EXPLORING THE SCIENCE OF EGO DEPLETION & WILLPOWER WITH PSYCHOLOGIST ROY F. BAUMEISTER
Episode 27 features Professor Roy Baumeister, one of the world’s most prolific and influential psychologists, known for his work on the self, social rejection, belongingness, sexuality and sex differences, self-control, self-esteem, self-defeating behaviors, motivation, aggression, consciousness, and free will.
The oldest child of a schoolteacher and an immigrant businessman, Roy grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He received his PhD in social psychology from Princeton in 1978 and did a postdoctoral fellowship in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has received research grants from the National Institutes of Health and from the Templeton Foundation.
In his 2011 New York Times bestselling book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (with John Tierney), Roy writes:
“When you pick your battles, look beyond the immediate challenges and put your life in perspective. Are you where you want to be? What could be better? The unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan.”
In episode #27, we discuss:
- Is mental effort (willpower) like a muscle?
- Eating glucose can help restore mental energy.
- “Ego Depletion” is another useful analogy.
- Practice can make mental effort easier.
- Is Free Will an illusion? A scientific view.
- Self-esteem without achievement is a trap.
Roy coined the term “ego depletion” in 1998 to refer to the observation that initial exertion of self-control impairs subsequent self-control performance.
The term was an homage to Sigmund Freud, as he was one of the pioneers of an “energetics” view of human psychology.
Baumeister’s research has many practical implications.
In a series of experiments:
- Participants who practiced self-control were more likely to quit smoking, a really hard thing for many smokers to do.
- Another study showed that tired medical professionals were more likely to over-prescribe medications.
- A third experiment demonstrated that when consciousness intrudes on an automatic mental process, people can “choke under pressure.” Consciousness can interfere with habitual performance.
Good self-control helps with building positive habits, including the habit of performing hard mental work. People who have higher self-control are more likely to follow a daily routine that allows them to take on challenging tasks with less ego depletion.
Many people believe that free will is an illusion — but is that really true?
Roy looks at both sides of the debate and explains that it is more of a semantic disagreement than a scientific one. He and Bernie also explore the cultural, philosophical, and legal implications.
- Can cultures that deny free will also demand responsible behavior?
- Or should society accept free will as a reality?
Exploring the dark side of self-esteem.
Although high self-esteem is correlated with positive outcomes like better grades and less drug addiction, these findings are correlational, not causal.
It seems that real achievements do lead to higher self-esteem, but self-esteem by itself does not lead to better achievement.
There’s no substitute for hard work, including hard mental work.
- Roy describes one “dark side” of high self-esteem in people with narcissism, who are overly self-confident to the point of acting out aggressively when questioned.
This is very important, because a great deal of interpersonal violence in the real world might be traceable to swollen self-esteem in people who cannot tolerate their own limitations.
To listen to the full episode, CLICK HERE!
Bios
Roy F. Baumeister is a social psychologist who explores how we think about the self, and why we feel and act the way we do. He is especially known for his work on the subjects of willpower, self-control, and self-esteem, and how they relate to human morality and success. He has published some 700 scientific works, including 40 books. A recipient of many awards, in 2013 Roy received the highest award given by the Association for Psychological Science, the William James Fellow award, in recognition of his lifetime achievements.
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) began with this question: “How does a serial, integrated and very limited stream of consciousness emerge from a nervous system that is mostly unconscious, distributed, parallel and of enormous capacity?”
GWT is a widely used framework for the role of conscious and unconscious experiences in the functioning of the brain, as Baars first suggested in 1983.
A set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been. These updated works by Bernie Baars, the recipient of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by International Neural Network Society form a coherent effort to organize a large and growing body of scientific evidence about conscious brains.
