Willpower

task of all. When self-control was measured afterward by asking people to solve as many anagrams as they could, the people who had actually made decisions gave up sooner than the others. Crossing the Rubicon appeared to be tough mental work, whether it involved deciding the fate of an empire or the size of a computer drive.
    But suppose the choice involved options easier and more appealing than starting a civil war or contemplating the innards of a computer. Suppose it involved a process that you found entertaining. Would those choices still deplete willpower? Researchers investigated by conducting another version of the bridal-registry experiment, but this time the subjects included people with widely assorted attitudes toward the task. Some of the young men and women were much more enthusiastic than Jean Twenge at the prospect of choosing wedding gifts for themselves. They said they looked forward to making the choices, and afterward they reported that they enjoyed the experience. Meanwhile, other subjects in the same experiment utterly detested the whole process of picking china and silverware and appliances.
    As you might expect, the process wasn’t as depleting for the ones who enjoyed it—but only up to a point. If the participants were given a short list of choices to be made in four minutes, then the ones who liked picking gifts could zip through without depleting any of their willpower, whereas the registry-dreading group was predictably depleted even by that short exercise. But when the list was longer and the process went on for twelve minutes, both groups were equally depleted (meaning that they exhibited less self-control on tests than did a control group that hadn’t made any choices about wedding gifts). A few pleasant decisions are apparently not all that depleting, but in the long run, there seems to be no such thing as a free choice, at least when it comes to making it for yourself.
    Choosing for others, though, isn’t always so difficult. While you may agonize over just the right furniture to put in your own living room, you probably wouldn’t expend all that much energy if you were asked to make decorating decisions for a casual acquaintance. When researchers put a series of home decor questions to people and then tested their willpower afterward, the results showed that it was much less depleting to decide for a casual acquaintance than for oneself. Even though it might seem difficult to choose a sofa for an acquaintance whose taste you don’t know, that difficulty is apparently offset by not caring a great deal about the outcome. After all, you won’t have to look at the sofa every day. The other side of the Rubicon looks less scary when you know someone else is going to end up there.

The Judge’s Dilemma (and the Prisoner’s Distress)
    Four men serving time in Israeli prisons recently asked to be released on parole. Their cases were heard by a board, consisting of a judge, a criminologist, and a sociologist, that periodically met for a daylong session to consider prisoners’ appeals. There were certain similarities to the four cases. Each of the prisoners was a repeat offender, having served a previous term in prison for a separate offense. Each man had served two-thirds of his current sentence, and each would have been able to participate in a rehabilitation program if released. But there were also differences, and the board granted parole to only two of the four men. From the list of the four cases, try guessing which two men were denied parole and had to remain in prison:
    Case 1 (heard at 8:50 A.M.): An Arab-Israeli male serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.
    Case 2 (heard at 1:27 P.M.): A Jewish-Israeli male serving a 16-month sentence for assault.
    Case 3 (heard at 3:10 P.M.): A Jewish-Israeli male serving a 16-month sentence for assault.
    Case 4 (heard at 4:25 P.M.): An Arab-Israeli male serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.
    There’s a pattern to the board’s decisions, but it’s not one you’ll find by looking at the men’s ethnic backgrounds or crimes or sentences. In looking for it, you might keep in mind a long-running debate about the nature of the legal system. One traditional school of scholars treats it as a system of rules to be administered impartially: the classic image of a blindfolded Lady Justice weighing the scales. Another school emphasizes the importance of human foibles, not abstract rules, in determining verdicts. These legal realists, as they’re