Willpower

time in her life to say a prayer—or at least her version of a prayer. The best she could come up with was: Higher power, where the fuck have you been? She still didn’t believe in any kind of deity, but she did decide to keep offering thanks every evening for remaining sober. About a week later, as she writes in her memoir Lit, she expanded her nightly prayer by listing other things for which she was grateful, and then mentioning some things she wanted, like money.
    “It takes me a full five minutes to shut up begging,” she recalls, “and it sounds crazy to say it, but for the first time in about a week, I don’t want a drink at all.” She went on being skeptical about a higher power, and when members of her AA group urged her to “surrender,” she protested: “But what if I don’t believe in God? It’s like they’ve sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can’t will feeling.” Religion was so irrational, and yet, when she found herself desperately craving a drink at a cocktail party for the New York literati at the Morgan Library, she retreated to the ladies’ room, went into a stall, and irrationally sank to her knees to pray: Please keep me away from a drink. I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it. Please, please, please. Just as with Clapton, it worked for her: “The primal chattering in my skull has dissipated as if some wizard conjured it away.”
    That wizardry can be especially hard to understand for agnostics, a group that includes us. (We’re both lapsed Christians who don’t spend much time on our knees praying to any higher power, either at home or in church.) But after looking at the data, we have no trouble believing there’s some kind of power working at 12-step meetings and religious services. Although many scientists are skeptical of institutions that promote spirituality—and psychologists, for some reason, have been particularly skeptical of religion—self-control researchers have developed a grudging respect for the practical results. Even when social scientists can’t accept supernatural beliefs, they recognize that religion is a profoundly influential human phenomenon that has been evolving effective self-control mechanisms for thousands of years. Alcoholics Anonymous couldn’t have attracted millions of people like Eric Clapton and Mary Karr without doing something right. Does a belief in a higher power really give you more control over yourself? Or is something else going on—something that even nonbelievers could believe in?

The Mystery of AA
    With the exception of organized religion, Alcoholics Anonymous probably represents the largest program ever conducted to improve self-control. It attracts more problem drinkers than do all professional and clinical programs combined, and many professional therapists routinely send their clients to AA meetings. Yet social scientists still aren’t exactly sure what AA accomplishes. It’s hard to study a decentralized organization without systematic records: AA’s chapters operate autonomously and, of course, insist on members remaining anonymous. The local chapters follow the same general 12-step program, but these steps weren’t systematically devised—the number of steps was initially chosen to match the number of Christ’s apostles. A researcher would want at the very least to test the twelve steps one at a time, to see which ones (if any) have an effect.
    AA members are fond of comparing alcoholism to diseases like diabetes, hypertension, depression, or Alzheimer’s, but the analogy is problematic. Sure, there are physiological aspects of alcoholism—some people seem genetically predisposed to it—but going to AA is nothing like going to the hospital. Diabetics and hypertensives don’t treat their conditions by sitting around offering one another encouragement. As various skeptics have observed, clinicians do not think that depressed people would benefit from spending time attending meetings with other depressed people. The progression of most diseases does not directly depend on people repeatedly taking voluntary self-destructive actions: No one can suddenly make a firm decision to abstain from heart disease or Alzheimer’s. Alcoholism is more complicated, and these complexities have left researchers puzzling over the contradictory results from studies of AA. Some say the lack of consistent evidence casts doubt on AA’s efficacy; others say researchers just