Updating the Psychology of Self-Control
The Wall Street Journal:
An influential theory of self-control holds that willpower is like a muscle — it is depleted through exertion, and it can be replenished by ingesting simple carbohydrates. There’s a book out now that explains this so-called “energy model” of willpower, at length — co-written by Roy Baumeister, one of its main academic proponents.
But some academic psychologists are now challenging the prevailing model of self-discipline. In one experiment, as Wray Herbert explains, in his Huffington Post column, test subjects whose willpower was stressed, and waning, got a boost by simply washing their mouths out with a sugar solution. The important point was they didn’t have to ingest the sugar to get the effect that some previous studies had attributed to refueling. So “what’s restoring self-control, if not metabolized carbs,” Herbert asks?
Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
See Roy Baumeister at the 24th APS Annual Convention: Society for the Teaching of Psychology Talk and Invited Symposium
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