Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Roy Baumeister: Free Will, The Self, Ego, Will Power

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

Roy Baumeister joins Theories of Everything to discuss the complexities of free will, the interplay between self-control and societal behaviors, and the psychological impacts of rejection and belongingness. Consider signing up for TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.orgLINKS MENTIONED:Debate Between Roy Baumeister & Robert Sapolsky - https://youtu.be/xeb98U9d1hgWillpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength - https://a.co/d/4PMNQyXIntersectional Implicit Bias - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35587425/TIMESTAMPS:00:00 - Intro02:16 - The Human Mind09:45 - Language15:34 - Do Animates Have Free Will?20:02 - Robert Sapolsky28:20 - Different Free Will Outlooks40:54 - Ego Depletion & Decision Fatigue50:26 - Self Regulation55:44 - Left vs. Right Brain59:15 - Willpower01:12:49 - How To Increase Willpower01:19:15 - Opposing Mainstream Views01:20:08 - What Needs More Attention?01:21:59 - Prejudices In America01:26:25 - Q&A01:38:38 - Support TOE Support TOE: - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE - TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch  Follow TOE: - *NEW* Get my 'Top 10 TOEs' PDF + Weekly Personal Updates: https://www.curtjaimungal.org - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoriesofeverythingpod - TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoriesofeverything_ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 - Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything  

A problem in the free will debate is that people tend to think of it as all or nothing, whereas in psychology almost everything is on a continuum. We don't live in a deterministic world, we live in a world that's defined by choices. Roy Baumeister is a professor of psychology known for his work on the self, so that is, what and who are you? He's also a researcher in social rejection, belongingness, sexuality, sex differences, self-control, self-esteem, self-defeating behaviors, motivation, aggression, consciousness, and free will. Professor Baumeister's name may be unfamiliar

to those who are outside the universities, but inside the academy, he's a household name, especially in the field of psychology, where the literature is replete with references to his work, so much so that when I first encountered his research years ago, I thought he was dead because I've never seen so many references to someone who's alive. In fact, Roy Baumeister is one of the top cited researchers not just in free will studies, not just in consciousness studies, nor just in social psychology, nor just in psychology, but in any scientific field ever. He's even won an award

from this place called the Institute for Scientific Information. Again, some information for those who are outside the academy. Depending on your field, you're lucky if you're referenced a few thousand times and you're considered a legend if you're referenced tens of thousands of times. Roy Baumeister is in the hundreds of thousands. It was such an honor to speak to Professor Baumeister. Today we cover the topics of free will, Zen Buddhism, the self, and ego depletion. This is an extremely practical episode, meaning that there are nuggets throughout of tidbits

to improve your daily life. My name is Kurt Jaimungal. For those of you who are unfamiliar, this is a channel called Theories of Everything where we explore theories of everything in the physics sense, using my background in mathematical physics from the University of Toronto, but as well as explore other large grand questions. What is consciousness? Where does it come from?

What is reality? What defines truth? What is free will? And do we have it? Of course, increasingly we've been exploring artificial intelligence and its potential relationship to the fundamental laws. Enjoy this episode with the legendary Professor Roy Baumeister. Professor, I'm going to read something from a TED talk of yours and I'd like you to expand.

I'm paraphrasing, of course. Okay, sure. What's the human mind for? The evolutionary people will tell us, obviously it's to facilitate survival and reproduction. Okay, that's probably true, but it doesn't get us very far. After all, that explains just about every functioning part in every living thing.

So, if we are to understand something special about the human mind, one must dig deeper. Evolutionarily, we're animals, yeah, okay, we're certainly animals, we have a birth, death, hunger, sleep, all the rest. But we're also supposed to be more than just animals. I mean, when someone tells you that you're acting like an animal, they're not stating some basic indisputable scientific fact. Rather, it's a vituberative reproach stating you're somehow failing to be more than an animal, which is what's expected by the way of a civilized human being. Professor, please expand on that.

Okay. I think where I was going with that is to lay out what's really been the foundation of my thinking for the last 20, 25 years, in my attempt to understand what the human condition and the human mind are all about. The human mind is created by nature for culture. Culture is our, I say it's our biological strategy in the sense that it's how our species solves the problems of survival and reproduction. Every species has to do that to how to continue life or else go extinct. So we solve it in a very unusual way. We use culture as in shared information, division of labor, exchange labor exchange networks and so on to improve our population, our biological outcomes.

It's a very successful one. I mean, the human population last year went over 8 billion total people on the planet, even while most of the other mammal populations are declining. So it's working very well for us. For that, we have to understand how to operate in a culture. My reading of the evolutionary literature is the two big themes in human evolution, the two things that set us apart even from the other great apes are the big advances

in communication and cooperation. And those are somewhat linked and you can understand culture as a giant system of cooperation and communication. So language is the first and very obvious thing. Language really improves communication. The other great apes have some communication mostly by gestures, for which they have a few signals, mainly to influence others like follow me or stop what you're doing or let's play or let's have sex or whatever. But they don't communicate to share information the way we do. In fact, linguists say there's no other species that has language. In contrast, every known human culture has language. So that's about as human universal and distinctive to us as

you can get. So the communication part is there. My sense too is that that's why we name ourselves homo sapiens as in Latin for smart people, clever dudes. But humans started walking upright and being different from the other apes before the brain really expanded. That's what we found with the Australopithecus who walked upright but had a tiny little pea brain still. But communication creates a reason for the brain to expand. There's more information, there's more for the brain to do. The brain's a very expensive organ. It doesn't just get, you might think, oh,

it's always better to be intelligent so all animals will be constantly evolving toward more and more intelligent. But that's, that's obviously not true. You don't see rats or squirrels with giant Einstein brains. And that's cause the brain consumes so much calories.

A squirrel, if it happened to be born with an Einstein brain, it would starve to death. It couldn't get enough more nuts just by being smarter to pay for the extra brain. But the humans do, and it's because of shared information, uh, and, uh, and all the things that go along with culture, like working together in teams with, uh, uh, division of labor and responsibilities, um, morality to promotes cooperation. Again, all human societies have morality and there are

moral sorts of things that you see in some animals. But experts say it doesn't really rise to the level of morality the way it does in humans, especially understanding in terms of abstract principles. They might feel bad if they hurt another, especially one they're related to, but it's a long road. So working together too, we cooperate even with strangers. Some animals will cooperate with their immediate kin. And I suppose you can say that some of the giant insect societies like ants, that that's cooperation, but it's not at all by the same mechanism. They don't understand what they're doing the way they do. We don't make choices. I have a book that's just coming out this fall on a scientific theory of free will. And in that, I make the point about being more than animals. Of course, we're animals. And so, you're acting like an animal. As you said in the quotation, that's just stating a fact, you are an animal. But we expect people to be more, including communicating, explaining your actions,

being moral, understanding moral principles, understanding the consequences of your actions, being responsible. Those things didn't just evolve in the brain, they're part of the requirements of an effective social system. And so the brain evolved to be able to operate in a system like that. Again, because it really works. It improves survival and reproduction. I mean, look at chimpanzees, our closest relatives. They don't have language. They don't have technology. They don't really have culture beyond a very minimal bit of copying a few ways of doing things from each other. While our population is up to 8 billion chimpanzees in the wild or something like 300,000 and a third of 1 million, not even a billion. Again, something

the humans did has been tremendously successful, just in pure biological terms of the increase in the population. And I think again, the key is that we learned to organize our social life for communication and cooperation. I would like to linger on the concept of free will, and there are several questions here about that. Okay. Firstly, do you believe language to be a necessary precondition to the development of free will? Or is it more like, well, we need a sophisticated self-concept and language is great for that? Well, language probably helps with the self-concept, but language helps you think about all sorts of things. I suppose there could be some degree of self-understanding without language.

Language really helps you organize information. And again, the approach like that is sort of taking the single mind and looking at it that way, but it misses the interpersonal dimension. We evolve to work together. We are collectively really smart. Joe Henrik, I was talking to him, I was visiting at Harvard this fall. He told me that the human brain has actually gotten smaller over the last centuries. So individually, maybe we're not as smart as our ancestors, but collectively we are smarter. What we've learned to do is share information. What one person accomplishes by himself or herself in a lifetime intellectually, you couldn't get far starting from scratch, but we all build on what others did. I mean,

start with mathematics. I mean, there's a pure, mathematics is objectively true. Every culture gets the same answers when it multiplies five times six, but it had to discover it collectively and build up that information. So it's not like each child gets up and figures out arithmetic and algebra and geometry for itself, rather generations of scholars worked over those facts and relationships and so on and then they can be taught. It's the marvelous thing about culture is information can be transmitted to the next generation, so it enables progress. Wolves are social animals, extremely social, but

a pack of wolves out in the wild away from human life, they live pretty much the same way a pack of lives would have lived 10,000 years ago. They haven't invented technology or democracy or reconceptualized the roles of female wolves or created a market economy or anything like that. Whereas the progress in human society due to advances in culture is enormous. Now, I haven't gotten to your question about free will and language, and that's a really interesting one, which I have not thought about. Clearly, with language, you could do a lot more with free will, but you might have some degree of

it without language. The problem in the free will debate is that people tend some degree of it without language. The problem in the free will debate is that people tend to think of it as all or nothing. Whereas in psychology, almost everything is on a continuum. I debated the biologist Robert Sapolsky also a couple months ago, and he was doing kind of the extreme all or nothing, you have to be independent of any causes. Why would that even evolve? For culture, we evolved to respond very thoroughly to the social environment, to all sorts of subtle aspects of it. So you want to be extra responsive to the causes in the environment, not be immune to them, which some ideas of free will have tried to push more more often by skeptics.

So I also say in the book, I've talked to a lot of scientists who believe in free will and a lot who don't, and I mostly agree with both of them because they're not talking about the same thing. The ones who reject the idea of free will are thinking of it as, as I said, being immune to all causes or it's some kind of supernatural thing that you have a soul that sort of causes your behavior independently of physical processes.

And I'm not making this up. This is, these are statements in the literature by free will skeptics. Well, I don't believe in that kind of thing either. Uh, but the people who believe in it say, well, it's the ability to make choices, to act differently in the same situation. It's a, it's a kind of flexibility of behavior and that is highly adaptive and animal researchers and biologists will tell you that just being somewhat, uh, uh, flexible makes it harder for predators to anticipate

where you are and to kill you and eat you. And being flexible, I mean, learning is a kind of flexibility. So obviously learning comes along before humankind and before free will. In terms of the language question, language gives us a lot more. Uh, the philosophers who talk about free will often emphasize the moral responsibility, moral aspect of it. And that's why it's important to ordinary people too, even in the legal system. Uh, why did you do that?

Did you enter into this agreement of your own free will? Did you break the law of your own free will? Or was it an accident? Did someone force you to, did you not realize what you were doing? All those reduce the blame worthiness. There's nothing like that in, in animal society, uh, questioning someone's intentions or offering explanations, uh, or anything like that. So, so to get to your question is, is language necessary for free will?

I won't say it's necessary, but again, it can do a lot more with language. Would you say that some animals have some free will? Well, yes, there's certainly steps in that direction. There are arguments that they have it, this guy Brems, he created a brief stir with publishing a paper on fruit flies, suggesting that fruit flies had free will and the philosophers are, oh my God, fruit flies, come on. But the evidence was he had them locked in a, in a sealed environment where there was no external stimulation and they would start flying and then they would change direction. So I said, there's nothing outside of the fruit fly that caused it to change direction.

It just seems like inside there's something that produced a random change. Uh, and then he went on to say, really in lots of animals, even in a couple plants, they sort of randomly turn out the other way, which makes harder for the predators who want to eat them to find them and so improves their survival a little bit. My problem with that analysis, with calling

that free will is the emphasis on random action. As we started this, that the basis of my thinking is that we evolved to do color analysis, with Calling That Free Well, is the emphasis on random action. As we started this, the basis of my thinking is that we evolved to do culture. Culture doesn't really appreciate random action. It doesn't really have that. In the book, I kind of make a joke and say, well, would you hire a plumber who did random things to your plumbing?

Of course not. You want them to be, I think, sorry, two things, competence and, and, and, and, uh, honesty. So you want them to come and fix the sink, uh, so that it works the way it's supposed to and to charge you a fair price for that. Uh, and that's what free will is for to make people follow the rules in the culture, uh, and to operate, play, perform their role in the culture.

In my previous book was trying to understand what is the self. And what I say in that is that the self comes into being when the brain learns to operate a role in the social system, in the, in the cultural system. It's not that the brain itself needs a self. It's not that the itself needs a self.

Um, so you have the same kind of question with animals, you know, the animals have a self, well, I suppose they have some, they know their position in there, they have relationships and so on, but, uh, not nearly, uh, to operate in a complicated system where you have a job and a house with a mortgage or an apartment with rent to do and a marital obligation and all these other things. Why would that person think that the fruit fly who changes direction has anything to do with free will? Because if you follow a gas molecule, it would do the same and it would be a difficult case

to make that the gas molecule has free will. Though some panpsychists probably would put the word proto in front and say, yes, it has a proto free will. Yeah. I don't think they would say it for the gas molecule. Um, and I don't know if it changes, right? It probably doesn't change direction for the same kind of reason that the fruit fly does in which the brain is issuing commands to

the wings to turn and go in a different direction. So a gas molecule might change direction, but it's probably changed by external currents in the wind or something like that. It's not changing from inside. Whereas the fruit fly, the brain is telling the wings to move. I don't actually know how a fruit fly steers itself, but it's telling it to change direction. Again, it was a sealed environment, so there's no external stimuli. There's nobody trying to swat it or there's no wind coming in. There's no light, there's no sound, nothing external to prompt it. So something inside is prompting it to change. And that's why they thought, and I don't think

he was really going to argue it's free will in the sense that humans have it, but it was an early step in that direction. Again, things in psychology are on a continuum. Things in evolution happen by steps and stages too. So it's not just bingo, Tuesday afternoon, free will evolved. And there it was. Well, that to me sounds like weak evidence because there are random error molecule collisions. But anyway, Robert Sapolsky is clearly not some fatuous dimwit. Like he's brilliant. Yeah, I'm a big fan of his. Yeah. And he's in neuropsychology. Why do you think it is that someone of his stature and intelligence and breadth of knowledge would come to a black and white definition of free will? We're not just psychoanalyzing him. Oh,

and by the way, what do you think Robert Sapolsky's definition is? That's good to state as well. Oh, I should look that up, but he means it's being independent of all external causes and of all prior events in your own history as well. And he's not alone. A number of people think of free will that way, including a number of fine scientists and plenty of ordinary people as well. So it's not idiosyncratic, but debates about free will have often been carried on in this all or nothing fashion. On the positive side, Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher, argued in his work in the 40s

that humans are condemned to be free. We are always free, always acting free. Later I'm told he recanted and said, I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know. Interesting. I believe that. But it seemed he was making a case for radical total freedom at all times. Whereas I think, I mean, that was before there was a big evolutionary psychology movement when Sartre was alive. But the evolution of psychological traits again, is likely to be a process of steps and gradual

emergence. And so what I said with Sapolsky that he didn't argue back. He said, Oh, I got to think about that was that all that we need for scientific theory of free will is that some actions are freer than others. Everybody can say that.

Uh, we ran a experiment where we asked people to describe one action they did where they acted of their own free will and one where they acted not of their own free will. And everybody could do this. Nobody said, Oh, I've never acted in my own free will. Uh, you know, sometimes you're free to make a

choice and sometimes there's no choice. Uh, I mean, even on the airline, I was on the airline yesterday, you sit in the back, uh, then there, there's no more chicken. They gave away all the chicken dinners. Uh, so you don't have that choice. Um, in fact, it's one thing I bring to the free will debate is background in social psychology.

We, we study situations and can think more and more freedom is in the situation. It's not that the brain somehow can split the stream of causality into different, uh, uh, pathways or anything like that. Um, rather you spot the opportunities, the threats, into different pathways or anything like that. Rather you spot the opportunities, the threats, dangers, the contingencies and so on in the situation.

And then you take action, you make choices to capitalize on those so that you get a good result. That that's what's adaptive. That's what we do to get better results. So then it would be a mistake to say that Roy has free will. It would be better to say Roy in this environment or interacting with this set of people has free will.

Well, it is a set of mental capabilities that you carry from one situation to another, but it's, it, you use the free will in a situation. Um, it's, uh, so in some situations you can use it, uh, better than others. And, um, some situations. It's my understanding that Robert Sapolsky, well, I don't know how he would respond to you saying that you don't want to a probabilistic plumber or a stochastic surgeon.

It's not even probabilistic. It would be random. Some people think free will has to be random action. There are these attempts. You see, the determinism, which is kind of what Sapolsky is embracing, is this view that every cause produces an effect that's inevitable. And the way Laplace, who is a mathematician actually, as well as a philosopher in about 1830 or whatever, the way he put it is if a smart enough mind understood all the laws of nature and understood the exact position of every particle

in the universe at some particular moment, it could predict the future with 100% accuracy, predict everything that ever happens. And so, I mean, nobody thinks anyone's going to do these calculations. In fact, some philosophers have calculated that if the whole universe were converted into a single computer, it still wouldn't have enough computing power to do this. But the implication is that everything you do was predetermined, it was predestined. In fact, back in 1900, everything in your life was already inevitable. In fact, it has been since the Big Bang or slightly after the Big Bang. So that's a vision, but that was really a 19th century vision. Science was spreading

through society and people were getting excited about causes and effects. I remember the, I mean, I don't remember, but reading about the sensation it caused when they predicted an eclipse in advance, and they told the whole city that the sun's going to disappear for a few minutes. And it actually happened. Wow. So the idea of the universe is a giant machine, the clockwork universe, they call it. This was an exciting idea to them at a time. A century later, you go into the early

20th century, that became untenable. First of all, relativity theory, there's no simultaneous moment of the entire universe. So, so the thought experiment that Laplace was based on would not possibly be done. Second, quantum mechanics that really does seem to be indeterminacy at the level of tiny particles.

And meanwhile, in philosophy, we moved on to phenomenology and existentialism, which puts conscious experience in human choice really as a central, basic reality. Everything is based on quantum mechanics. we moved onto phenomenology and existentialism, which puts conscious experience and human choice really as a central, basic reality. Everything else is inferred from that. Anyway, the quantum physics idea is that there's really some randomness in the universe. A lot of people get excited and think, well, can we build a free will theory based on that?

Maybe the randomness of these tiny particles in the synapses in the brain causes unpredictable outcomes. It's complicated further because scientists test theories, which you look for patterns in data. And so free will, they think would show up as randomness because it means they're not conforming to the cause that we expect. So there's this seductive, but I think ultimately very wrongheaded idea. The free will is about random behavior, but as I said, it's not useful.

Uh, it could be a little bit useful in nature. That was Brems' idea, the guy with the fruit flies. Uh, he said, well, if you just change direction randomly, it's harder for the bird who wants to eat you or whatever to track you down and anticipate. If you're perfectly predictable, they can get you. So he thought randomness might be useful there, but again, it's not, it's not what we need in culture.

I use the plumber example, but you could stay, say the same thing about being president of the country or of a corporation or being a professor or being a medical physician or whatever. Nobody wants the people in charge to be doing random things. We want them to use reason, to think out what is the right thing to do, to understand all the complexities of the situation, what's possible, what are the good possible outcomes, what are the bad possible outcomes, and then make behavioral choices, make decisions on that basis to produce a good result. And that's adaptive and that's why our population is booming. What's the difference in outlook between people

who lack a belief in free will and those who believe in free will who don't lack that belief? Well, it's a very astute question. I realized also when I was working on the free will book that you would think in psychology they would have radically different theories about how behavior is caused. And again, I've talked to a lot of both and they don't. They pretty much see things the same way. They understand this attitudes and emotions and rational consideration and impulsive choices. They all recognize the same thing. And the most striking point to me is they are both sides believe that the human mental system, so we're talking about a system in the brain that causes behavior,

right? The brain tells the muscles how to move. It sends out commands. And so whatever there is before that, that's the action control system, all the inputs into the brain telling you what to do. Even the skeptics agree that the human system is radically different from anything else in nature.

I mean, just what we're doing right now, there's no other species who can have technology to have conversations of a scientific and philosophical issues. Uh, no part of this is, is found even in chimpanzees are our closest relatives. So it's clear evolution sent us off in a different path and created a new system for controlling

behavior that's unlike anything else that came before it. And so they're merely disagreeing as to whether this marvelous new system deserves to be called free will or not. I see. And to me, that's not, that's not the scientific issue. That's a terminological will or not. I see. And to me that's not that's not the scientific issue that's a terminological question or whatever. The scientific challenge is to understand how this

marvelous new system works and so most of my book is devoted to laying out things like that. What I meant was well I've heard it said that when people lack a belief in free will, that they are more fatalistic and even depressed at times. But simultaneously, I've heard that Stoicism and Buddhism when adopted, at least here in the West or our Western versions of them, which espouse a so-called realization of the lack of control, or even in some interpretations, a complete obliteration of the illusion of free will, that people feel a sense of inner peace and freedom. So I don't know how to reconcile those two or what separates them. Yes.

There is a moderate amount of research the last, I'd say the last 15 years on belief in free will. So, you know, it's nice the scientists don't have to say whether they believe in it, whether they think it's true or not. Um, let's just say some people believe in it and some people don't. It's also most people believe in it to some

degrees, and so some people believe in it more than others, but still you can compare the ones who believe in it a lot versus the ones who are only believe in it some or versus the ones who are only believing in it some or not. So what are the differences? Untangling those because they're correlated with a lot of things. Christian religion, for example, emphasizes free will. So among the people who are high believers in free will, you're going to have more Christians. And so if they're happier, is it because they believe in free will or because of their Christian faith, which contributes to that? So I don't think we've quite gotten to

the bottom of that yet. Now there are experimental manipulations as well as measures to try to convince people to believe more or less in free will. Trying to increase the belief in free will doesn't do much because people already believe in it to a fair degree as in being able to make decisions and act differently in the same situation. But you can try to convince people, as Sapolsky does in his book, that they don't have any free will. Now he thinks it will lead to a more healthy, decent society. I'm skeptical of that. If it worked, I would have thought somebody would have tried it and then

the successful ideas would have spread. Are there no experimental results of experimenters in some double blind fashion saying to one group that you lack free will or creating some circumstance where the locus of control is not them and then seeing what the results of that are? Yeah. Double blind is double blind is hard, uh, because you have to convince them of it, but you can have the people read things denying free will or there's this way of priming the brain where you write a bunch of statements supporting free will or not. And the general finding in those is that making people

believe less in free will makes them behave in a more anti-social fashion. The first study showed people were more likely to effectively lie, cheat and steal. It was one thing. They were taking a test, they were told they'd get paid for correct answers and they could score their own answer sheet. And so, and supposedly get away with it, nobody would be able to check on them. Well, so the people who were told to not believe in free will, who were induced to not believe in it, were more likely to, they claimed they got more answers correct than in the other conditions. So that's a dishonesty kind of thing. In ours, people were more likely to say they'd behave aggressively. Maybe they actually did behave more aggressively. They were less helpful to others. There are a variety of other findings that go with this. The replication record on this has been uneven. There are no findings in the

opposite direction that making people disbelieve in free will makes them more prosocial in their behaviour. They're a little more prone to not punish people for doing bad things. But even that is just anecdotes about strangers in real relationships. Disbelieving in free will makes them less likely to forgive their partner because then they don't think their partner can change if their partner did something bad. So the findings are that belief in free will supports positive pro-social behavior. But again, the replication record is not that. Sometimes it doesn't work, as I said. When it works, it works in that direction.

Sometimes it doesn't work. Now, I'm not totally surprised by that because a lot of these replication studies are done in a more casual fashion and you really have to get the person to buy into it to some degree. If you just say, okay, read this and now fill out this questionnaire or whatever. Well, okay, they read it, but maybe they didn't buy it. You have to push them a little harder. In other words, to summarize the evidence suggests that it's pro-social when you do believe in free will and anti-social when you don't. However, that evidence is not terribly strong, but there isn't evidence to the contrary, if anything, that's evidence to the neutral position.

Yes. Yeah, there's either no effect or the effect you described, the pro-social effect of believing in free will, which again, it's important to function in society. When the judge asks, did you enter into this contract of your own free will? He's certainly not asking if you did it randomly. Yes. He wants to know, did you understand the meaning? Did you agree to it when nobody was holding a gun to your head? Were, were you able to say no? And did you understand the consequences in that case, you're responsible and then you have to, uh,

uh, pay or perform the duty or whatever you contracted for, if you were forced into it, uh, then the judge is more likely to say, well, okay. Uh, that you should not be obliged to, uh, uh, to fulfill that contract because you didn't freely choose to do it. That's the kind of thing that matters in human social life. We judge people by their actions,

but by the intentions behind the actions. And if you do something that you didn't intend to do, you're not necessarily totally free of blame, but you're less blameable than if you intentionally did it. I imagine you brought these up, these counter arguments to Robert Sapolsky. What were his comments? The debate is online, people can hear it. It was a moderated debate. So we were sort of limited. I talked to the guy, Robert afterwards, and we kind of agreed it would have been nice if we could have just had a discussion ourselves.

I mean, the organization appointed a very nice moderator who had a list of questions to ask us, and so she structured the discussion. We had a couple of minutes statement each at the beginning. But after that, we weren't able to really argue back and forth. And I wish we could have. Just so you know, on the Theories of Everything channel, this channel, there's a format that I have called a theolocution, which is my tongue in cheek way of giving reverence to the guests, it's the gods talking. What it is, is because they're Titans in their field. a theolo-cution, which is my tongue and cheek way of giving reverence to the guests, to the gods talking. What it is is, because they're titans in their field. And it's me moderating,

except I give an unlimited amount of time to each guest. And there's no, I'm not a fan of the standard structured debate format where you have to put your stake in the ground initially with a two to 10 minute statements, and then they have a counter to that. And there's a variety of statements said, and you have to keep track. And so it's essentially you all having a conversation, which is just. Mediated by myself and the floor is open to both of you. I can organize that. That would have been good.

Uh, if, if, if, uh, I mean, we could write to him and say, you want to do it. Uh, if, if he's up for it, I certainly would be, um, he's, he's super busy and, uh, uh, but, uh, but I know he's really interested in these ideas. Uh, I spoke to him on this channel. It did fairly well. So I imagine he would be wanting to come back on again. Now, was there anything in the past two months that occurred to you much like, I don't know if you've watched Seinfeld, George Costanza, when he would think of the comeback afterward

and then just kick himself. So was there anything two months later that has occurred to you that you wish you had said to him that you weren't able to get the chance to because maybe it didn't come to you? At the time, I'm sure there were a whole bunch of things, but I don't think I could retrieve them now. Again, I think we both felt a little frustrated at not being able to follow up on what the other one said because the moderator said, okay, next question, and moved us right along. I'm not complaining about her, she was doing her job, very nice about it. But

her as she was doing her job. Uh, nice about it. But, uh, uh, in terms of, uh, I wish we could have gone further into that or I would have liked to, to push them into that. I understand. Uh, I mean, his book is called Determined and what I said, I think at the end, which I think is important is that we don't live in a deterministic world. Uh, that's where we went from the 19th century to the 20th century worldviews of existentialism and phenomenology. We live in a world that's defined by choices. I've heard even psychologists say we have to believe in determinism, but I don't think they understand what they're saying here and I don't think they mean it. Nobody writes their journal articles this way.

The negotiators falsely believed they could either stand firm or compromise their they're saying here and I don't think they mean it. Nobody writes their journal articles this way. The negotiators falsely believed they could either stand firm or compromise. It's a false belief to a determinist because really only one thing was ever possible. They had the illusion that they could do either. But to this deterministic, virile view, all choices are based on illusions that you have multiple options, whereas the outcome is always inevitable.

Another idea that you're known for is ego depletion. I'd like you to spell out the relationship between ego depletion, decision fatigue, and free will. ego depletion, decision fatigue, and free will. All right. So ego depletion was this finding that after people, initially after they exert self-control, after they self-regulate in some way, if there's another demand for self-control right after that, they do worse on the second one. It was a big surprise at the time because everybody in psychology was using these computer models of the brain. And, you know, in the brain, if you have one program loaded, or in a computer rather, if you have one program loaded and then have another task for it, it's faster. Right? If you

have your word processing or your data analysis, so it's faster, but this seemed to make it slower and it suggested that there was some kind of energy that gets used up and that's why the term depletion ego is Freud's term for the self. We use that as kind of an homage because Freud had been the last person we could find in half a century to talk about the self as consisting of energy. So that finding, which I had some challenges too, but I think it's now possibly the best replicated finding in social psychology. It at least has a strong case. There are one or two others you could make a case for. Um, so it's very strong. It's been shown in lots of contexts as well.

Uh, one of the early extensions of it though, was it maybe it's not just for self control, self control is extremely important. Uh, it's highly adaptive. It's one of two traits that psychology has found that really makes life better in just about every context it's studied, the other being intelligence. Uh, and, uh, I believe in trade-offs in general, but I can't find any downside either to being intelligent or to having good self-control.

Uh, it's just better to be better at those things. Um, so if all it did was self-control, that would intelligent or to having good self control. It's just better to be better at those things. Um, so if all it did was self control, that would already be a big boost, uh, to the, to the psyche. Uh, but I said, well, what about maybe decision making? That's another thing. Uh, one of the key views of human nature is, is rational beings.

We, we make decisions based on logic and reasoning and understanding things. And sure enough, we started finding in a series of experiments that if you have people make a bunch of choices, then they look like people who are depleted by exerting self-control. So we have them make choices and then we give them a test of self-control.

I forget what the first one was, but like one classic is how long can you hold your hand in ice water? Uh, cause it's cold and you feel like pulling your hand out when you have to do mind over matter and make yourself hold it. And so the people who had made a whole bunch of decisions, uh, quit faster.

They, they, they couldn't last as long. So making the decisions took something out of them that they didn't have available anymore to make themselves do better on the, on the self control test, the ice water test. And then the other way around, we showed it too, after self control, then decision making suffers, people start to make more impulsive

decisions, don't think things through as carefully and make more mistakes. So that was there. That's where we started talking about decision fatigue, that making a lot of decisions can use up this resource, uh, in the mind and presumably in the brain also. Um, and, uh, can lead to, uh, these problems.

In fact, I had a kind of humorous worry in my mind that, uh, the politicians will start using this when they get caught having a sex scandal or taking drugs after hours or something and they say, Oh, well, I worked so hard all day making all these decisions to help, help my, my city, my country, whatever that I, my willpower was just depleted and I, I couldn't

resist when the, uh, uh, the chance to have sex with the wrong person. Um, but, but that, that, that kind of, I can, I don't want to support people making excuses, but that kind of thing will, uh, will happen and will become more likely. So, uh, decision fatigue is a form of ego depletion. I now call it the quartet. There are four kinds of phenomena that show this, uh, limited resource depletion

pattern and they interact with each other. So we have two already, the self control decision making, uh, the third was planning. Um, people planning takes mental work. People, you don't want to make plans when you're tired, uh, but planning also helps you when you are depleted. If you have a very specific plan for what to do, uh, then when you're depleted, you

don't, oh my God, I don't know. Yep. Uh, and the fourth was initiative. Uh, uh, so the first experiment we had there, uh, we borrowed this procedure from stress research. So first we depleted people or not, had them engage in a self-control task and to use up some of their willpower.

I forget what that was. But for the main measure, we say to them in front of a computer and the experimenter said, okay, just follow the instructions on the computer and hit start and left the room. And the computer just went to blue screen and stayed there and nothing happened. And the measure was how long does the person sit there staring at the screen before getting up to go

find the experiment or say, oh, it's not working. The computer's not doing anything. And we took their phones away so they wouldn't be looking at their phones or playing games or whatever. And sure enough, the people who were depleted sat there twice as long, just staring at a blank screen, wasting their, wasting their time. Um, so then you asked about what this has to do with free will. I think these are, are forms of free will. If you want to get down from the lofty philosophical level of, uh, is the human

mind capable of free choices and so on. Again, in practice, what does free will look like when people are using it? Well, self-control is basically overriding one response, one impulse to do something else. Think of a diet or you're hungry, there's some food, the impulse is to eat it, but you override that, you don't.

And it also does in a sense, create freedom. If you don't do what your first impulse is, that creates the freedom to do something else. So, so, uh, that's their rational choice. Also obviously very central in free wealth, instead of just react, going along with the situation or, um, doing whatever you always did or acting out of habit. You can stop and think, is this really a good thing to do and change. The philosopher Searle made a great point in his book on rational,

I think it's called Rationality in Action. And he said, so many thinkers have said, yes, humans are at least to some degree rational beings. We do plenty of irrational stuff, but we are rational beings. That's part of the essence of being human. But to say that we're rational requires at least some degree of free will, at least enough to change what you're going to do based on that. Cause otherwise you'd have the rational thought and you could figure out what's the right thing to do, but then you'd go and do the other thing.

Anyway, so you need at least the flexibility to say, okay, I've thought about it. The logical plan, even though I want to do this, the logical plan is to go do something else. And then you can do something else. the other thing anyway. So you need at least the flexibility to say, okay, I've thought about it. The logical plan, even though I want to do this, the logical plan is to go do something else instead. And so you need at least free will to turn away from what you were going to do and what you feel

like doing to do something else. Um, planning, this is very obviously highly adaptive and so on. People who make more plans are more successful and so on. And initiative is useful too, for the most part. So free will and action would be those four. So that's from the ego depletion research. There's also a couple other things you could get from the cognitive science.

There's studies of executive function, task switching is one. Humans can switch back and forth among different tasks, can manage that very well. Animals, it's harder unless you have some innate prompting. I mean, a bird will build a nest and it might have to stop when it gets dark and it will resume the next day and so on. But that's pretty hardwired. Uh, you know, they call a fixed action pattern. It, the bird knows it has to make the nest.

Interesting. I didn't know that about task switching because whenever I've heard about that, it's usually in the context of ADHD and it's seen as a negative. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Um, no, I think that's not what the cognitive scientists mean by task switching. Uh, it's you're trying to do a couple different things and keep them both going and you move back and forth among them.

Um, I would say, I mean, I've been a professor, so that's an obvious example. I'm trying to write a paper to publish, uh, but I have to go teach my lecture. So I save what I've done so far, and then I go give my lecture. And then I come back and go back to work, uh, on writing the paper. Or I have to take a break for a committee meeting or, you know, things like that. Um, so, um, okay. Let me see if I can summarize. So it seems like what we have is something like an ego store,

like how there's a charge for your battery. We have an ego store. And when I say ego, I don't mean bravado or triumphant, or pride, just, just the self, just the self. And there are four ways that we pull from this store. So one is decisions, when we make decisions, self-control is another initiative and planning. And anytime we do so, it's as if we're opening up different apps or doing some sort of calculation and then the battery gets drained a bit. Certain actions, I believe, replenish them such as sleep and so on. But all four of these, the decisions, initiative, planning and self-control, sound like examples of deliberation or conscious effort.

So would it be correct to say that they're free will or do you make an equivalence between deliberation and conscious effort and free will? Or am I just incorrect in generalizing them to have that in mind? No, these are important issues. There's the question of unconscious or automatic, is there any self-regulation at that level? It's not nearly as depleting. I had a really good postdoc

who ran some studies in there, but I think she never published them. So she found the conscious effort to do these things, that's the most depleting. But if you can sort of train yourself to do it automatically, it's less depleting, but it's still some depleting. It's not like nothing. Now the automatic self-regulation, some people will use that to include how your body maintains its temperature. You're not conscious of that at all. Even when you're conscious that you have a fever, you can't consciously lower the fever by

decisions. So I don't know about that process. In terms of free will, people believe it involves conscious thought. There's no theories of unconscious free will. So that's essentially there and that's the main thing. I mean, there's a long tradition of thinking of conscious and unconscious as sort of separate competing systems. I say, oh, is that conscious or unconscious? I think Freud got us thinking that way, you know, did you mean to do that or is this your unconscious which means that you meant to do it but you didn't realize you meant to

do it. But really, they're two systems that work together. The unconscious is very powerful, it can do a lot and it does it with not much energy. Consciousness takes a lot more energy, it's much more costly, but it's much more flexible, it can do things that the other can't. And so they work together. I had these debates with John Barge, is the conscious mind like the driver of the car who's in charge of it and making sure where it goes, or is it just the passenger or the unconscious is driving the car and all consciousness does is look out the window and see where you're

going. And we argue back and forth on that for a while. What I ended up saying is consciousness may be more like your navigation system, uh, that figures out where you want to go. It isn't what drives the car. Uh, but, uh, boy, if you want to get, get there, uh, having the, the, the map or the navigation system, tell you, you got to turn right up here and do it. That's really, really helpful. So it's consciousness is several steps removed from both the input and the output to the brain.

It's sort of internal processing, but it's hugely adaptive. Likewise, in terms of language, the unconscious can understand single words. There are all these priming studies. You prime a single word and then it affects behavior or whatever. These two have a very uneven replication record, but they never work in the opposite direction. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. To me, that means it's just kind of a delicate effect that everything has to be just right. But I totally believe in those. Anyway, my point was there's only one word. It can only use one

word at a time. If you manage to prime two words, it just sort of adds them. Some people have done things like green and bread. And so what's your overall reaction? Well, green is good, you know, the environment and bread is food, it's tasty, it's good. And so green plus bread is a double good. It takes the unconscious to say, wait a minute, I don't want to eat any green bread. Something is wrong if the bread is green or on the opposite, uh, you know, on the negative things,

dead enemy, dead is bad and enemy is bad, dead and enemy. Then if you prime them both, it's a double negative reaction, it takes the conscious mind to combine them and say, Oh no, dead enemy. That's, that's what we want. That's progress. Um, and that's just two words. Uh, what you can do with combining words is, is, is literally

infinitely more information than what you can do with any number of, of one word sentences. Interesting. What I'm reminded of is these studies where you show some word or you get the right brain to do some task and the left brain is unaware of it. Can you speak to how those studies are viewed by psychologists and neuroscientists? It's my understanding that especially not now anymore where you cut someone and then you get a twin and you cut one twin and you leave the other and you do some tests to them.

So how robust are those findings? How are they viewed? Are they still thought of as great evidence for how the left and the right brain act and how we perceive and don't perceive? Okay. The split brain studies, uh, studies, Sperry and Gazzaniga and Gazzaniga became the big, the big star who did a lot of those, taking advantage

of that. This was a treatment for epilepsy. And if you cut the connecting tissue between the left and the right brain, it seemed to reduce epileptic seizures. Since then they've come up with new treatments. And so nobody's doing that anymore. And so, you know, it's a, it's a, it seemed to reduce epileptic seizures. Since then they've come up with new treatments and so nobody's doing that anymore.

That was a brief period when that was available and this one brilliant guy and his colleagues figured out, oh, we could do these studies on these people and learn about it. So yeah, I think they are still respected that the two sides of the brain have somewhat different responsibilities and conscious thoughts in the sense of what you can tell other people you've had is mainly focused on one of them, but the other is doing stuff as well. I don't go into a lot of, I don't know a great deal more about those. I'm, I'm not so much a brain researcher myself.

I'm, as I said, I'm a social psychologist. So, well, I imagine much of that research can be continued from people who have strokes. So while we don't go and cut the corpus callosum, maybe there's some similar damage with people who have strokes. I don't know. Uh, stroke is probably damaging one side of the brain. The beauty of the split brain people was both sides of the brain were fully intact and functioning normally, except that they weren't sharing information through that little membrane, the corpus callosum.

Is it true that that's the only connection between the left and the right? Or is it just the primary place for the connections? Like when you sever that, are they completely independent or are there still interchanges somewhere? Um, my understanding was they were completely separate, but, uh, there might be some way to pass a message through the body or there might be something else. Who knows?

You know how science goes as the progress things get more and more complicated and the simple truths get overlaid with, well, there are qualifications and so on. So I find it hard to believe that that's the only place where they're connected and that then you have completely different halves operating rather than now there's only 0.5% of the connections that there used to be, something like that. With respect to these ego stores, and I don't know if that's the correct term, I just called it that. What do you call it? We've come around to using the term willpower. We resisted that for a long time. Scientists don't like to use terms from everyday language

because they're all this connotation and baggage that, but eventually I came to think, yeah, this is what we're talking about and this is what people mean. They mean the same thing. So, so we call it willpower. Have you found that once willpower can increase over time, I mean chronically, because I understand that acutely, if you don't have a great rest, then your willpower the next day is lower. So you can acutely decrease it and maybe acutely increase it with some drugs. But have you found that there are certain exercises that allow you to stably increase it across time? And is it correlated with IQ or something else?

IQ question is a different one, but in terms of increasing it, the metaphor that served me well through 20, 25, I guess it's now 30 years since we started doing those studies was it was like a muscle, that the capacity for self-control was like a muscle. Even in morality, we were calling it the moral muscle because most moral virtues require self-control to overcome one thing to do something else. And so, we said, well, if it's like a muscle and it gets tired when you exercise it like a muscle does, does that mean if you exercise it regularly, it will get stronger. So we ran a few studies and yes, it didn't always work but it sometimes worked. And other people picked this up. I think there are two meta-analyses done by other people. I had no connection with them. Summarizing results from multiple laboratories

in different countries and continents and saying, yes, it does seem you can improve self-control even in adulthood through regular exercise. After you exert self-control, the Victorians used to call it building character. There was that phrase that you get up and take a cold shower or make yourself run a mile before you have breakfast or, you know, be hard on yourself. And that will make you stronger. And we don't pay much attention to the Victorians anymore, but they were right about this. At least my colleagues, or my friends who did the meta analysis say,

yes, there's an hour abundant evidence that this, uh, uh, this is solid is, is correct and, uh, some things work better than others. And of course, if people don't really do the exercises, they're not going to benefit from them. So a study could fail because you're not persuasive enough to make sure the people do the exercises. But if they do them, it does seem to work. Now you asked the question, does it give them more willpower? I don't know. This is an interesting question. We also have a personality measure that some people, as you know, have better

self-control than other people. So we have a questionnaire measure and it could identify them pretty well. It's been used in thousands of studies at this point. It's very, very popular. Thousands of published studies, in fact, so most of them have worked. Um, do the people with high self-control have more willpower than other people? I wasn't quite sure how that could be, especially when they were starting to tie in the self-control willpower thing to the body's basic energy supply.

So maybe they don't have more willpower, but they use it more effectively. Ah, that's interesting. One thing I learned after the trait self-control scale had been published and been out for about 10 years, a couple of Dutch colleagues said, well, why don't we do a meta-analysis and put together all the findings that have been found to show what high self-control does. And so they did that and they coded different kinds of behaviors. And one was automatic behaviors versus controlled behaviors. And the prediction was obvious, this automatic is something that happens without conscious oversight.

And so that should be irrelevant to self-control. Whereas self-control should be about using it for things you can control. And yet it was significant in the opposite direction. And this is after combining results of dozens of studies. And so they're completely puzzled, uh, as was I. Uh, so I said, well, go back and look at the codings and let's see exactly what, what those things were, uh, where, where self-control worked and they came back and he said, it's habits.

It's mostly about habits. And so that was a big insight to me that people with good self-control worked. And they came back and they said, it's habits. It's mostly about habits. And so that was a big insight to me, that people with good self-control, they may not have any more willpower in the sense of energy in their body, but they use it more effectively. They break bad habits and form good habits. Now the beautiful thing about habits

is that it doesn't take energy. It just sort of goes on automatically. So we tend to think of self-control as the heroic resisting temptation, you know, that you love someone and someone else wants you or whatever. But really, the most effective use is to set up life to run on automatic pilot by having good routines and as I said, breaking the bad habits. The sizes of the effects, what self-control was good for, everybody associates it with dieting as you have to resist the temptation to eat. And yeah, there was people with good self-control are better at dieting, as you have to resist the temptation to eat. And yeah, there was people with good self

control are better at dieting. Uh, but it was only a moderate to small effect. The big effect was on work and school. And so what do you really need self control for and work in school? It's, it's developing good work habits and good study habits. Um, you might think, well, uh, what would you

need self control for us? You've got to write a 20 page paper and it's due tomorrow and you haven't started. So you've got to make yourself stay up all night and read a bunch of things and write it together and pull it together. But that's not what people with good self-control do. They got it done a week ahead of the deadline. So there's no crisis. The people who get themselves in the situation where it's due tomorrow and I haven't started, these are people with poor self control, uh, which

fits out other evidence on how those people live their lives. They're always scrambling to catch up or dig themselves out of problems that they dug themselves in for. Uh, have good work habits. You make a little progress every day. The paper gets done. There's no crisis, no, no having to stay up all night. Uh, I, I never stayed up all night to study.

I was going to do it once just, just for fun. I didn't, there was nothing to do. I said, ah, I've heard these people, my friends pulling an all nighter. They call it, I was heard these people, my friends pulling an all nighter, they call it. How old were you? Uh, I was in graduate school at this point. And, uh, I'd just gotten a whole bunch of data from my experiment and, and back then we didn't have computers, so we had to go to the computer center and say, why don't I just stay up all

night in the computer center and analyze. Yes. Analyze all these things. Cause you run an analysis and then you'd study it. And you put the cards back in and run another analysis. But about three in the morning, I thought this is stupid and I just went home to bed. But I knew plenty of other people who left things to the last minute and are always stressed out.

We actually ran a big experiment with that with the students, my wife, Diane Tyson, I was teaching a health psychology class. And so she had, she got people to identify whether they're procrastinators or not, because there's a questionnaire measure. Uh-huh. Um, and, uh, since it was health psychology, she had them also record their health, uh, and well, and

check their grades. So she ran all semester, got to the end of the semester, we looked at the data. Uh, the procrastinators first, they had worst grades on everything. They also were late on stuff. They had lower grades on the midterm, on the term paper, on the final, but their health was

better. So I thought, oh, that's interesting. It's a trade off. Uh, and we talked about it and said, well, but you collected the health data in the early part of the semester. That's when, that's when the procrastinators are out, uh, playing frisbee, drinking beer,

having a good old time while the non-procrastinators are getting to work. I said, I wonder if you kept it going all the way through the end of the semester and final exams. So we re-ran the whole experiment and everything replicated with the additional finding that at the end of the semester, the procrastinators were so much sicker.

Their total health for the semester was worse. So it reversed what we'd found the first time where we just measured, you know, during early in the semester, they had fewer visits to the student clinic and fewer symptoms and things like that. They were so much sicker at the end. And the non-procrastinators, how were they? They were healthier than the procrastinators. I mean healthier than they were initially or that just remained static? I think it remained constant. I don't remember that we did comparison. We were comparing mainly

the procrastinators against the non-procrastinators. And earlier when you referred to some personality tests that one does for willpower, are you referring to conscientiousness or industriousness or something else? We have a trait, it's called the trait self-control scale, Jun Tang Ni. And I developed it, I think we published it in 2003. The big five, approach to personality measurement was spreading then. Conscientiousness is one of the big five. For my take, it's mostly self-control, but there are a few other things in there like being traditional. Traditionalism is not necessarily a self-control trait. A couple other things will load that. The way they put these together is just took thousands and thousands of results from different trade scales and looked at what correlated with what.

You do a giant factor analysis and the big five factors sort of came out as clusters of traits that were correlated with each other. So conscientiousness is one, but to me the operative part of conscientiousness is self-control. They put industriousness sometimes as a separate thing there, but being industrious is mostly about self-control too. It's making yourself work hard. And under what circumstances is this willpower depletion counterintuitive? So for instance, when I work out, often I'll have a surge of energy and I feel like I have

more willpower, even though I just engaged in a physically strenuous enterprise that used my deliberate effort. Now is that maybe I just feel like I have more willpower actually don't? Yeah, it'd be interesting actually to do a study and see that and give people a self-control test then. It might depend on the kind of workout and It might depend on the kind of workout and how much you had to push yourself to do it. Is more in this instance of willpower always better? In other words, let's remove the physiologically taxing aspect of it. Is there something that is advantageous to having less willpower. You know, we've been looking for that for a long time and nothing has really come along. I've heard people say that I even published a paper with a couple of German colleagues

where we claim to find a downside to good self-control, but it was sort of hypothetical questions of who, and the main one was who would you rather go to a party with? And so they think, well, maybe I don't want to go to a party with a person with good self control. But that also is important because like you mentioned, the social aspect of us is vital and primary. Mm hmm.

Yes. Well, uh, I think people are just, when they answer a hypothetical question like that, they're mostly operating on stereotypes. I would want, before I really take that seriously, I would want to see that people actually do have more fun with people who have low self-control. Because you say, okay, I'll go to the party with Joe who has low self-control. And because you say, okay, I'll pick, I'm going to the party with the Joe who has low self control. And then you get, and Joe is late arriving there or he gets too drunk. It gets in a fight with somebody or speeds on the way home and you get a, a ticket or spend the night in jail.

Uh, it's, it, you know, it's fine to say hypothetically, if I'm going to have a good time, it wouldn't matter though though if they enjoyed the person with less willpower more or less. It would matter if they're more invited because it just depends on if they think that the person with less willpower is someone to hang around with more because then they get invited more. If they think that, yeah, that could produce an advantage. Yeah. Again, I don't know any evidence of that actually happening, but that is plausible. That would be consistent with the hypothetical answer.

In terms of popularity and relationships, it very much goes the other way. People with good self-control are more popular. They have better relationships, better close relationships. They have a lot more friends, they're more respected. There's abundant evidence of that. Matthew 15 You've sold the audience right now on Willpower. They're wondering how can they increase their own? How can they cultivate it? You've written a book just for people who are interested called Willpower with your co-authors, John and Dennis or Denny. And I forgot the last name, so I apologize.

And we're going to talk about that soon. But for people who are interested, you can check out that book. It's on screen and the link is in the description. OK, yeah, it was John Tierney. So we included some of the exercises that we did. So a small exercise of self control every day, um, will gradually build up your, your strength. Now, again, I don't know if it gives you more

willpower or it just, um, makes it better. And there's also the finding we have more willpower than we think we have. Uh, I think the brain is designed to conserve energy probably for sound evolutionary reasons. That's a Navy SEAL saying. So the Navy SEALs say that when you think you're done, you're only 40% done, something like that. Okay, I didn't know that, but I'm glad to hear that. And yes, yes, they're right. I don't know about the precise figure of 40%. Um, but, uh, people can do more, uh, than they think.

Uh, fatigue, whether it's physical fatigue or, or depletion, which is a kind of mental fatigue, uh, the, the, the body, the brain are designed to conserve energy, especially if this is all tied into the body's basic energy supply as in glucose in the bloodstream. The reason I think there's such a bias toward conserving is that we evolved with uncertain food supply, you weren't sure you could get food tomorrow. And probably even more important, the immune system where it uses a lot of energy sometimes when there's a challenge.

So if you got an infection in your foot, in most of our evolutionary history, you know, it could kill you. They didn't have antibiotics or anything to treat it. So your body had to be treated, and you had to Uh, in most of our evolutionary history, you know, it could kill you. Uh, they didn't have antibiotics or anything to, to treat it. Uh, so your body had to be able to fight it off. So you don't want your, uh, energy reserves to get dangerously low in case the immune system, uh, uh, needs it.

Um, now, so the, the brain doesn't actually know how much energy it has. It doesn't keep an inventory of how much glucose is stored in various fat cells or something. So my impression is what it does is it looks for signs that it's used up some, I call it counting the ashes because there's a by-product of metabolizing this stuff. It comes to the ashes and say, okay, I've burned a lot of energy, I should stop using that and save my strength.

We know with physical muscles, they are like this too. Colleagues who study exercise and so on, And you can look at how hard a person can exert pressure. And of course, as the experiment goes on and they do it over and over again, they get tired and they don't do it as hard. But at the end of the experiment when they should be really tired and they say, all right, if you can match your first one, we'll give you

$5 or something like that. And they can, they can still push as hard. Now there is a point at which muscles don't work anymore, where they're just really starting to become incapable of doing more. But the fatigue feeling comes long before that. And you are still capable of exerting maximal effort, it's just your body starts to conserve And you are still capable of exerting maximal effort.

It's just your body starts to conserve the energy more and more, especially as it sees it's been using a lot. So again, we're designed to err on the side of conserving energy, which means again, with the Navy Seals are right. You think you're done, you're not done. You still have further reserves. As I said, lab studies with physical exertions have shown that. And we found that with the ego depletion too, that if you were depleted and they'll do worse,

but if you give them an incentive or a reason to do better on the second task, then they can do it. And they can do really well. Then you give them a third test and they're really depleted. Uh, it's not, it's not magic. That's interesting. Let me see if I could summarize. You were saying that the brain doesn't keep a record of resources, but instead

looks at evidence of expenditure and it does so by examining something called ashes, but I didn't understand what those ashes were. Oh, that was a metaphor. Um, it's, it's like, you don't know how much wood is in the wood pile. Uh, but you can tell you've already burned a whole bunch because they're, the fireplace is full of ashes. So maybe you shouldn't burn a lot more right now. I see that sort of it. Uh, is it, if, if glucose, I forget the chemical terms now, but glucose is the chemical that's the body's

energy supply. And when it's processed, it produces a byproduct that the brain could tell that it is there, the sort of a residue that indicates, yeah, a chemical reaction has happened. So counting the ashes is just my non-brain expert way of thinking about how it works. The brain doesn't know how much energy is stored in the body total. It just knows it's been using a lot and, or it hasn't been using a lot. And so makes decisions on that basis. That's my impression.

Again, although I'm not a brain expert, I wouldn't put a lot of emphasis on that. And, and the work on glucose and self-control, there, there are some very strong findings and then there's some people who don't find those things and there's some confusion about it. So it's to me one of the weak points in current knowledge on this. There are some psychological theories that are taught that are just prevalent and believed in and I'm curious of those currently, which one do you vehemently disagree with? That's being touted as like some dogma, let's say.

Are you going to give me a set of choices? No, I don't know the psychological literature. So are there any that you disagree with that are believed wholesale nowadays? Um, all right. I'd have to think about that. A lot of people still believe that venting your anger is good for you, that if you're unhappy about something, you should go pound a hammer on something or hit a pillow or whatever. But it's just a big meta-analysis. My friend, Brad Bushman, did. I wasn't involved, but I saw the paper.

That's just wrong. When people try to deal with their anger, reducing arousal sometimes works. Doing anything to express it or whatever, that tends to make it worse. That's counterproductive. It goes, in Freud's terms, it was the catharsis hypothesis that you have some energy inside that you need to let out in acts of aggression or violence. People used to argue watching a boxing match would be good for you because you could get out

your aggressive impulses, but that, that doesn't appear to be correct. Uh, you watch a violent boxing match, if anything, it makes you more aggressive for most people, has no effect, but it doesn't satisfy something or reduce it. So that would be one, one popular, uh, but still, still popular, but wrong theory.

Are there any large questions in psychology you feel like should be addressed more? I, uh, I think about a lot of different things and, uh, what should be done or what should be addressed. Psychology is full of fascinating questions. My concern recently has been in where some people say that certain questions should not be studied or certain theories should not be tested, mostly for political reasons. And that's, I think, an unfortunate distortion of the scientific project. You have to follow the data wherever they go and reality is not going to turn out to be the way we want it to be. Yeah, it seems like much of your work skirts the lines of something that can be construed

politically or with a social faux pas. And I'm curious how you maneuver around landmines when dealing with these subjects and engaging with the public. Well, I try to be explicit. Usually that sometimes people just don't want to hear the truth. So they go, well, that's too bad then. Uh, sometimes they're worried about that people will overinterpret or take it the wrong way or something like that. So then you can sort of anticipate those and spell out, you know, it doesn't mean this or not saying, uh, saying this or that. Can you give a quick example?

Um, well, one recent one, recent one that was not from my work, but it's talked about in some circles, was a big study last year saying, what are the real prejudices in America today? What are the strongest ones and they compared male, female, black, white, old, young, and rich, poor. To say which one of these are measuring implicit bias here. So which only one of them came up consistently. Do you want to take a guess? Rich, poor. That's a good guess.

I would have guessed old, young, but it was but it was sexism, male, female, and specifically anti-male, pro-female. And some people think, no, there's prejudice against females. There probably is some in some places. So in terms of your question of how to talk about this to the public, the most common prejudice in America today is anti-men, pro-women, but that doesn't mean that there's not prejudice against women. Um, some people may be in some places and so, uh,

it, uh, you sort of forestall it, you know, this doesn't mean it's the only prejudice or the, the only biased person you'll ever meet. Uh, anything like that, uh, in a country of what, 350 million people, you'll ever meet, anything like that. In a country of what, 350 million people, you'll find all types and all sorts of different attitudes and so on. Nevertheless, across the general population, the study was very impressive. It was four different experiments, two with national samples and two with student samples, large student samples and comparing them, mixing them and so on.

It shouldn't be a surprise if you watch television, who is made look stupid on television or you look at the courts, the woman and man convicted of the same crime, the woman will get half the sentence, the man will do. In academia, if a man and a woman are equally qualified for a job or an award, the woman almost always will get it and so on. It's just sort of taboo to say anything critical about women, whereas you can criticize men all day and say, oh, men are stupid or violent or do this thing or that thing wrong.

Nobody minds that, but criticizing women, that's taboo. So yes, that is the prevailing major thing. But when we talk about this in the public, this doesn't mean there aren't other prejudices and there aren't people with all sorts of other prejudices and certainly people with the old, young. As I was saying, I would have guessed old and young because it seems like everybody thinks it's better to be young than old, but they didn't find much sign of it. There was a bit of a rich poor one. There was some evidence for that. That was the weakest

because that was the one you couldn't tell for sure just by looking at them. They had the people dress in expensive or shabby clothes to convey the rich poor. But that isn't a pure manipulation of say, you can look at somebody and tell whether it's a man or a woman right away, or for race they do black and white and you tell right from the face which one, which one it is. So the rich poor, uh, there, there might be something there, but, uh, I dunno, a lot of people are critical of rich people too. Yes. Yes.

Now these weren't your findings. What is the name of the person? So I can pull up that, not pull up the study, but show the people the study right now on screen. Okay, Connor was the name. Okay, well, I will find the study and then right now it's on screen. Link is in the description. Professor, I know you got to get going, but I have so many audience questions here for you that I'm going to have to choose two of them out of the maybe 20 or so and ask you what happens to the brain and personality

of individuals who feel chronically rejected or misunderstood. People who feel chronically rejected to, I mean, my, I've done a lot of research on rejection, but it's, it's a one-time rejection and chronic rejection may be different. The immediate reaction to being rejected is there's a bit of a shock reaction like with physical injury, the brain seems to release opioids and so you actually feel less physical pain. And we found this in our laboratory. I remember somebody raising the hypothesis and I said, wow, I can't believe that, uh, that that would be true, but let's give it a try.

And we bought a pain machine to measure what, when people feel pain. Uh, and the people we had just put through a laboratory rejection experience, um, it was longer before they felt the pain and they could tolerate a higher amount before they said, oh, that's too much to stop it. Um, so now that's the immediate response there.

We had some evidence, which we've not published that chronic rejection might eventually use the other system. It's, it's almost like it uses up the coping system of releasing these opioids to, uh, drug you out so that you don't feel the pain. And so it's evidence that people who had been chronically rejected when they were children, when they were adults, they felt more pain compared to other people who had the same diseases. It's hardly a randomized clinical trial or anything like that. But that may be one case where the chronic is different from the acute. But most of my work is on immediate effects of rejection.

Someone asks, since Roy has worked on our sense of self, it would be interesting to hear his opinion on meditation techniques that focus on deconstructing the self, even permanently. So there's the doctrine of Anatta, which is no self in Buddhism as a practice or a goal in general. Pete No, that's a very interesting question. There's a long passage on this in my book, The Self Explained, which was out, I think, last year or the year before, the self-explained, which was out I think last year or the year before, because I was very interested in that too. It turns out there's less of that than meets the eye. This is a European group headed by Gebauer who studied people who meditate to see if they become less ego oriented and so on. And as they continue

to meditate over the weeks, they start to think they're better than the other people in their yoga group. So they become more. And then this is a researcher, Nina Strominger, I think at Yale, who tested a bunch of people on questions related to the self and are you afraid to die because supposedly having a self makes you afraid to die. Or if you were sick and there was only one cure that in the whole world, one dose, you could take it and it would prolong your life by a month or you could give it to somebody else and it would prolong your life by a month or you could give it to somebody else and it would prolong their life by a month or by a year or by five years or whatever. And so they looked at how people trade that off. And she sampled a whole bunch of different kinds of

people, including Zen monks. And the monks were actually the most egotistical in the sense that they had the highest fear of death. They were least likely to give up the medicine to someone else. I heard her present this work and she said, I did the research and I wanted to thank the monks for participating. So I went back to the monastery and presented the results there and they were kind of mad. I clearly won't be able to go back there and do it anymore. There's some other arguments too against the no self issue. And in terms of basic things, I mean, the Zen monks, even the enlightened ones, it's not like they put their shoes on somebody else's feet because they can't tell the difference. I mean, they tell the difference. I think what the no-self means is that

there's not a separate thing, that the self only exists in relationship to others. This goes back to I think Nagarjuna, the Buddhist philosopher, who talked about emptiness and the self was empty, but not in the sense that it doesn't exist at all. It doesn't have an independent existence. It rather exists in relation to others. In Western philosophy, David Hume and Immanuel Kant had somewhat of the same exchange. Hume said, I can't find myself as just a bundle of perceptions. And Kant said, well, but I perceive myself perceiving something. And, you know, when Hume was right, I don't just perceive myself the way I perceive a table or a shoe or whatever, but I perceive myself doing, you kind of

catch yourself in the act of doing something. So that's it. By the way, when you were asking what people could do to improve their willpower, meditation is a fine thing to do it. Cause it is a pure mental self-control exercise in many respects, concentrate on this, count your breaths, uh, visualize this focus on this, keep your mind from wandering. Uh, so, uh, that's interesting because like the questioner mentioned, meditation is thought of as a dissolution

of ego, but at the same time meditation is a technique used to train the willpower which is itself associated with ego. Yes, and the word dissolution, I remember this back from when I was young in the hippie days and it means to dissolve. So you can take it to mean that it disappears or that it merges with others, which is kind of emphasizing the connectedness or the interpersonal aspect of what I said that the self doesn't exist independently but in relation to others. And so if you meditate a lot, you may start to feel that we're all one and we're all united

and so on. But as I said, they still understand the self and this is mine and that's yours. So the last question I have comes from Robinson. He asks, how do you regain your past inner self-confidence and natural radiance and inner child after having a relationship with a toxic woman in this case, but we can substitute that with a toxic parents or just a toxic relationship in general that brought you down in a subtle way that got in your system and under your skin without noticing it.

That's a hard one. There's not enough research on things like that. You can't even ethically put someone through that, through a long-term relationship where the other person undermines you or, I mean, I know, I mean, long ago I've had bad relationships too, and they do sap your energy. I remember one from before my, before we started on the self-control and ego depletion stuff that I had a difficult relationship and I was always

so tired. It was hard to get focused on work and I got started with my wife now. I was surprised that I actually had more energy for my work. A good relationship seems to improve your outlook on life and your confidence and makes you stronger and, and may even improve your, your willpower or your ability to use it in some way. Certainly coping with a bad relationship is about as depleting a thing as you can get. This is one of our later findings in the ego depletion work too, that relationship conflict,

we never used that in the lab as a source of depletion, but boy, that just depletes people having an argument with someone you love or being in a situation where like you said, a toxic partner who's constantly difficult to deal with and so on, that just sucks so much of your energy away that when you get out and get free of it and get into a different one, you're amazed at how much better life seems. Yeah, I heard this and I don't recall the source, could be Terry Tao, it's a mathematician or it could be Cal Newport, could be neither. Those two names just come to mind. And they said something paradoxical, which is that having a child or children makes you more

regimented and focused than when you didn't have them. And so you would think you would get less done because you have this huge time sink, but in some ways, because you have less time, you become more laser like with what you have to do. Is this similar or no? It becomes more organized and that could help. I suspect there are changes in motivation that are more fundamental. What I recall from when I was reading the research on that in terms of career involvement, when with the birth of the first child, the woman, the mother tends to pull back from her career because she's all invested in the baby. Or is the man who is now a provider responsible for it.

He gets more invested in his career. He works harder. Somebody was describing it in football terms as two hands on the ball. You don't want to mess up and mistake it. You know, you're a single man and you screw up in your job. All right, it's bad, but you know, you only yourself to blame and you can cope and get another job and muddle through, but you've got a baby depending on you. You don't dare take a chance on that. So it could be, I didn't catch the names of the mathematicians, but if they were men,

it could well be that this heightened sense of responsibility for another human being. This is a whole other topic, but it's something I've been thinking of a great deal about lately and in terms of human evolution of recruiting the man into the provider role is a huge change. None of the other apes care about being fathers or about their children or providing for them or anything like that. And yet humans do it all over the world, many of us for years and years and years. So it's a huge biological change and it is a difference between men and women. So having the child could indeed push men to think, okay, I got to, I got to really be serious and responsible now in a way that I might not have felt felt that before the

child was born. Yeah. Do you know Eminem the rapper? I don't know him. I've heard the name. Well, anyway, Eminem said something similar. As soon as he had his kid, he had to make it in rap. Like he was a failed rapper. He just was working at a burger shop. He had a kid and he's like, I'm putting everything into this because I need to make it for my baby girl.

That's right. Okay. Yeah. I know lots of men feel the same way. Yeah. Okay. Professor, I could speak to you for so much longer. Maybe in the future we'll have an in-person one-on-one.

Okay. And maybe we'll even set up that conversation between you and Robert Sapolsky. But either way, it's been a blast and thank you for being with me. Yeah, it's been a good thing. If you want to talk again in person or do this again or whatever, just let me know. This is fun. Okay. Thanks a lot. Take care.

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