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A popular psychological theory says that your willpower is a "limited resource" like the fuel in your car, but is it wrong?

When we use willpower to concentrate or to resist temptation, does it leave us depleted so that we have less self-control left over to tackle new challenges? This is a question fundamental to our understanding of human nature and yet a newly published investigation reveals that psychologists are in open disagreement as to the answer.

The idea that willpower is a limited resource, much like the fuel in your car, is popular in academic psychology and supported by many studies. In their recent report What You Need To Know About Willpower: The Psychological Science of Self-control, the American Psychological Association states "A growing body of research shows that resisting repeated temptations takes a mental toll. Some experts liken willpower to a muscle that can get fatigued from overuse."

This view was backed by an influential meta-analysis published in 2010 [pdf] that looked at the results from nearly 200 published experiments. But now a team led by Evan Carter at the University of Miami has argued that the 2010 study was seriously flawed and they've published their own series of meta-analyses, the findings of which undermine the limited resource theory (also known as the theory of ego depletion).

Many psychology studies on willpower follow a similar format: one group of participants is first asked to perform an initial challenging task designed to drain their willpower, before completing a second "outcome" task that also requires willpower. For comparison, a control group of participants performs the outcome task without the first challenge. Superior performance by the control participants (on the outcome task) is taken as evidence that the willpower of the first group was left depleted by the initial challenge, thus supporting the theory that willpower is a limited resource.

The new meta-analyses and the 2010 effort both consider the combined results from many studies following this format, but the new analyses are far stricter in that they only consider studies that used tasks well-established in the literature as ways to challenge willpower, including suppressing emotional reactions to videos and resisting tempting food, and that also used established tasks as outcome measures, including persistence on impossible anagrams, food consumption and standardised academic tests (such as the graduate record exam). The 2010 analysis, by contrast, included a far wider range of studies including those that stretch the definition of a willpower challenge to its limits, including darts playing and purely hypothetical temptations.

Another key difference between the 2010 study and the new analyses is that Carter and his team trawled conference reports to find unpublished studies on willpower. This is important because in this scientific field, as with most others, it's likely there has been a bias in the literature towards publishing positive results (in this case, those consistent with the popular idea that willpower becomes depleted with repeated use).

When Carter's team analysed the evidence from the 68 relevant published and 48 relevant unpublished studies that they identified, they found very little overall support for the idea that willpower is a limited resource. The one exception was when the outcome measure involved a standardised test – here performance did appear to be diminished by a prior self-control challenge.

But for other outcome tasks such as resisting food, the combined data from published and unpublished experiments either pointed to no effect of a prior self-control challenge, or there was worrying evidence of a publication bias for positive results, as was the case, for example, when the outcome challenge involved impossible anagrams or tests of working memory. The new meta-analyses even found some support for the idea that self-control improves through successive challenges, a result that's consistent with rival theories such as "learned industriousness".

This new series of meta-analyses should be not be taken as the end of the theory of willpower as a limited resource. Proponents of that theory will likely respond with their own counter-arguments, including questioning the use of unpublished work by the new study. However, the results certainly give pause. "We encourage scientists and non-scientists alike to seriously consider other theories of when and why self-control might fail," Carter and his team conclude. It's worth noting too that this message comes after the recent doubts raised about a related idea in willpower research – specifically, the notion that depleted self-control is caused by a lack of sugar in the body.
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  Carter, E., Kofler, L., Forster, D., & McCullough, M. (2015). A Series of Meta-Analytic Tests of the Depletion Effect: Self-Control Does Not Seem to Rely on a Limited Resource. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/xge0000083

--further reading--
Self-control – the moral muscle. Roy F. Baumeister outlines intriguing and important research into willpower and ego depletion

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

When we look at our lives, we tend to break them up into chapters, rather like the seasons of a TV box set. Potential dividers come in many forms, including the dawn of a new year, or the start of a new job. But if those events act as a marker between episodes, it is the decades of our lives that represent the more profound end of one series or season and the start of the next.

According to the psychologists Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield, when we're on the cusp of one of these boundaries - in other words, when our age ends in a "9", such as 29, 39, 49 or 59 - we are particularly prone to reflect on the meaning of our lives. If we don't like what we see, their new results suggest we take drastic action, either fleeing life's emptiness, or setting ourselves new goals.

The pair began by looking at data from the World Values Survey. Based on answers from 42,063 adults across 100 nations, they found that people with an age ending in 9 (the researchers call these people "9-enders") were more likely than people of other ages to say that they spent time thinking about the meaning and purpose of their lives.

In another study, participants prompted to imagine and write about how they would feel the night before entering a new decade, tended to say they would think about the meaning of their life more than did other participants who'd been prompted to write about the night before their next birthday, or to write about tomorrow.

At the dawn of a new decade, how does this focus on life's meaning affect our behaviour? Alter and Hershfield say that for some people it can lead to "maladaptive behaviours". They looked at data from an online dating website that caters for people who are seeking extramarital affairs. Among over 8 million male users of the site, 9-enders were over-represented by 17.88 per cent relative to what you'd expect if participation were randomly distributed by age. The same was true, though to a lesser extent, for female users of the site.

For some people, the self-reflection triggered by the prospect of entering a new decade is more than they can bear. Alter and Hershfield also examined suicide data collected between 2000 and 2011 by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention. They found that 9-enders take their own lives with a greater frequency than people whose ages end in any other digit.

It seems the "crisis of meaning" triggered by the prospect of a new decade can also lead people to set themselves new goals. When the researchers looked at data on the Athlinks website, they found that among 500 first-time marathon runners, 9-enders were over-represented by 48 per cent. The same site also contained evidence of 9-enders investing greater effort into their training and performance. Focusing on data from runners in their twenties, thirties and early forties who'd run a marathon at the end of a decade and also in the preceding and following two years, the researchers found that people achieved better times, by an average of 2.3 per cent, when they were aged 29 or 39 than when they were one or two years younger.

The researchers said there's a growing literature that suggests "although people age continually, the passage of time is more likely to influence their thoughts and actions at some ages than others." They added: "Here we find that people are significantly more likely to consider whether their lives are meaningful as they approach the start of a new decade."

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Alter, A.L., & Hershfield, H.E. (2014). People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age PNAS

--further reading--
The findings of this study have been challenged by Erik Larsen
The taste for competition peaks at age 50
The boxed set approach to setting goals

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

When a man describes himself as bisexual, we usually take this to mean that he has sexual relations with both men and women, and/or that he is attracted to both sexes. However, prior lab research has found that many men who self-identify as bi-sexual are not in fact sexually aroused - in a physical sense - by the opposite sex.

It's important to remember that physical sexual arousal is only one reflection of a person's sexual desires and identity, not the be all and end all. However, this past research suggests that, from a bio-psychological perspective, the label bisexual is used by a diverse group of men. A new study builds on this idea, and finds that a key distinguishing characteristic among bisexual men is their level of sexual curiosity.

Gerulf Rieger and his colleagues conducted two studies with hundreds of men, some of whom were recruited via university adverts, others via websites where men seek sexual partners. The first study used pupil dilation as an index of sexual arousal. The second study used increase in penile circumference as the measure of sexual arousal.

The men, who rated themselves on a sexual orientation sliding scale from strictly homosexual, to bisexual, to strictly heterosexual, watched video clips of attractive male or female models masturbating in the first study, or, in the second study, short videos of two men having sex, or two women having sex. In both studies, the participants also filled out a 10-item questionnaire about their sexual curiosity. Example items included "If I were invited to watch a porn movie, I would accept" and "Sex without love is appealing to me."

On average, men who self-identified as bisexual showed the sexual arousal patterns you might expect, being less aroused than heterosexual men (but more aroused than homosexual men) by videos featuring women, and more aroused than heterosexual men by videos featuring men. This average data conceals the fact that some bisexual men were aroused by both sexes, while others were aroused only by men. The novel finding from this research is that these arousal patterns were correlated with sexual curiosity. Bisexual men on average reported more sexual curiosity than straight or gay men; moreover, among bisexual men only, greater sexual curiosity was linked with more arousal in response to videos featuring women. Bisexual men with low levels of sexual curiosity tended to be aroused only by other men.

Rieger and his colleagues speculate that shared genetic influences likely account for increased sexual curiosity and bisexual physiological arousal, thus explaining why these two characteristics correlate. They also propose that some bisexual men with elevated curiosity may "reattribute" their curiosity-related arousal to sexual stimuli depicting either sex, "thus increasing their sexual arousal and rewarding experiences associated with both men and women." What about the bisexual men who are only aroused by men? Rieger's team suggest that their identity may be in a transitional stage - perhaps they self-identify as bisexual on the basis of past experiences and relationships, or to conform to societal norms.

"The present findings are in line with the notion that a male bisexual identity can be found in a diverse range of men who differ in sexual attitudes and feelings," the researchers said.

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Rieger G, Rosenthal AM, Cash BM, Linsenmeier JA, Bailey JM, and Savin-Williams RC (2013). Male bisexual arousal: A matter of curiosity? Biological psychology, 94 (3), 479-89 PMID: 24055219

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Writing in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, a Dr Yvo Smulders of the Netherlands makes a proposal: A two-step manuscript submission process can reduce publication bias

Smulder’s point is that scientific manuscripts should be submitted for peer review with the results and discussion omitted. The reviewers would judge the submission on the strength of the methods and the introduction alone. If they recommended publication, the authors would then send them the full paper.

The reviewers would then have a chance to change their mind and reject it, or ask for further experiments to be carried out, but the ‘bar’ for this to happen would be high.

Hence the scope for reviewer-based publication bias, the tendency to favour ‘positive’ results, would be reduced. Reviewers would have to make a decision on the basis of the experiment itself, regardless of whether the results were positive or not. Smulders says that it would also ease the burden on reviewers in terms of the volume of material they’d need to digest.

It’s a clever notion (and, as Smulders points out, not a new one; it dates to the 1970s, but has never taken off.)

The proposal is reminiscent of the preregistration with peer pre-review model which I’ve advocated. The difference is that in the latter case, the authors submit the introduction and methods before the study has been conducted while in ‘two-step’ submission, the results are already there, just not revealed until later in the process.

The difference is that unlike preregistration, two-step review would not prevent publication bias (or other questionable practices) on the author’s side. Two-step would, however, reduce the incentive for such bias – why fish so hard for a positive result if you know your study would make it into a good journal on the strengths of its methods?

But the proposal would certainly be a step in the right direction and, in fact, could form a natural stepping-stone to a preregistration system.

Smulders YM (2013). A two-step manuscript submission process can reduce publication bias. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology PMID: 23845183

The post A New Kind of Peer Review? appeared first on Neuroskeptic.