In terms of policy measures, it will be necessary to provide institutionalized commitment devices on the premise of sophisticated decision-making while pro- viding education and intervention on the premise of naı¨ve or at least partially naı¨ve decision-making. I will discuss this point in greater detail in Chap.6.
4.8 Willpower and Self-Control
difficult puzzle (a puzzle that is actually unsolvable) and determine how many minutes they work on the puzzle before giving up.
How do the results differ by group? The results of this unique experiment, which was conducted with 58 subjects by Mark Muraven and his joint researchers (Muraven et al. 1998), showed that the subjects in Group 1, which had been instructed not to think about polar bears, gave up on the puzzle in the shortest time, on average (Group 1¼56.3 s; Group 2¼86.7 s; Group 3¼75.8 s). This result can be interpreted thus: the subjects in Group 1 were no longer able to control themselves and work on the puzzle because their willpower had been exhausted by the thought-suppression task of not thinking about polar bears.
In this way, when subjects are asked to perform two unrelated tasks that require self-control, one after another and without advance warning, performance with respect to the second task worsens, compared to when it is performed indepen- dently. This is because the first task exhausts one’s willpower and weakens the individual’s self-control, which could otherwise be used in the second task. It is for this reason that it is not uncommon for people to eat junk food or drink too much on the way home after a day full of work.
Incidentally, how would the results of Muraven’s aforementioned experiment be different if we were to give the subjects advance warning that they would be performing two tasks? It has been reported that because subjects adjust the amount of self-control applied to the first task in anticipation of a second task, performance deterioration in performing the second task will be reduced. In other words, the subjects preserve their willpower.
4.8.2 Willpower and Present-Oriented Tendency
As described thus far, self-control is especially needed when making an inter- temporal choice to choose between a today’s (present) small reward and a tomorrow’s (future) larger reward. To restrain oneself from a small but immediate benefit or pleasure, such as snacking and a bit of “slacking off,” in order to obtain a larger benefit that can be realized only in a distant future, like a healthy body and completing a large project, one must have strong self-control. Therefore, our present-oriented tendencies, as measured by subjective discount rates, should largely depend on willpower. Subjective discount rates should be higher among individuals whose willpower is more greatly depleted, as it would increase their present-oriented tendencies.
To verify this, we conducted an online nationwide survey among a sample of more than 3500 Japanese subjects (theInternet Survey on Life and Behaviors 2014);
it made use of a questionnaire proposed by three psychologists, June Tangney, Roy Baumeister, and Angie Luzio, in order to measure people’s willpower (i.e., their ability to control themselves) (Tangney et al. 2004). Based on the data, this study sought to examine the relationship between the magnitude of willpower and the subjective discount rate. Figure4.7summarizes the results. Numbers 1 through 5 on
the horizontal axis represent quintile groups, namely, from the bottom 20 % to the top 20 %, based on the level of willpower. Here, the average discount rates are compared among the willpower quintile groups. Since the discount rate data are standardized to make the overall average zero, a positive value indicates that it is above average while a negative value indicates that it is below average. In addition, since subjective discount rates are affected largely by age and gender differences, those effects are excluded here.
Now, as expected, we can see from the figure that the subjective discount rate steadily increases from group to group as willpower weakens. Putting otherwise, the depletion of willpower increases the subjective discount rate among people, making their decision-making in life and at work more present-oriented. Con- versely, as willpower increases, it lowers the discount rate and makes it possible for them to behave patiently. In that sense, willpower can be considered a source of patience.
For example, it is well known that when a task such as watching a video without reading the subtitles, which exhausts the individual’s self-control resource more than expected, is experimentally given, the purchasing behavior of the subject instantly becomes more extravagant. Effective salespeople who sell consumer durables like automobiles and expensive properties like real estate can probably use such a mechanism to boost their sales performance. By introducing various attractive options and skillfully inserting selection tasks that exhaust customers, they are actually driving customers to behave in extravagant, present-oriented ways (Baumeister and Tierney 2012, Chap. 4).
The relationship between willpower and the subjective discount rate has impor- tant implications in thinking about the impact of poverty and disaster as well as the polarization and immobilization of income hierarchies. This is because it is con- ceivable that hardships in life increase the personal discount rate by depleting willpower and that this, in turn, further impoverishes people. Conversely, having
0.14
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-0.05 -0.06
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1 2 3 4 5
Fig. 4.7 Average discount rates by willpower score quintile group. Note: The discount rate is the residual after excluding the effects of age and gender differences from the standardized score in the original data. Source: The Internet Survey on Life and Behaviors 2014.N= 3509
a comfortable life could reduce the discount rate by increasing one’s willpower, which would lead to an even more comfortable life. I will discuss this issue again later.
4.8.3 Willpower Budget and Efficient Self-Control
Because willpower as a source of self-control is an easily exhausted, depletable resource, it is possible that the willpower limit could constrain the total amount of self-control. It is the same as how the magnitude of our various spending and savings levels is constrained by the size of the budgetary income and assets. People are financing various types of self-control—from maintaining health to working hard—by using the predetermined budget called willpower. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate in economic sciences, made an interesting point in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. He noted that when you say “pay attention,” you are in fact “paying” willpower from your proverbial wallet to cover the self-control needed for “attention” (Kahneman 2011, p. 22). Thinking in this way, it is possible to understand the seemingly obscure problem of self-control as a resource alloca- tion problem—a problem of how to efficiently use the scarce resource called willpower without any waste, something at which the discipline of economics excels (Ozdenoren et al. 2012).
Considering the constraint of willpower as the self-control budget, it is not a good idea to blindly work hard on many different things. In order to efficiently utilize one’s willpower, it becomes necessary to allocate efforts so that the return on willpower is balanced among those tasks that require self-control, from business to maintaining health and human relations. Specifically, such a method of effectively utilizing willpower is summed up by two action principles.
First, when there are multiple tasks and that each requires self-control and there is no large difference among them in the returns obtained through self-restraint, one can effectively use willpower by allocating equal effort to each task. In economics, the even use of a resource so as not to be wasteful is called “smoothing.” In other words, the economic principle of smoothing also applies to the behavior of self- control. For example, when there are two tasks of conducting business and maintaining family life—both of which require self-restraint—willpower is used effectively by expending equal effort on each and aiming for work-life balance.
Smoothed self-control also becomes key when finishing a long-term project or task.
Smoothing by “plugging away” steadily in the same way every day so as to avoid unevenness each day leads to finishing a long-term job effectively.
Second, when the returns on applying self-control differ greatly, willpower can be used effectively by allocating varying levels of effort according to those differ- ences. The common behavior of expending greater effort on a larger job is actually this principle put into practice. When one begins neglecting one’s own appearance or stops cleaning while being immersed in work, it can be interpreted as the
conservation of self-control in areas that do not matter to him or her, to squeeze out more willpower and direct it towards work that offers a large return.
Such behavior, in which one varies the level of effort according to the expected return on work, is also observed intertemporally. Taking a vacation after complet- ing a large project to which one devoted extensive self-control or having a drink on the way home from work is an act of conserving willpower that is exhausted from work. Conversely, recharging one’s energy levels prior to starting a large project is an act of preserving willpower in preparation for the future. Adjusting resource allocation over a period of time based on the returns at each given point in time is, in economics, referred to as “intertemporal substitution.” The above examples indi- cate that the intertemporal substitution of self-control is sometimes essential to using willpower effectively.
4.8.4 Crowded Out Self-Control
As willpower is a limited, exhaustible resource for self-control, when there is an exogenous shock that requires some sort of self-restraint and the demand for the resource is suddenly increased, willpower is depleted by that much, and perfor- mance in self-restraint tasks with a low priority or which require great effort would decline. Put otherwise, other self-control behaviors would be “crowded out” by the self-control behavior needed to address the exogenous shock.
Although unbeknown to us, our behaviors are affected by this phenomenon of the crowding out of self-control. For example, some kind of negative mental shock could prompt seemingly unrelated intemperate behavior or disturb the rhythm of work and life; examples include starting to smoke or drink again after having problems at home or in the workplace, failing to lose weight after having a broken heart, and so on. The mental shock is crowding out low-priority self-control behaviors by exhausting the willpower budget.
While a variety of behaviors require self-control, the required level of self- control is actually not the same across them. This becomes clear when you compare self-control tasks performed in order to endure and deal with the hardships of life or the pain of sickness and self-control tasks performed for the purpose of accumula- tion, such as saving money, developing human capital (study and learning), and managing health. Whereas the former is a form of self-control absolutely essential to survival, the latter can be considered self-control essential to enhancing the future rather than to meeting immediate needs.
In economics, goods such as groceries that we cannot avoid consuming even when we are poor are called necessity goods; goods that we consume only after becoming more affluent are called luxury goods. Whereas self-restraint in enduring hardship is self-control as a necessity good, so to speak, self-restraint for the future is self-control as a luxury good that is available only after becoming affluent.
Moreover, just as we begin cutting luxury consumption first when disposable
income is reduced, self-control for the future as a luxury good is crowded out first when the available willpower is reduced by the occurrence of a negative mental shock.
Conversely, when the worries of daily life are resolved as a result of some kind of luck or good news that might open up one’s own future, we initiate self-control for the future by using the excess willpower gained after being released from the previous suppression. As discussed in the next section, these mechanisms relating to willpower are also important when considering the long-term effects of poverty and disaster.
Now, the self-destructive behavior of giving up easily can also be understood by relating it to the inefficient allocation of willpower. Naı¨ve individuals who are unaware that willpower can be depleted will quit, sooner or later, before completing their plans—be it work or diet—because they are apt to make unreasonable plans.
Such “giving up easily” can also be considered an outcome of the crowding out of self-control. In this case, it was not that the burden on willpower increased due to external shock; rather, the self-control needed to continue with the overzealous plan was crowded out because the self-control payment unexpectedly grew and unintentionally became a burden on willpower. Of course, they might try hard and continue to work as planned, in some cases; however, in this case, crowding out should happen so as to take a toll on some other tasks, possibly with lower priorities (e.g., saving), rather than on the plan.
4.8.5 Depletion and Reproduction of Poverty
With the various self-control tasks that we perform, when some sort of exogenous negative shock is placed on willpower, the self-control that had been “plugging away” up to that point is partially crowded out (i.e., pushed back); this adversely affects subsequent life by reducing assets, be it human assets or financial assets.
Such a chain effect has important implications when one considers the impact of poverty and disaster, as well as the polarization and immobilization of income and social hierarchies.
For example, when people are hit by bad luck, such as losing employment or receiving a significant pay cut as repercussions of a recession, it prompts the depletion of willpower and results in the crowding out of self-control.
There are two types of self-control: one that must be used for survival, or self- control as a necessity good, as it is called in economics, and one for the future, which is used only after it can be spared, called self-control as a luxury good. Since people who face hardships in life must use more willpower on self-control for survival, they are forced to neglect by at least that much the self-control related to the future. As indicated previously, the fact that the subjective discount rate—a measure of present-oriented tendency—increases as willpower is depleted probably reflects such a relationship.
As a result, the accumulation of assets—be it financial assets or human assets—
otherwise earmarked for the future is postponed, and even if the initial negative shock on life were temporary, it will end up having a persistent adverse effect on future life and even on skills acquisition. Such a propagation of adverse effects on the future could go beyond generations from parents to children. This is because the parents become incapable of caring for and disciplining children in preparation for the future—things which require strong self-control ability of the parents—when their willpower is depleted, and the children also begin losing willpower on account of the deterioration of their growing environment.
In a report on children from poor families who gave up schooling (Aoto 2009), a mother from a poor family who was interviewed made a desperate comment:
“Being poor means you are unable to do anything.” Poverty means being forced to spend an enormous amount of willpower in order to maintain the present state of the family under difficult income constraints, and it is propagated in the children’s generation in the form of a lower future-oriented tendency (increased subjective discount rate) and reduced human resources. Exhausted children, therefore, accept having a low educational attainment and reproduce poverty under the resulting limited employment opportunities.
This assertion is indirectly supported by the data in Fig. 4.8, which shows changes in the unemployment rate and the high school dropout rate in Japan since 1982. In addition to the unemployment rate and high school dropout rate,
0 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45
Rate of maladjustment to school life and studies (left scale)
Rate of high school dropouts (right scale)
Unemployment rate (right scale)
Fig. 4.8 The unemployment rate, academic maladjustment, and high school dropouts. Source:
Prepared based on the study of various problems in student guidance, such as Problematic Behaviors of Children and Students, 2014, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and Labor Force Survey, 2014, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications
the figure plots the percentage of high school dropouts due to maladjustment to school life and studies. As one can see, it is dropping out on account of academic maladjustment, rather than the high school dropout rate itself, that shows a high correlation with the unemployment rate. In other words, it seems that unemploy- ment prompts school abandonment by depleting children’s willpower and crowding out self-control for the future (i.e., adjustment to school life and studies) rather than that unemployment directly produces high school dropouts by creating economic hardship.
4.8.6 Poverty and Adversity During Childhood
Related also to the above story, it is known that willpower depletion during childhood has a strong negative impact on adulthood behavior and quality of life.
One example is the relationship between the experience of childhood adversity and the quality of adulthood life. When childhood adversity is scored by counting various hardships experienced during childhood, such as financial struggle, dys- functional family, domestic violence, and neglect, there is a negative correlation between this adversity and each behavior and quality of life in later years, as measured by (early) smoking during adolescence and adulthood, poor health, educational background, financial struggle, level of happiness, etc. (Ramiro et al. 2010; Oshio et al. 2010). People who experienced severe adversity in childhood are more likely to have a lower quality of life in later years.
This assertion is neuroscientifically supported. As an important brain function related to self-control, there is a function called working memory. Roughly, you can think that an individual with a larger working memory capacity can better perform self-control. In fact, to support the relationship just mentioned, it has been shown that the working memory capacity tends to be small among individuals who experienced prolonged poverty during childhood. This is one of the reasons why individuals who grew up in poor families often cannot control themselves.
However, the story does not end here. It is actually possible to look at physio- logical data, such as those relating to blood, to quantify the extent to which an individual has struggled in the past, that is, how much stress has accumulated from the past. To our horror, it has been shown that individuals with higher amounts of such quantified past stress are more likely to have a smaller capacity of current working memory (Evans and Schamberg 2009). That is, working memory, which enables self-control, is more likely to be lower among those who experienced great stress in the past.
I have mentioned that there are two factors, namely, childhood poverty and the amount of past stress, that degrade working memory. So which is a true cause of deterioration in working memory? Gary W. Evans and Michelle A. Schamberg actually showed that the accumulation of past stress is the true culprit in degrading working memory; the negative correlation observed between childhood poverty and