Willpower

interest-paying savings account. They not only gave up the chance for interest but also put themselves at risk of losing it all—and indeed, at the six-month mark, more than half of them did end up flunking the test. The urge to smoke was so strong that a majority of them yielded to it even though they knew they’d lose their money.
    The good news, though, was that this incentive did help some of the smokers to quit, and they stayed off cigarettes even after passing the six-month test and collecting the money in their account. At that point, the program officially ended, and the subjects didn’t expect to be monitored any further. But the researchers wanted to see how lasting the effects were, so they waited another six months, until the one-year mark, and then surprised all the subjects by asking them to take another urine test. Even though the people no longer had any financial incentive to stay off nicotine, the effects of the program were still evident. Compared with a control group that was offered a different stop-smoking program, the smokers offered a commitment contract were nearly 40 percent more likely to be nicotine-free after a year. Given an incentive to temporarily restrain their smoking, they were more likely to make a lasting change in their lives. What began as a precommitment turned into something permanent and more valuable: a habit.

The Brain on Autopilot
    Imagine, for a moment, that you are Henry Stanley awaking on a particularly inauspicious morning. You emerge from your tent in the Ituri rain forest. It’s dark, of course. It’s been dark for four months. Your stomach, long since ruined on previous African expeditions by parasites, recurrent diseases, and massive doses of quinine and other medicines, is in even worse shape than usual. You and your men have been reduced to eating berries, roots, fungi, grubs, caterpillars, ants, and slugs—when you’re lucky enough to find them. The closest thing to a good meal recently was your donkey, which you shot in order to feed the group. The ravenous men ate every part of it, even fighting over the hooves and desperately licking blood on the ground before it seeped into the soil.
    Dozens of people were so crippled—from hunger, disease, injuries, and festering sores—that they had to be left behind at a spot in the forest that is grimly being referred to as Starvation Camp. You’ve taken the healthier ones ahead to look for food, but they’ve been dropping dead along the way, and there’s still no food to be found. You fear you’ve just gone from one starvation camp to another, and you have begun imagining, in morbid detail, how you and the other men will collapse and die on the forest floor. You envision the reaction of the forest’s insects to each man’s death: “Before he is cold, a ‘scout’ will come, then two, then a score, and, finally, myriads of fierce yellowbodied scavengers, their heads clad in shining horn-mail; and, in a few days, there will only remain a flat layer of rags, at one end of which will be a glistening, white skull.”
    But as of this morning, you’re not dead yet. There’s no food in camp, but at least you’re alive. Now that you’ve arisen and taken care of nature’s first call of the morning, what’s the next thing to do?
    For Stanley, this was an easy decision: shave. As one of his servants in England would later recall: “He had often told me that, on his various expeditions, he had made it a rule, always to shave carefully. In the Great Forest, in ‘Starvation Camp,’ on the mornings of battle, he had never neglected this custom, however great the difficulty; he told me he had often shaved with cold water, or with blunt razors.” Why would somebody starving to death insist on shaving? When we asked Stanley’s biographer about this extreme punctiliousness in the jungle, Jeal said it was a typical manifestation of the man’s orderliness.
    “Stanley always tried to keep a neat appearance—with clothes, too—and set great store by the clarity of his handwriting, by the condition of his journals and books, and by the organization of his boxes,” Jeal said. “He praised the similar neatness of Livingstone’s arrangements. The creation of order can only have been an antidote to the destructive capacities of nature all around him.” Stanley himself offered a similar explanation for his need to shave in the jungle: “I always presented as decent an appearance as possible, both for