Willpower

scratch my ear if I had an itch. If a mosquito landed on my cheek, I couldn’t swat at it. Those were the real challenges.”
    But even though the challenge was mental, she also noticed that it eventually took a physical toll. As much as she liked the money, usually about fifty dollars an hour, she found she couldn’t do it for long. She would typically work for ninety minutes, take an hour break, get back on the box for another ninety minutes, then call it a day. Sometimes on a Saturday in peak tourist season she would supplement her street work by going to a Renaissance festival and posing as a wood nymph for a few hours, but it left her exhausted.
    “I’d get home barely alive, barely able to feel my body,” she says. “I would put myself into the bathtub, and my brain would be completely blank.”
    Why? She hadn’t been expending energy to move her muscles. She hadn’t been breathing harder. Her heart hadn’t been beating faster. What was so hard about doing nothing? She would have said that she’d been exercising willpower to resist temptation, but that folk concept from the nineteenth century had been mostly abandoned by modern experts. What would it even mean to say that a person was exercising willpower? How could it be shown to be anything more than a metaphor?
    The answer, as it turned out, was to start with warm cookies.

The Radish Experiment
    Sometimes social scientists have to be a little cruel with their experiments. When the college students walked into Baumeister’s laboratory, they were already hungry because they’d been fasting, and now they were in a room suffused with the aroma of chocolate chip cookies that had just been baked in the lab. The experimental subjects sat down at a table with several culinary choices: the warm cookies, some pieces of chocolate, and a bowl of radishes. Some students were invited to eat the cookies and candy. The unlucky ones were assigned to “the radish condition”: no treats, just raw radishes.
    To maximize temptation, the researchers left the students alone with the radishes and the cookies, and observed them through a small, hidden window. The ones in the radish condition clearly struggled with the temptation. Many gazed longingly at the cookies before settling down to bite reluctantly into a radish. Some of them picked up a cookie and smelled it, savoring the pleasure of freshly baked chocolate. A couple accidentally dropped a cookie on the floor and then hastened to put it back in the bowl so no one would know of their flirtation with sin. But nobody actually bit into the forbidden food. The temptation was always resisted, if in some cases by the narrowest of margins. All this was to the good, in terms of the experiment. It showed that the cookies were really quite tempting and that people needed to summon up their willpower to resist them.
    Then the students were taken to another room and given geometry puzzles to work on. The students thought they were being tested for cleverness, although in fact the puzzles were insoluble. The test was to see how long they’d work before giving up. This has been a standard technique that stress researchers and others have used for decades because it’s a reliable indicator of overall perseverance. (Other research has shown that someone who keeps trying one of these insoluble puzzles will also work longer at tasks that are actually doable.)
    The students who’d been allowed to eat chocolate chip cookies and candy typically worked on the puzzles for about twenty minutes, as did a control group of students who were also hungry but hadn’t been offered food of any kind. The sorely tempted radish eaters, though, gave up in just eight minutes—a huge difference by the standards of laboratory experiments. They’d successfully resisted the temptation of the cookies and the chocolates, but the effort left them with less energy to tackle the puzzles. The old folk wisdom about willpower appeared to be correct after all, unlike the newer and fancier psychological theories of the self.
    Willpower looked like much more than a metaphor. It seemed to be like a muscle that could be fatigued through use, just as Shakespeare had recognized in Troilus and Cressida . The Trojan warrior Troilus, convinced that Cressida will be tempted “most cunningly” by the charms of Greek suitors, tells her that he trusts her desire to remain faithful but is worried that she will yield under strain. It’s folly to presume that our