Willpower

AA meetings at a church during her first attempts to remain sober, but at first she was put off by the motley crowd and the earnest stories.
    She kept her distance until, after one particularly bad binge, she followed the AA advice and chose one member of the group, a fellow academic in Boston, as her sponsor—her personal counselor. She had no patience for the sponsor’s talk about a higher power, but the daily conversations still made a difference: “With her ministrations, I do not—for two months—drink: a white-knuckled, tooth-grinding effort that impresses no one outside the church basement I go to a few nights per week.” When the two women met for coffee to celebrate the two months of sobriety, Karr complained about the losers and loons in their AA group and their “spiritual crap.” Then, as Karr recalls, her sponsor suggested another way to think of a higher power, and of the group in the church basement:
    “Here, she says, are a bunch of people. They outnumber you, outearn you, outweigh you. They are, ergo—in some simplistic calculation—a power greater than you. They certainly know more about staying sober than you. . . . If you have a problem, bring it to the group.”
    Part of the group’s power comes from the passive act of sitting there and listening. To novices, AA meetings can seem pointless because most of the speakers just take turns telling their own stories instead of responding to one another and offering advice. But the act of telling a story forces you to organize your thoughts, monitor your behavior, and discuss goals for the future. A personal goal can seem more real once you speak it out loud, particularly if you know the audience will be monitoring you. A recent study of people undergoing cognitive therapy found that resolutions were more likely to be kept if they were made in the presence of other people, especially a romantic partner. Apparently, promising your therapist that you will cut down on drinking is not a powerful boost to self-control, but promising your spouse makes a big difference. Your spouse, after all, is the one who’s going to smell your breath.
    To quantify the power of peer-group pressure, economists studied a group of Chilean street vendors, seamstresses, and other low-income “microentrepreneurs” who had received loans from a nonprofit group. These people, mostly women, met in groups every week or two to receive training and to monitor the repayment of their loans. The economists Felipe Kast, Stephan Meier, and Dina Pomeranz randomly assigned these people to different savings programs. Some were simply given a no-fee savings account; others received the account plus the opportunity at their regular meetings to announce their savings goals and then have their progress discussed. The women subject to peer scrutiny saved nearly twice as much money as the others. The result seemed to confirm the power of the group, but where did the power come from? Could these effects be achieved with a “virtual peer group”? In a follow-up experiment, instead of discussing their savings out loud at a meeting, the Chilean women regularly received text messages noting their weekly progress (or lack thereof) along with information on how the rest of the savers in their group were doing. Surprisingly, these text messages seemed to be about as effective as the meetings, apparently because the messages provided the women with a virtual version of the same key benefits: regular monitoring and the chance to compare themselves with their peers.
    Smoking cigarettes has long been regarded as a personal physical compulsion due to overwhelming impulses in the smoker’s brain and body. Hence there was considerable surprise in 2008 when the New England Journal of Medicine published a study showing that quitting smoking seems to spread through social networks. The researchers, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, found that kicking the habit seemed to be contagious. If a member of a married couple quit smoking, the odds of the other spouse quitting would increase dramatically. The odds also got better if a brother, sister, or friend quit. Even coworkers had a substantial effect, as long as the people worked together in a fairly small firm.
    Smoking researchers have been especially intrigued by places where very few people smoke, because the assumption was that these remaining few must be seriously addicted. Indeed, one popular theory was that more or less everybody who can