Roy Baumeister || Willpower, Violence, and Free Will

excited to be speaking with our guest, Roy Baumeister. Roy is a professor at both the University of Queensland and Florida State University. He's authored more than five hundred publications and his co author who edited almost thirty books. He's one of the most highly cited psychologists of all time. This is part two of a two part series. You've

also studied willpower, another you know, small topic. Let me just because of an interest of time, Like, can you just tell me one or two things people can do increase their willpower, because that's something that people, you know, like goal achievement, goal attainment. The biggest thing they'll get in their way is lack of willpower. Like I want to go to gym and lose wheat, but that juicy cookie is right in front of me, and I've lost

the willpower. So what's there some strategies. Well, first we say that the glass of willpower is half full and half empty. The people think a lot, and the big positive psychology survey on the Values and Stuff found that people rate self control is one of their biggest weaknesses. Rarely does it come up as one of one's biggest strengths. So it seems to be a widespread perception that we don't have enough self control and in terms of reaching our ideals and being the person we want to be,

more self control would help. But we also have a lot more than other creatures and we use it a lot. We do pretty well with what we have, so to focus on the positive as well as the negative. So in terms of practical question of what people can do to maximize it, this is something where that a lot of research going on and some controversies and different opinions.

My best guess present is that good self control it's not really that they have more will power in any kind of physiological sense, they just use it more wisely and prudently. Had a big study looking at what everyday desires and do people resist their desires and so on? So what people high self control, you'd expect them to report resisting their desires more No, they reported resisting desires less high is that well, they stay out of tempting situations,

They avoid trouble. It turns out what successful people do is they develop habits and routines that get them the results that they want, don't expose them the temptation where they need all their willpower. And you talked about being it, you wanting to go exercise and seeing some tempting piece a cake or don't at what you said, cookie cookie, Okay, person with high self control is not going to come across the cookie. The person price self control, it's just

time to exercise. And so you have a well developed habit that you go exercise. You don't need willpower to make yourself do it. You do need it to establish the habit. But once it becomes a habit that every day at seven am or four pm or whenever I'm going to go get some exercise, and then you manage not to find yourself looking longingly at cookies in between. So to me, there's been a big change in how we think about self control. It's not the heroic act

of resisting temptation. Rather, it's setting up the routines and habits that will make life runs smoothly and the more automatic thing, so you don't need as much willpower because we don't have a great deal in terms of your question, was how to increase or strengthen or replenish or whatever.

There's some evidence that it works like a muscle, that if you use self control regularly you get better at it, you get stronger, and there maybe even some brain changes and how it stores energy, stuff like that, and then basic things getting enough sleep and getting food to eat bodies energy comes from food. It's one of the particular challenges of dieting because for dieting you need willpower. For willpower,

you need energy you need from food. So you have to eat so that you'll have the willpower to resist the fattening foods. Start and be successful. To start by eating a bunch of healthy foods, and you can tell yourself, I can have desert later, fill up on the healthy stuff, and then that would give you maybe the strength of

character to resist. The Sleep is another one, a little bit of argument about it, but to me it looks like people who are sleep deprived look like people with poor self control are more likely to act impulsively and get into trouble and make poor judgments. What do you say to the critics. There's some scientists who have proove challenged the ego depletion theory thing. It's not like a

muscle that that's not the mechanism. Does your research still stand up as far as you're concerned, that is what's going yea, yeah, yeah, I just went through all the literature. In my view is just to end up knowing what's right. I never assume I'm right, of course, but you think on totality the evidence. Yeah, other views. There's some great contributions people are making, and they have excellent valid points, but mostly it works together as an extension of the

idea that there's limited willpower to replace it. There only one or two that have seriously tried to say, let's get rid of the whole notion of limited resource, and they're just a fair number of findings, so much evidence now that if you want to take it seriously, you'd have to be able to account for things. You know

they want to pick and choose. Well, I can explain this finding without using willpower or strength that yes, they're right, they can explain this finding and this finding and this finding, but what about these others challenges them to do that? And there are lots. So just spent about two years trying to read everything and let's put it together. So I've changed my opinion several times and may change it again, But right now, the best guess is that we still

need to understand the limited resource. Some of the processes are fairly far removed from the actual physiological expenditure of energy. That's sort of the stimming licut. It turns out with physical exertion, it's the same thing. Your muscles start to feel tired long before they reach the biochemical state where they can't function. So you're tired muscle. If you're motivated, it can still perform at the full peak level. It's just there's some kind of central system that starts to

conserve energy. And this is why we've exerted a lot of energy. And this is not sustainable. You've got to realize we evolved under different conditions. You know, there were no supermarkets and evolutionary past you might have to go several days without anything to eat, and moreover, the basic energy that goes into self control and willpower. So it's the same energy that powers the brain and the kidney and the rest of the functions, and in particular the

immune system. Immune system uses a lot of glucose, but quite variably cool. This next topic just sound like the worst segue ever. But what have you found is the main cause of violence and aggression? I mean, you did this terrific review paper. I believe you wrote a book on this topic, The Counterintuitive True Cause of Violence and Aggression, which is different than what a lot of people in

the media often say, all right, causes of aggression. This is from my book Evil Inside even violence and Cruelty, and the go there is to understand these nasty things from the perspective of the perpetrators. There are a lot of books about evil that just say, oh, look at this awful thing this person did, and okay, you believe with this monster, but you sort of treat the perpetrator

like some inhuman foreign species. I want to try and say, I want people to read these things and be able to say I could see myself doing that in that situation. So what I came up with there was for root causes and three and a half maybe, and then one approximate cause. So the root causes. First, it's just a means to an end, and there's a lot of that. People do violence. People fight wars to take food and land and other resources from other people. People commit crimes,

rob people or whatever to get their way. Second, threatened egotism that people have a favorable view of themselves. Others question it, challenge it, disrespect them, impune and criticize them. That seems to elicit an aggressive response, as you want to know you shouldn't criticize me. They want to keep a positiveview. This might be what you were referring to, because there was a tradition of thinking low self esteem led to aggression, but could not find anything exactly, any

set aside, any signs of that. And there's abundantly clear that most perpetrators of violence think they're superior beings, and studies of murderers and rapists and yes, so as often a sense of superiority that's not being respected. I'm not getting the respect I deserve, even terrorists and so on. The governments too have this feeling. The third was an idealistic that we think God's on our side and God's against the other people, and God wants me to kill

those other people. So the biggest body counts of the twentieth century. We forget this, but they produced by idealists, the communism. They thought, we're going to make the world a better place by making everyone equal, killing a lot of the people who didn't fit in. The Nazis had this utopian vision of a fair and just society. People treat each other. They just need more space. We're going to kill other people who are in the way or

who weren't with the program. It's in the US we don't see this as much, but some of the people who bomb abortion clinics and so on, thinking that, well, they're killing babies in there. You know, to most of us that seems evil to kind of bomb and kill some people. But to them, they're doing what's good. And I think this work. It's come out since then that many murderers see what they're doing is upholding positive moral values and avenging. I run killers and not serial killers

much more. The impulse that most killers are one time thing. The serial killers are probably a deranged group, and then they might fit into the fourth category, which is sadism, which is do people actually get pleasure out of harming others. And I wrestled with that one for a long time. There were lots of victims always claiming, oh yeah, they were laughing, they were enjoying it. They took pleasure in

our suffering. It's hard to see much of that in the perpetrator's own accounts, but there was enough way that they said I don't really enjoy it, but there was someone else who said he did, and so on. So I came to think this is the half. It's not a real route that people are born and say this. There may be a few, but it's not a major

source of violence. But some people can let themselves start to enjoy killing others or performing harm to others, and so then they take pleasure in inflicting harm on others. And to me that secondary. They often may be initially motivated by one of the other three basic motives, but as they do it, they start to get some pleasure out of it the proximal cause. Those are the beginnings of violence, the roots. But I also struck me that the last link in the chain between all these things

and the actual doing it is self control. That most people have violent impulses now and then, but they restrain them, and so a breakdown and self control is often the immediate cause of violence. So things like alcohol or extreme emotion or provocation, these are things that will overcome one's natural inhibitions against hurting another person and allow people get

carried away in However, there are clearly individual differences. Not everyone who loses their cognitive control goes and kills someone, absolutely right, So there's a combination of individual differences and societal variables. Yesh yep. So why did you write the book Is there anything good about men? Well, for me and my grand intellectual plan was to move from my book on human nature to write another book on free

will and understand that problem. So in between, I wanted to understand how culture, which is not a physical thing, can influence behavior, which is a physical thing. So I thought, let's look at how culture uses one gender, and for that I could have picked either men or women. But there are already a ton of books about how culture or exploits and takes advantage of women, so I thought it'd be a little more interesting and different to look

at how culture uses men. There's some interest there. Since the seventies, there have been two dominant themes about people write about gender. One is that women are just superior to men, and the other is that there's no difference, but no difference. One has its advocates, but seem less plausible to me. But also it didn't seem plausible that women would just be better across the board than men.

I believe in trade offs. I don't know why nature would make one gender superior to the other in all respects, but nature will preserve differences when there's a trade off, and one thing's better for one thing and one thing better for another. So, you know, if you're a man, you read the gender research, you just notice that the

men are never allowed to win. You know, whatever you're finding is you can say it's fine to say women are better than men, or to say there's no difference, But there are almost no studies coming out saying that men are better than women at this or that. About spatial visualization research, yeah, they all still sometimes conceded that, but it's not in terms of socially meaningful interesting stuff. There's very little there, and it's a strong bias in

the literature. So I've gotten thinking about men. Had this big article called the Need to belong, arguing that one of the basic human motives is this desire to connect with others. Goes back to the theme of my career that we evolved to participate in social systems and relationships

and so on. As a paper submitted that I got sentimeter review saying that well, mainly women have the need to belong, that men aren't as social as women, and they made a pretty thorough case, but well, they're just looking at being social in terms of one to one relationships, and maybe women are a little bit more attuned to that. But if you look at lige groups and social systems, those are almost all things that men do more than women. Men care more about big groups in their position and

social hierarchy and stuff like that. So you make a case men are more social there, and that got me thinking, well, society uses men and women in different ways consistent with the trade off ideas, so you start to look at the different patterns. So what emotional expressiveness is one of the basic gender differences. Women express their feelings a lot more. So it's easy to say, oh, you see, women are more social. They'll express their feelings to others, then share

them and then keep them hidden. But Okay, it's better express your feelings in a one to one relationship because then your partner knows what your feeling and can take care of you and do more for you and so on. But in a large group, showing all your feelings is risky. You've got rivals, you've got enemies, you've got coalitions. Maybe you're trying to buy a used car and you say, oh,

I love it, I've got to have it. Well, you're not going to get as good a deal as say, well maybe, so the male pattern, over and over is more evolved toward what's functional in large groups, and the female pattern more toward intimate relationships. Is why throughout history women very strong getting into a close intimate relationships and developing the skills and very good of that and so on.

But you know, you look through history, what a large groups of women done, whereas compared to large groups of men, is almost the mainstay of history. So that made me start thinking of it that there are trade offs, and men and women are good at different things, molded by nature for somewhat different tasks. Different And you want to say either gender is inherently superior. They're just different but equal, which is a theory that the field that never really

entertained seriously, So do we have free will? Yes? The answer the free will question is a definition question. I started with defining myself. The people arguing about free will are usually using quite different definitions, and so the arguments they're talking past each other, and it's kind of frustrating. The answer do we have free will? It depends on which definition you use. I mean, from where I sit, there are several definitions by which yes, we do have

free will. But for people to home that free will means you have to have a soul that causes behavior without a physical process, or that you're exempt from the rules of natural causality or something like that, that those seem preposterous to me. My goal has been developed a scientific theory which is natural and causal. But clearly some actions are freer than others, and people make choices. So to me, it's can you do differently in the same situation?

And that's the foundation of a lot of social life, including pretty much all moral judgment. The moral judgment says, should you have done something else in that situation? Which or could yeah? Yeah? The question of whether you should have done something else presupposes that you could have yes, yes, and you would say yes you could, right, I mean you could have steered your consciousness in a different direction, right, Yes. So that's a topic. We'll table that topic for another day.

All right, that's a good one. So you said you resonated with a colleague who once remarked that my whole life is sort of an avoidance response to boredom. Is there a coherent, integrative theme to all your work? Right? Well, now you're asking an embarrassing question. I was supposed to have one theme, and I know you said there's no higher meaning. I tried to pretend there is. I'm so curious about why we're here and what is the human condition and the project? Why are we doing what we're doing.

So I'm trying to get all the different pieces of that, and I've moved around and start doing literature views more that effecting my own data. I've looked at the different areas. I looked at self and identity and meaning of life, self control and social roles. I looked at evil and violence and sexuality and gender difference as a culture. So I give myself fifty to fifty chances to kind of

have it all figured out. Before I dropped dead. I think so, I mean, you've covered the greatest hits of humanity. That's my cool and commercial advice to make your careers. You should pick one thing and make that your specialty and stick with it. And that's what works best for the system. It's just hard on an individual. You get

bored doing the same thing. I see people who pick one topic and study it for twenty years, and you know, they make a major contribution that way, and you can get the grants and the awards and so on, but then eventually you just kind of run out of ideas on that and brings difficulty for those people. I've always done multiple different things, and so for me taking them something new is not such a big issue or challenge. The other thing is that most social science careers are

based on collecting data and that's it. So you develop your skills to study some topic, and you keep studying the topic. Integrating into broader and broader schemes not really part of that, except as you refine your theory or whatever it is you voted your crew to. But as a literature viewer, you can combine lots of different things, and so it's more possible to come together with bigger,

more integrative understanding. So I'm still hoping, so looking for a few other pieces of the puzzle and then hoping I can put together the puzzle to come up with something new the meaning of humanity. Yes, I love it. Are there any topics we didn't cover today that you want you anything you're working on more recently that you definitely wanted to talk about? No, this has been fun, and I'm sure they are more interesting things going on now.

But that's how I sue this. I think we've covered a lot of ground, and I hope your listeners are getting get a kick out of this patience to make it to the end. Yes, I think ween it split this up into two sections, actually two party. Well, thank you for such a wide ranging, fascinating I say cheicily uplifting because it wasn't really always uplifting, but I was hopefully litening to people discussion. Thank you so much, Royan. Okay, Scott, thank you, take care of them, talk to you and soon.

Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barak Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought per booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or hear past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com