Measurement Has Its Limits: The Cookie-Radish Effect

 No willpower needed

I recently wrote about how measuring your own activity, using something as simple as a stopwatch in the shower, can pay off big time in behavioral change. (It can speed you up on tasks you tend to do slowly.) That said, I’ve recently run into a few people who take that concept much further. They schedule tasks for themselves in 10-minute intervals and constantly check to see whether they’re on time and on task. I’ve even talked to one colleague who suggested I do something similar.

Yikes! I can’t imagine being a slave to the stopwatch in that way. But I want to have a clearer reason why such a thing makes no sense for me. Something more than it just doesn’t feel right. So here it is:

When you force yourself to do something that takes a lot of effort or willpower, what you are actually doing is using the rational part of your brain (the part that handles executive functioning) to take over from the more emotional and instinctive part of your brain (the part that wants to do what feels right). Well, there’s a lot of research that suggests that most people have rational effort/willpower in limited quantities. Use too much of it and you’ll begin to run out.

A little more effort to eat these

The best-known among many examples is an experiment some researchers at Case Western Reserve University did back in the 1990s with chocolate chip cookies and radishes. They recruited a bunch of psychology students and asked each to skip a meal and come to a room when he or she was very hungry. Once there, the students encountered a table with some aromatic, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, as well as some radishes. Some students were asked to eat two or three cookies and avoid the radishes. Other students were asked to eat several radishes and to avoid the cookies. (A third group of students—the control group—skipped the food altogether.) After that, the researchers asked the students to solve a pair of geometric puzzles. Unbeknownst to the students, the puzzles were actually unsolvable. The researchers found that students who had eaten radishes and avoided the cookies (tasks that required significant willpower) were far less persistent in their attempts to solve the puzzles than either the cookie-eaters or the control group. The conclusion was that the radish-eaters had depleted their store of willpower.

Returning to the stopwatch situation—it’s pretty clear to me that timing myself throughout the day would require far too much willpower on an ongoing basis. On the other hand, there may be people (like my colleague) who can use a stopwatch without expending that much effort. The trick is to know which type you are and act accordingly.

[Photos courtesy italian voice and scubadive67]