Willpower

to focus and concentrate. At best, we have partial control over our streams of thought, as Wegner, who is now at Harvard, demonstrated by asking people to ring a bell whenever a white bear intruded on their thoughts. Some tricks and distraction techniques and incentives could briefly keep the creature at bay, he found, but eventually the bell tolled for everyone.
    This sort of experiment might sound frivolous. Of all the traumas and psychoses afflicting humans, “unwanted white bear thoughts” doesn’t rank very high. Yet that distance from everyday life is precisely what makes it a useful tool to researchers. To understand how well people control their thoughts, it’s best not to pick ordinary thoughts. When a graduate student tried a version of Wegner’s experiment in which people were told not to think about their mothers, the experiment failed in its purpose, and served to demonstrate only that college students are remarkably skilled at not thinking about their mothers.
    What makes Mom different from a white bear? Perhaps the students are trying to separate themselves emotionally from their parents. Perhaps they often want to do things that their mothers would disapprove of, and so they need to put Mom out of their minds. Or perhaps they wish to avoid feeling guilty for not calling their mother as often as she would like. But notice that all these possible explanations for the difference between Mom and the white bear are things about Mom. That’s exactly the problem, at least as a researcher would see it. Mothers are not good topics for pure research, because there is so much baggage—so many mental and emotional associations. The reasons you do or don’t think about your mother are many, variable, and highly specific, so they would not easily generalize. In contrast, if people have trouble suppressing thoughts of white bears—creatures that presumably play essentially no role in the daily life or personal history of the average American college student and research participant—then the explanation is likely to apply to a wide range of topics.
    For all those reasons, the white bear appealed to self-control researchers studying how people manage their thoughts. Sure enough, after people spent a few minutes trying not to think of a white bear, they gave up sooner on puzzles (compared with people who’d been free to ponder anything). They also had a harder time controlling their feelings in another slightly cruel experiment: being forced to remain stoic while watching classic skits from Saturday Night Live and a Robin Williams stand-up routine. The audience’s facial reactions were recorded and later systematically coded by researchers. Once again, the effects were obvious on the people who’d earlier done the white bear exercise: They couldn’t resist giggling, or at least smiling, when Williams went into one of his riffs.
    You might keep that result in mind if you have a boss prone to making idiotic suggestions. To avoid smirking at the next meeting, refrain from any strenuous mental exercises beforehand. And feel free to think about all the white bears you want.

Name That Feeling
    Once the experiments showed that willpower existed, psychologists and neuroscientists had a new set of questions. Exactly what was willpower? Which part of the brain was involved? What was happening in the neural circuits? What other physical changes were taking place? What did it feel like when willpower ebbed?
    The most immediate question was what to call this process—something more precise than “changeful potency” or “weak will” or the “The devil made me do it.” The recent scientific literature didn’t offer much help. Baumeister had to go all the way back to Freud to find a model of the self that incorporated concepts of energy. Freud’s ideas, as usual, turned out to be both remarkably prescient and utterly wrong. He theorized that humans use a process called sublimation to convert energy from its basic instinctual sources into more socially approved ones. Thus, Freud posited, great artists channel their sexual energy into their work. It was clever speculation, but the energy model of the self didn’t catch on with psychologists in the twentieth century, and neither did the specific theory about the sublimation mechanism. When Baumeister and colleagues tested a list of Freud’s theoretical mechanisms against the modern research literature, they found that sublimation fared the worst of all. There