Two Types of Willpower

Quick Hits
Brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

Willpower is certainly a useful thing to have and in everyday life this often means overcoming temptation.

But many of us fall short on willpower at least some of the time – but mostly very often. However, the term may be misleading because researchers think of willpower in different ways. There’s one way which is just don’t eat that extra chocolate bar, scoff the dessert, eat the bag of crisps (chips for the rest of the world), or get out for a run in the cold rain. That is what researchers call synchronic regulation.

The other approach is to do what Odysseus did in Homer’s Epic: to get his sailors to strap him to the mast so that he couldn’t be overcome, or better respond, to the Sirens song. This therefore involves changing the environment or creating new habits to avoid temptation in the first place. This is known as diachronic regulation.

Zachary Irving et al. of Rutgers University wanted to know how normal fold view will power or emotional regulation. They conducted a series of experiments whereby respondents had to judge a person’s actions and the scenarios describe either synchronic or diachronic regulation or a mixture of both.

They found out that we normally only consider synchronic regulation as willpower that is just resist the temptation through pure force of will. This is interesting because it shows that what researcher’s think and the everyday person may differ. It is also the least effective strategy.

Willpower requires power and is hard to exert all of the time. That is why Odysseus had the foresight to have himself strapped to the mast of his ship. He knew that shaping the environment and pre-empting his lack of ability to exert willpower was the most effective way to overcome this.

And this sage advice is a few thousand years old – but today it doesn’t apply to Sirens song but often to what we eat or how we get your daily physical activity. And now you have the terminology: diachronic regulation is the way to go.

This highlights that in behavioural change either self-initiated, or from external sources, is better suited.

As we have stated and many others have noted relying on willpower alone is a bad behavioural change strategy. Though we may not consider it willpower, it is neverthelss prempting behaviour and using similar brain areas, diachronic regulaiton is a good strategy.

And this in turn builds new habits which can make good old-fashioned willpower more likely to succeed.

Reference

Zachary C. Irving, Jordan Bridges, Aaron Glasser, Juan Pablo Bermúdez, Chandra Sripada.
Will-powered: Synchronic regulation is the difference maker for self-control.
Cognition, 2022; 225: 105154
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105154