Self-Reliance Isn’t a Superpower, It’s a Vice
New Year’s resolutions heading off the rails? Ask for help.
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Co-authored with Samuel Murray.
It’s easy to imagine ways to self-improve — and formulate innumerable New Year’s resolutions to get us there. But the self-control part of it is harder. Self-control is a scarce resource for many of us, which often means we don’t quite achieve what we originally dreamed. And come March, a lot of us are back into our old ruts.
So how can we break this cycle?
One way to start is to change the way we think about self-control.
We are part of a team of philosophers and psychologists from Duke University, University of Pittsburgh, and the Universidad Externado de Colombia in Bogotá who recently studied people’s beliefs about self-control and the value of different kinds of self-control. We found that people are biased toward purely self-reliant forms of self-control, such as exercising willpower or directly inhibiting impulses. Using an online survey platform, we provided a fictional story to 147 anonymous participants (mostly female, average age was 31 years old) about students who need to study for a test, but are tempted to go out and party with friends. People were inclined to attribute more self-control to the fictional character who resisted temptation through sheer willpower rather than to the fictional character who shut off their phone to avoid messages about going out.
In a follow-up survey study with 149 different participants (nearly evenly split between females and males, average age was 32 years old), we provided people with fictional scenarios where someone must manage temptation. Participants were asked to generate several different strategies for managing temptation and instructed to rate the effectiveness of these different strategies. After coming up with strategies, we asked participants to pick the one they would advise the fictional character to follow. We found that people most often recommended self-reliant exercises of self-control as ways to resist temptation — more so than getting support from friends or modifying one’s environment.
Communal dependence, rather than self-reliance, is what succeeds.
