Willpower

self-discipline and for self-respect.”
    Now, you might think the energy spent shaving in the jungle would be better devoted to looking for food. Wouldn’t that exercise of self-control leave you more depleted and less able to exert willpower for something vital? But orderly habits like that can actually improve self-control in the long run by triggering automatic mental processes that don’t require much energy. Stanley’s belief in the link between external order and inner self-discipline has been confirmed recently in some remarkable studies. In one experiment, a group of participants answered questions sitting in a nice neat laboratory room, while others sat in the kind of place that inspires parents to shout, “Clean up your room!” The people in the messy room scored lower in self-control on many measures, such as being unwilling to wait a week for a larger sum of money as opposed to taking a smaller sum right away. When offered snacks and drinks, people in the neat lab room chose apples and milk instead of the candy and sugary colas preferred by their peers in the pigsty.
    In a similar experiment conducted online, some participants answered questions on a clean, well-designed Web site on which everything was correctly positioned and properly spelled. Others were asked the same questions on a sloppy Web site with spelling errors and other problems. On the messy site, people were more likely to say that they would gamble rather than take a sure thing, that they would curse and swear, and that they would take an immediate but small reward rather than waiting for a larger but delayed reward. The messy Web site also elicited lower donations to charity. Charity and generosity have been linked to self-control, partly because self-control is needed to overcome our natural animal selfishness, and partly because, as we’ll see later, thinking about others can increase our own self-discipline. The orderly Web sites, like the neat lab rooms, provided subtle cues guiding people unconsciously toward self-disciplined decisions and actions helping others.
    By shaving every day, Stanley could benefit from this same sort of orderly cue without having to expend much mental energy. He didn’t have to make a conscious decision every morning to shave. Once he had expended the willpower to make it his custom, it became a relatively automatic mental process requiring little or no further willpower. His dutiful behavior at Starvation Camp was extreme, but it fits a pattern recently observed by Baumeister working together with Denise de Ridder and Catrin Finkenauer, two Dutch researchers who led an analysis of a large set of published and unpublished studies on people who scored high in self-control as measured in a personality test. These studies reported experiments involving a variety of behaviors, which the researchers divided into a couple of broad categories: mainly automatic or mainly controlled. The researchers assumed, logically enough, that people with high self-control would tend to exercise it most noticeably in the behavior they controlled the most. Yet when the results were totaled up in a meta-analysis, just the opposite pattern appeared. The people with high self-control were distinguished by their behaviors that took place more or less automatically.
    At first the researchers were baffled. Their results suggested that we don’t use self-control on controllable behaviors. How could that be? They checked and rechecked their codings and calculations, but that was indeed the finding. Only when they went back to the original studies did they begin to understand what this result meant. And it meant a serious change in how to think about self-control.
    The behaviors they had coded as automatic tended to be linked to habits, whereas the more controlled sorts of behaviors tended to be unusual or one-time-only actions. Self-control turned out to be most effective when people used it to establish good habits and break bad ones. People with self-control were more likely to regularly use condoms, and to avoid habits like smoking, frequent snacking, and heavy drinking. It took willpower to establish patterns of healthy behavior—which was why the people with more willpower were better able to do it—but once the habits were established, life could proceed smoothly, particularly some aspects of life.
    Another unexpected finding from the meta-analysis was that self-control was particularly helpful for performance in work