OMG NO NOSECONES
Interesting idea. Basically, a tough day making decisions leaves you mentally drained. I think we kind of knew that already, but it's neat to see the science attempting to explain why that is.
edited 9th Jun '11 12:32:05 PM by pvtnum11
Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.
Is that cake frosting?
Interesting. The next natural assumption, assuming that the study holds up, is that it might be possible to train willpower just as you train any other ability. That's something I already considered to be the case, but it would be nice to verify experimentally if this is really the case.
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
OMG NO NOSECONES
Let's test it. For Science.
Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.
Oh My
If we can train willpower and have this verified by fancy science peoples then ooooh.
If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
So how much exp will this cost me?
Nihilist Hippie
I need willpower therapy. 
Well, of course you can train willpower. You aren't born as The Determinator
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - Barkey
No longer a forum herald
Want to train your Willpower? Go heal someone, or blow stuff up with magic!
Leading to the paradoxical question of what is it exactly that one uses to train the willpower?
Oh My
Sitting around doing nothing. Alternatively doing things and doing nothing.
If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah
Den harde nordmann
: Getting shit thrown in your face, but reduce the amount of willpower used.
I have a book about this, or rather a book that talks about this and the study. Some things:
1) Willpower is a resource
2) When you turn an action into a habit (brushing your teeth, doing laundry, taking shower, etc.) it then becomes a "free-action" which means that you don't consume any mental "energy" when doing it.
3) I forget the rest
Power corrupts. Knowledge is Power. Study hard. Be evil.
Gunpla is amazing!
Well we all know alot of Super Robot run on willpower, so great idea I say!
Seriously? I'd love to know this. There is alot of days (like today) where I just dont feel like doing shit.
wait..so you're saying World of Darkness roleplaying games were right all along about having willpower be a spendable resource?
:O
Lv. 3 Genasi Wizard
It's like Final Fantasy 2, is you get half to all of your will power used up on any given day, it increases in overall value. Going into the negatives may cause the stat to drop, so you can't over extend yourself either. Then go through shit repeatedly with some rest stops at an inn and before you know it, you're an emotional juggernaut of invincibility.
edited 10th Jun '11 8:16:16 AM by Usht
The thing about making witty signature lines is that it first needs to actually be witty.
I find the tone of the article somewhat dodgy, but in essence, psychological experiments are showing that using Willpower to make decisions then makes it more difficult for you to do other mental exercises.
It's a long article so I'm only going to post part of it. http://www.tnr.com/article/environment-energy/89377/poverty-escape-psychology-self-control
In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”
Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”
In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as possible, and to make the best decision in light of one’s personal goals. And, in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource.