From: The Wall Street Journal
Updating the Psychology of Self-Control
The Wall Street Journal:
An influential theory of self-control holds that willpower is like a muscle — it is depleted through exertion, and it can be replenished by ingesting simple carbohydrates. There’s a book out now that explains this so-called “energy model” of willpower, at length — co-written by Roy Baumeister, one of its main academic proponents.
But some academic psychologists are now challenging the prevailing model of self-discipline. In one experiment, as Wray Herbert explains, in his Huffington Post column, test subjects whose willpower was stressed, and waning, got a boost by simply washing their mouths out with a sugar solution. The important point was they didn’t have to ingest the sugar to get the effect that some previous studies had attributed to refueling. So “what’s restoring self-control, if not metabolized carbs,” Herbert asks?
Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
See Roy Baumeister at the 24th APS Annual Convention: Society for the Teaching of Psychology Talk and Invited Symposium
More of our Members in the Media >
APS regularly opens certain online articles for discussion on our website. Effective February 2021, you must be a logged-in APS member to post comments. By posting a comment, you agree to our Community Guidelines and the display of your profile information, including your name and affiliation. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations present in article comments are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of APS or the article’s author. For more information, please see our Community Guidelines.
Please login with your APS account to comment.