Willpower

easily quit smoking has already done so, leaving behind a hard core of heavily addicted smokers who could not kick the habit for love or money. But wave after wave of evidence has contradicted this theory. While some people will go on puffing all by themselves, smokers who live mainly among nonsmokers tend to have high rates of quitting, indicating again the power of social influence and social support for quitting. Studies of obesity have detected similar patterns of social influence, as we’ll discuss later.

Sacred Self-control
    If you’re in a religious congregation and ask God for longer life, you are likely to get it. It doesn’t even seem to matter which god you ask. Any sort of religious activity increases your longevity, according to the psychologist Michael McCullough (who isn’t religiously devout himself). He looked at more than three dozen studies that had asked people about their religious devotion and then kept track of them over time. It turned out that the nonreligious people died off sooner, and that at any given point, a religiously active person was 25 percent more likely than a nonreligious person to remain alive. That’s a pretty hefty difference, especially when the measure is being alive versus dead, and that result (published in 2000) has since been confirmed by other researchers. Some of those long-lived people no doubt liked to think that God was directly answering their prayers. But divine intervention was not the kind of hypothesis that appealed to social scientists, if only because it was so tough to test in the lab. They have found more earthly causes.
    Religious people are less likely than others to develop unhealthy habits, like getting drunk, engaging in risky sex, taking illicit drugs, and smoking cigarettes. They’re more likely to wear seat belts, visit a dentist, and take vitamins. They have better social support, and their faith helps them cope psychologically with misfortunes. And they have better self-control, as McCullough and his colleague at the University of Miami, Brian Willoughby, recently concluded after analyzing hundreds of studies of religion and self-control over eight decades. Their analysis was published in 2009 in the Psychological Bulletin, one of the most prestigious and rigorous journals in the field. Some of the effects of religion were unsurprising: Religion promotes family values and social harmony, in part because some values gain in importance by being supposedly linked to God’s will or other religious values. Less obvious benefits included the finding that religion reduces people’s inner conflicts among different goals and values. As we noted earlier, conflicting goals impede self-regulation, so it appears that religion reduces such problems by providing believers with clearer priorities.
    More important, religion affects two central mechanisms for self-control: building willpower and improving monitoring. As early as the 1920s, researchers reported that students who spent more time in Sunday school scored higher on laboratory tests of self-discipline. Religiously devout children were rated relatively low in impulsiveness by both parents and teachers. We don’t know of any researchers who have specifically tested the self-control consequences of regular prayers or other religious practices, but these rituals presumably build willpower in the same way as the other exercises that have been studied, like forcing yourself to sit up straight or speak more precisely.
    Religious meditations often involve explicit and effortful regulation of attention. The beginner’s exercise in Zen meditation is to count one’s breaths up to ten and then do it again, over and over. The mind wanders quite naturally, so bringing it back to focus narrowly on one’s breathing builds mental discipline. So does saying the rosary, chanting Hebrew psalms, repeating Hindu mantras. When neuroscientists observe people praying or meditating, they see strong activity in two parts of the brain that are also important for self-regulation and control of attention. Psychologists see an effect when they expose people to religious words subliminally, meaning that the words are flashed on a screen so quickly that the people aren’t consciously aware of what they’ve seen. People who are subliminally exposed to religious words like God or Bible become slower to recognize words associated with temptations like drugs or premarital sex . “It looks as if people come to associate