high in self control also live in the real world, so I just don’t think that is is a likely scenario.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:40:58] And then I actually have data with my student Marina Milyavskaya and Blair Saunders, where we examined the extent to which people use different kinds of strategies to regulate their their impulses that might lead them astray. And we find that people are all strategies are kind of more or less the same in terms of like they’re successful about half the time in any one moment. But whether people are successful in any one time doesn’t actually predict whether they’re successful long term. So there’s a disconnect between what they’re doing in the moment is state self-control and then some eventual outcomes. So it just it strikes me as not correct. I think a different explanation could be, and one that is very difficult to solve is maybe these people that we call high in self-control, they’re not tempted by things to the same extent. They don’t like chocolate croissants like I do. They want to eat carrots and broccoli, or they want to study, or they want to exercise. Now how do they become this way? Were they born out of the womb, like in carrots and broccoli? I doubt it. So there’s something else. And find out what that something else is. I think we have to think far more broadly about what we’ve been calling self-control up until now, trait self-control. And then we can think about it in a different way, and then maybe we’ll get different clues.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:09] I mean, that’s so interesting, right? The notion that maybe there’s something actually in the brains of these folks where the stimulus of all these things that would be like so much more desirable and tempting for other people, it just doesn’t trigger the same yearning, the same craving, the same desire in them. So they don’t actually even have to resist all that much because they don’t have something to resist. Because that’s really interesting. But it’s also it.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:42:38] Presents a puzzle, right? Because. Right. Again, because self-control is deals with many kinds of stimuli that will tempt us. So I have a really tough time believing that someone is born. Or we said it’s not just all genetic, it’s also learned someone has come by, let’s say by 20. We think personality is more or less stable, that somehow they don’t like any tempting things.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:59] Yeah, it’s like there’s got to be something.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:43:01] Right? Right. Exactly. But but the broad band, they seem to to have like be pretty good at pretty much everything. And also one thing I should say is I don’t want to overstate things like the effect sizes we’re talking about are not massive. We’re not talking about like massive, massive differences, but there are differences nonetheless that are important. I think what is more helpful then is to kind of go back to the drawing board and ask ourselves, okay, what do we mean by trait self-control? So the people to then talk to are not social psychologists or cognitive psychologists. It’s personality psychologists who study people. They study individual differences. And I’ve already mentioned the five, the big five, right. The first one of my canoe is conscientiousness, a word that I have trouble spelling. And people who are not native English speakers have trouble pronouncing not a great word. Great choice of words, I should say. So Angela Duckworth, she is essentially, I don’t want to be uncharitable, but she’s kind of reinvented the construct and called it grit. Okay. But it’s essentially the same thing. But I think it’s better to call it conscientiousness. It’s a respect. It’s it’s history and the amount that we know about it. If it’s easier for your listeners to think of it as grit, but conscientiousness itself is a trait about it helps us meet all these various kinds of goals.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:44:10] And it has aspects. It has facets to it. Self-control is one of them, okay. The ability to resist temptation. But there are other facets that might be as important. So another one is industriousness having an appetite for work. So I’m an industrious person. Like I can’t sit still. I like on the weekends. I’m like always puttering around the house doing things. And my wife drives my wife crazy because she’s, like, much more comfortable just sitting back and relaxing. Conscientious people are also responsible when they say they’re going to do something. They’re more likely to do it because they feel some sort of obligation, some sort of like pact with themselves or someone else. So maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s just like I stick to my word and some people are more okay with not sticking to their word. Another one is called traditionalism. I don’t love that word because it connotes conservatism and and old fashioned values. But I think what it means in the context of conscientiousness is adhering to social norms and seeing value in the norms of society and respecting authority to some extent. And I wonder, I have no evidence for this at this point. Is that the secret sauce of conscientiousness? Is it that because that would then explain why they have these broad band, you know, kind of advantages? So if we assume that the rules and norms, whether it be explicit laws or just informal norms of a society, if we assume they’re wise, if we assume that they will lead us to have a good life, which I think there’s probably some.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:45:41] We could argue that this is wisdom in our culture, and if you’re sensitive to what your society rewards, then you’re going to be more likely to internalize those values, and then you’re more likely not to be tempted by the things that lead you away from those values. So I’ll give you an example. It’s been a long time now, and I think it’s not. No, it’s not only in Toronto, I think it’s widespread, but uh, a number of years ago, maybe 15 years ago, uh, the big school board in Toronto, the Toronto District School Board, decided to essentially get rid of due dates. I think the reason behind it is wise, and that is that there’s many different circumstances in people’s lives and kids lives, and sometimes they can’t hand things in and they get penalized for not having things in on time that are for circumstances that are out of their control, like they’ve got home insecurity.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:46:29] They haven’t eaten that day, they have an abusive home home life. So I think it’s a very kind gesture. But what it also does is it sends a signal that being on time is not important, punctuality is not important. And this then changes our values of the school kids. And now we’re seeing the ramifications of it at university and maybe at workplaces where people don’t respect due dates anymore when things are due. But in the real world, let’s say you’re in a business and your client needs something. If you don’t send it to them on time, guess what? You no longer have that person’s business. So there are real consequences. Now, thankfully, as our broader society sees the value of of being on time and being punctual now, now again, the people again, there’s an hypothesis. Maybe the conscientious people sense. They can see what’s being rewarded, not just explicitly by the TDSB, but more broadly in society. And they internalize those rules, they adhere to those rules, and they’re just less likely to be tempted. So that’s one possible idea. But now, you see, we’re not talking about self-control anymore. We’re not talking about saying no to things, pushing things away. We’re talking about being sensitive to your society and what it reward.

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:37] Yeah. So we’re sort of like expanding the concept and saying like, this doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This is part of a broader set of qualities, experiences. You know, the trait is it’s more complicated and expansive, you know. So maybe conscientiousness is sort of like the better overarching description of this. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Okay. So let’s zoom the lens out a little bit. Right. So somebody’s listening to this or watching along and they’re saying okay, so this is really interesting eye opening I like some of what’s being said. I don’t like some of what’s being said, but I kind of probably still agree that there’s value in it. And what do I do with this? I’m in the middle years of my life. Maybe I feel like I’ve got a reasonable amount of this trait in me, and I’ve been able to accomplish a certain amount, a certain amount of industriousness. I can resist the thing and or strive toward something that’s meaningful to me, even when I know it’s hard and I’d rather be doing other things. But there’s a whole bunch of other things out there that are not working for me, or I don’t have the control to resist, or I get halfway, and then I keep bailing on her and procrastinating on this. So maybe I’m feeling like I’ve got some of this in me, and I don’t have some of it in me. What can I do? Are there things that I can do to help me? Because there are still things there behaviors that I want to manifest, to live the way I want to live, achieve the things I want to achieve and be in the world in a particular way. How can I think about being proactive and just saying, I accept whatever it is that I have or don’t have on a trait level, but then what can I do on a day to day basis to help me get where I want to get and be? Be how I want to be?

Michael Inzlicht: [00:49:10] Yeah, that’s an excellent question. And I certainly don’t want to leave your your listeners nihilistic. Sometimes I get there myself, but I do in fact think there are things we can do, but it’s by clarifying our concepts that we get there. It’s not by sticking to just just keep at it, you know, keep doing self-control. So I teach a class, uh, a seminar. It’s only it’s pretty small, about 20 or 25 students. It’s called the science of behavior change. I’ll just start with the bad news is not many things I think we know, but there are things we do in fact know that are backed by research and that I stand behind and that are helpful and that can help people reach their goals. So what might those be? So we’ve already talked about that really interesting and perplexing, vexing finding of those who are high in trait self-control control less. Right. And that then led people like Angela Duckworth to say, what about situation selection? Kind of like avoiding the temptations to begin with. And despite me kind of Pooh poohing it, saying it’s a bit like narrow. There is wisdom still in that general idea. If we expand it out a bit, and I think the way you can expand it out is by two things that are really strongly related. The first is goal setting. So setting goals and there’s a good way to do that. And there’s a bad way of doing that. And then planning, which is part of, you know, a good way of goal setting.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:50:29] So maybe the conscientious people are setting explicit goals for themselves, and they do it in an intelligent way and they plan it out so they know, oh, Monday morning I wake up, oh, I gotta do this. Like, I bet I have a Substack. I a Monday morning, I write, I write for the Substack, I know what I do. The first thing in the morning on Monday. Actually on Tuesday. Wednesday too. So you plan it out. So those are my two favorites. So now how can you set goals in a better way? Actually to plug my own Substack my next week or I’m not sure when this will air. Uh, but at some point you’ll, you’ll see a Substack exactly on goal setting. There’s something called goal setting theory. I mean, it’s it sounds like all, like, big and important because it has theory at the end of it. But it’s a really, really simple idea. And the idea here is that people accomplish more. They’re more productive when they set goals for their productivity. Okay. So and this was done in the field. So for example I think this is hilarious. Some of the first studies was done uh very Canadian was done on loggers and loggers. Some of your listeners might not know they get paid on a on a piecemeal basis. The more trees they cut down the more they get paid. Sad for the trees.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:51:32] I love trees, but blogging exists as an industry, so you would think that every blogger would want to cut down as many trees as possible because they get paid more. At the end of the day, these industrial and organizational psychologists went in and said, hey, what if we gave people a tool to help them to be even more productive? And the tool was simple. It was like, how many trees do you want to cut down today? A number, a specific number, a concrete number, and I don’t know what that number would be. I have no idea how many trees that are today. Let’s say 60. Those people who said 60 or put a concrete number in, they didn’t always reach the goal. They often didn’t, but they cut down more trees than the other group who were just told, go ahead, cut down as many trees as you can today. And again, they’re both incentivized to cut down trees. They both want to have money in their pockets, but those who had concrete goals did better. And then there’s been 20, 30, 40 years of research on this, with thousands of studies fleshing out the theory. But at the heart of it, it’s very simple. When you set a goal, make sure it’s concrete, it’s specific, it’s challenging, and it’s time bound. And time bound might be the most critical one in my point of view, but concrete and specific, I mean, say what you’re going to do and don’t think about outcome.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:52:45] Only think about the process to get to your outcome. What actually, you’re a student and you want to get an A in your class. A goal of I want to get an A is is vague. Okay. How do you get an A? Well, you get an A by studying, by reading your textbook, by going over your notes maybe multiple times, maybe having a study group. So you can see part of the goal setting is now making it concrete. And now I’m also planning and thinking about other steps that are involved in reaching this goal. So now you’ve cut it down. You cut it down, but you made it very specific about what you want to do. So that’s specific and concrete okay. Challenging easy goals. They might feel good when you accomplish them. But you want what we call reach goals, things that are kind of just outside your reach. And maybe you don’t accomplish them every day, or maybe you don’t accomplish them ever. But it shouldn’t be too far that you get discouraged. And also, you should be forgiving of yourself when you don’t reach them because you know you’ve set a reach goal. Okay. And the third and most important, and this has to do with planning and scheduling or calendaring, is make it time bound. Put a deadline to it, even if it’s something that has no deadline. Freelance work, for example, does have deadlines. Typically before you’ve at least got a contract, put it in your calendar.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:53:51] And the reason why time bound is so important is because this is why goals are so important in general, is that it gives you feedback on how you’re doing. If you don’t have a time bound, if you don’t have a concrete, you can’t really tell yourself in a really accurate way if you’re making progress towards your goal or not. So I know that I write my Substack on Monday morning if it’s Monday afternoon and I haven’t written anything, I feel bad about myself, and then I redouble my effort the next day. So I’ve gotten feedback and I take action. And when I do make some progress, I get that the feels I feel good and then I’m motivated to be doing it the next day. So you build confidence, self-efficacy, and you keep on going. So that’s the kind of theory of why goal setting works. And then I think that the complement to that is planning and using your calendar. I’ve got it’s actually remarkably little research on calendaring, but I think it’s a really good tool to not just use it for your appointments, which of course we all use it for that, or many of us use it for that. But literally break down some of your goals and put it in your calendar, those concrete steps that will help you. So that’s kind of one broad thing you could do. And I think.

Jonathan Fields: [00:54:55] That’s accessible to most people also, which I like, like these are ideas that we can actually put into action. I started I guess they call it often. It’s called Timeboxing my calendar a couple of years back, which is doing exactly what you’re saying. Instead of just putting meetings in, I look at the things that I want to accomplish, and I break them down into the tasks that would get me there. And then I put those tasks into the calendar, and I just found I’m much more likely to do them as much as I like, do, or don’t want the end state. Like if it’s in like that, it’s almost definitely going to happen. And even if I look at it and I say like, you know, like my day got blown up, now I’m going to actually move that thing to an appropriate place, and I’m going to rethink my commitment to that in the first place. And whether it was realistic or not. And like how to like whether I need to make some adjustments. But it’s been a huge differentiator for me. So there are practical things that we can do.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:55:42] Yeah. I have one other thing that is a bit more difficult. I’ve got some studies, we’re just getting going on it, but as I mentioned, I don’t think I did mention this actually, but I kind of hinted at it. We ran some studies again with my student Marina Milyavskaya, who’s actually a professor now in Ottawa, and we what we did was we looked at what people do on their on a moment to moment basis in their daily life, and then to see if any of those things that they did in their moment to moment basis predicted how well or how much they accomplish their goals sometime later. So we’ve done it with like three, six, I think even 12 months later. Okay. And we found there was more bad news for self-control. Self-control helped people in the moment. So if you say no to a Wendy’s hamburger, guess what? You don’t eat the hamburger. But your goal isn’t to not eat a hamburger, at least not your bigger goal. Your goal is to lose weight or to be healthier. Okay. And we found there’s a zero association between resisting temptation in the moment and goal progress up to a year later, which was like what? But what we found that did predict goal progress three, six, 12 months later was whether you were tempted to begin with, whether you had the desire that led you astray or that could lead you astray to begin with.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:56:58] So again, this idea of like, if you’re tempted, you’re already undone. Okay. So then the solution is don’t be tempted. How do you do that? You know, million dollar question. I don’t think we have great answers, but we have some hints. So from Motivation Science, we know that motivation comes not just in quantities but in qualities and kinds. And there’s a very prominent theory that actually springs mostly from Rochester, New York. It’s called self-determination theory from the University of Rochester. And this theory essentially makes the point that when you’re motivated for the right reasons, engaging in actions that are motivated for the right reasons feels effortless. It feels light. It feels pleasurable. It feels good. Okay. And what are the ingredients of a good kind of motivation? Self-determined motivation. There are three pillars. The first is autonomy. You chose it. You want it. It’s not something that your parent told you. A doctor told you. Society tells you you want it. I like birding not because my kids think it’s not cool. My wife thinks it’s not cool. My friends laugh at me, I don’t care. I think birds are beautiful and I want to look at it and it gives me pleasure seeing them.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:58:07] Okay, I’ve chosen that. And you can think that, you know, for example, dieting. You might ask yourself why you’re dieting. Often I’m the answer is not because you want a diet or you want to eat well, it’s just because you want to look a certain way. Maybe your boss wants you to look a certain way. That’s now an extrinsic reason for doing something not as healthy as an intrinsic reason. Second, the action brings you closer to people. It’s relational. It involves like groups of people, and we’re social animals. So things that involve other people tend to be good. So whatever goal you could do, if you can bring other people along, like running, is much easier when you’ve got friends running with you. And then the third is the thing needs to make you feel like you’re competent or you have got mastery of that thing. So, uh, and this is hard, especially when you’re learning something new. But as long as you kind of feel like you’re making progress, um, it can feel good. So these three things build self determination. And we wondered if it’s possible to turn something like that’s not self-determined to something that is self-determined. So we for shorthand we use a have to goal like I have to do it.

Michael Inzlicht: [00:59:12] I you know I might have to do it. Do I want to go? I want to do this. I have to eat broccoli. I want to eat broccoli. They’re very different. And the closest we’ve seen is it was therapy, essentially. But I don’t think I tell your viewers, go to therapy to reach your goals. It’s not a scalable intervention, but you can start reflecting on your goals and start asking yourself, how do these goals align with my personal values to get at autonomy, how does it connect with other people for relatedness, and how do I feel a sense of competence and mastery and self-efficacy from these? So kind of rethink it. And what we’ve developed now is still kind of a working project is we’re using AI. We’ve created a chatbot that is called a motivate chatbot that people come there asking, saying, okay, what are your goals? And then through a series of steps, the chatbot frames these goals, helps people see how their goals might be self-determined, and we wonder if that will then translate to them being more persistent, finding more joy, and sticking with it for a little bit longer so that they’re not tempted anymore. Right. Because they love this thing. Yeah, it’s a hard ask, but this is what we’re thinking.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:21] But I mean, it’s so cool if you can actually change that wiring from like taking something that you perceived as a half do and then get your brain to actually then translate it and say like, this is actually a want to that, you know, it’s like they’ve never been a moment in my life where I’ve said, I have to eat chocolate today, right? Like if we can kind of like flip that switch, that’s pretty. Well, I’m so excited to see where this is all going to lead with the work that you’re doing on it. Very cool. Yeah.

Michael Inzlicht: [01:00:44] Thank you.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:45] It feels a good place for us to come full circle in this conversation as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up.

Michael Inzlicht: [01:00:53] To live a good life? Oh, boy. So I’m the, um, director of the Work and Play lab. That’s the name of my lab that I changed the name a few years ago, and I’m a firm believer in both those things. I’m a firm believer in working hard and exerting effort towards the things that you care about. But I’m also a firm believer that we need rest. We need leisure. You can exert effort and leisure too. And it turns out that the best kind of leisure would be effortful leisure. So not just physical, physically effortful, but also cognitively effortful. So I’d say find that balance with work and play. And don’t be afraid of effort because I think it’ll be, um, it can lead to a meaningful life.

Jonathan Fields: [01:01:30] Mm. Thank you.

Michael Inzlicht: [01:01:32] Thank you.

Michael Inzlicht: [01:01:34] Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with James Clear about Atomic Habits. You’ll find a link to James’s episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did, since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email? Even just with one person? Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.