Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Skinner, Behaviorism, and Me


Henry Hazlitt started off his book The Way to Willpower by boldly stating in the introduction, "There is no such thing as Willpower." However, I will mean it in a different sense than he did. My thesis is that Willpower is that you have an innately puny amount of willpower. So that, if you think you are doing something out of willpower, it is my thesis that you are doing it subconsciously out of clever self-manipulative tricks or clever cognitive rephrasing. To back up this claim, there is some research I'd like to bring up:
-Check out this Google talk:

The speaker talks about the incredible limitations our pre-frontal cortex have. And that, when the subconscious limbic triggers, we literally have seconds to respond.
-Check out this article on procrastination. Specifically, they give a nice summary of the classic marshmallow experiment which I will allude to later, but now I just want to focus on the fact brought up in the article that willpower qua willpower is not the issue.
-If the opposite of the claim is accepted (i.e., by way of contradiction), then this runs into logical contradictions. (the outline of this argument runs along the lines: If we had complete free will we would be able to control our own free will.)
-If the opposite of the claim is accepted, then this runs against a LOT of common experience out there. The vast number of AA chapters, rehab clinics, and cyclical diet phenomena seems to suggest that if this were apt to a "brute willpower" motivation, that if people have enough motivation to start these social groups and try these various things, that that kind of strategy would have worked. tl;dr, "brute willpower" is the DEFAULT strategy that pretty much everyone starts with doing, thus, this seems to indicate that something else is going on here.
-Third of all, it's kind of insulting. Some guy is and has been on and off trying to get off of alcohol for 20 years. And someone comes along and says, "Man up, just use your willpower dude." He has twenty years of experience to the contrary.  Perhaps people have different modes of willpower and we should respect that. Or perhaps there is a different thing going on here altogether that we should appreciate.
That's my evidence that willpower is not the way to beat procrastination.  That's my argument against "MAN UP", and I'd like to give an alternative approach.  It was, for the most part, discussed in my previous huge post on thymology, so this will be retreading some old ground found there.

What I find as the alternative, that has worked for me so far, is implementing the ideas of Behaviorists (which is a subset of all that I would suggest), which I will get to in....THE NEXT POST.

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