Willpower

“Often it appeared as though it were wholly useless to struggle against evil, yet there was an infinitesimal improvement in each stage. The character was becoming more and more developed.” By his twenties he was a successful war correspondent and preacher of self-discipline to his friends. When one of them suggested he take a vacation, he dismissed the idea with a wonderful bit of verbiage (and self-importance): “It is only by railway celerity that I can live.” He wouldn’t even be able to enjoy a vacation, he wrote to his friend, because his conscience would torment him for wasting time. Nothing could interfere with his goal: “I mean by attention to my business, by self-denial, by indefatigable energy, to become, by this very business, my own master.”
    But once he reached Africa, Stanley also came to recognize the limits of anyone’s willpower. Although he credited his experiences there with ultimately strengthening him, he also saw the toll that Africa took on men unaccustomed to its rigors and temptations. “It is difficult for anyone who has not undergone experiences similar to ours to understand the amount of self-control each had to exercise, for fifteen hours every day, amid such surroundings as ours,” he wrote about their passage through the dark Ituri Forest. When Stanley first learned of some of the Rear Column’s cruelties and depredations, he noted in his journal that most people would erroneously conclude that the men were “originally wicked.” People back in civilization, Stanley realized, couldn’t imagine the changes undergone by the men since leaving England:
    At home these men had no cause to show their natural savagery . . . they were suddenly transplanted to Africa & its miseries. They were deprived of butcher’s meat & bread & wine, books, newspapers, the society & influence of their friends. Fever seized them, wrecked minds and bodies. Good nature was banished by anxiety. Pleasantness was eliminated by toil. Cheerfulness yielded to internal anguish . . . until they became but shadows, morally & physically of what they had been in English society.
    Stanley was describing what the economist George Loewenstein calls the “hot-cold empathy gap”: the inability, during a cool, rational, peaceful moment, to appreciate how we’ll behave during the heat of passion and temptation. At home in England, the men may have coolly intended to behave in a virtuous manner, but they couldn’t imagine how different their feelings would be in the jungle. The hot-cold empathy gap is still one of the most common challenges to self-control, albeit in less extreme versions. We deal with gaps more like the one observed by a friend of ours who grew up on a commune in Canada. She was the only child on the commune, mostly consisting of idealistic hippies. Among their ideals was to consume only the healthiest and most natural forms of food. Her mother, however, thought that a child ought to have cookies from the supermarket every now and then. For buying them, the mother had to endure lots of jokes and lectures about the evils of sugar, the perils of fattening junk food, the immorality of supporting international food corporations. The mother kept buying them anyway but then faced another problem. The cookies kept disappearing. Late in the evening, after partaking of natural substances like wine and cannabis, the commune dwellers’ willpower was depleted, and their disapproval of corporate junk food was no match for their cravings for Oreos. Some parents have to hide cookies from their children; this mother found that her child was the only person to whom the location could be revealed. The cookies had to be hidden because the grown-ups suffered from the hot-cold empathy gap. They denounced junk food by day without realizing how much they’d want those evil cookies once they were tired and stoned.
    In setting rules for how to behave in the future, you’re often in a calm, cool state, so you make unrealistic commitments. “It’s really easy to agree to diet when you’re not hungry,” says Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. And it’s really easy to be sexually abstemious when you’re not sexually aroused, as Loewenstein and Dan Ariely found by asking young heterosexual adult men some personal questions. If, say, they were attracted to a woman and she proposed a threesome with a man, would they do it? Could they imagine having sex with a woman who was forty years older?