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Today I want to talk with you about “The Economics of Willpower.” I came across a fascinating idea in something I’ve been reading lately: the fact that we never seem to have enough willpower may actually be connected to the economic concept of “opportunity cost.”
Why does willpower so often run out? If you’re doing physical labor and can’t keep going for very long, that’s easy to explain. Muscles burn through too much energy when they’re used for too long, and the body’s energy reserves are limited. Once you go past the limit, your body sends out fatigue signals telling you to stop.
But why is it also so hard to stick with mental work? Reading books, going through reports, writing articles, doing arithmetic—you’re sitting there barely moving, so why do you feel tired and unable to continue after such a short time? Is thinking really as energy-intensive as hauling bricks?
The most popular view in the past said: maybe it really is. Mental work may actually consume a lot of energy. This was proposed by the famous psychologist Baumeister, the author of the bestselling book Willpower. He speculated that mental activity uses up large amounts of the body’s main energy molecule—glucose. He brought in a group of people and split them into two groups. Both did high-intensity mental work, but one group could drink glucose to replenish their energy, while the other couldn’t. And sure enough, the group that got the sugary drink lasted longer.
At first glance, this explanation seems pretty convincing, but it actually has a lot of serious flaws. For example, scientists later found that difficult mental work doesn’t burn more glucose than simple mental work. The brain certainly is a major energy consumer overall, but it doesn’t suddenly use more energy just because it’s doing mental work. There’s another even more obvious problem: exercise uses up a lot of glucose, but it often makes people perform better, not worse, in subsequent mental activities.
So if the willpower consumed during mental activity isn’t tied to glucose, what is it tied to?
One hypothesis was proposed by the American psychologist Robert Kurzban. He argued that what willpower is tied to is the opportunity cost of doing the task.
Opportunity cost is an economic concept. It means how much the other things you give up in order to do the thing at hand are worth. A meal may cost you 20 yuan, but if eating it means giving up a business deal worth 2 million yuan, then the opportunity cost of that meal is 2 million yuan.
According to Kurzban, the brain is constantly, silently weighing how high the opportunity cost of the task at hand is. What am I giving up in order to do this? Is it worth it?
For example, today I could spend the whole day coming up with and producing a new episode. Or I could choose to play around all day—binge-watch shows, watch movies, play video games. The pleasure I’d get from those things is the opportunity cost of making the episode.
So if I expect this episode to be a hit, with a million viewers and ten thousand likes, giving me a tremendous sense of accomplishment, then it looks very worthwhile. That tiny opportunity cost I’m giving up doesn’t seem worth mentioning. So I might work on the video all day without even stopping, and my willpower would seem extraordinarily abundant.
But if I expect only a hundred people to watch it and ten to like it, then by comparison, the opportunity cost of this task looks very high. Why should I give up the enormous pleasure of watching movies and playing games just to suffer through editing a video? It’s a terrible deal. In that situation, my willpower may seem exceptionally weak. I’ll go poke around and slack off every three or five minutes while editing.
This opportunity-cost view can explain a lot of phenomena involving willpower.
Difficult mental work is harder to stick with than simple mental work, not because it consumes more energy, but because it’s more painful. Compared with other, more enjoyable options, its opportunity cost looks especially high. And the reason glucose can help us persist longer at mental work isn’t that it replenishes our energy. It’s that sweet things strongly stimulate the brain’s reward circuitry, making us very happy. That feeling of happiness is what lowers the opportunity cost.
The longer an activity continues, the harder it is to persist—not because your energy has run out, but because the longer you’re involved, the more you can sense all the other things being delayed. In other words, the opportunity cost of doing one thing skyrockets the longer you stay involved in it.
In short, according to this opportunity-cost explanation, when mental work makes you feel tired, it isn’t really your brain telling you, “You’re tired.” Your brain is trying to tell you: there are other things more worth doing.
What I find especially interesting about this idea is that willpower was initially considered a matter of moral character. Later, it was considered a physiological matter (because it supposedly consumed energy). But if this “opportunity cost” explanation is correct, then willpower is actually a cognitive issue. It has little to do with our physical condition and a great deal to do with what we believe is valuable behavior. That’s cognition, isn’t it?
This also perfectly explains some of my own everyday observations. I don’t know if I’m right, but I’ve noticed that people with a lot of willpower are either somewhat stubborn—the kind who look a little goofy and don’t overthink things, who pick up a task and put their heads down until it’s done—or they’re extraordinarily smart, so smart that they see through a lot of things. Once they set their minds on something, they’ll stick with it without looking back. The people most prone to divided attention are those in the middle: quick-minded, aware of quite a few things, but without having thought any of them through completely.
Where does the difference lie? Isn’t it simply a difference in opportunity cost? Either they can’t see the other options, so the opportunity cost of the task at hand is extremely low—they don’t know what they’re giving up—or they can see the other options perfectly clearly, but also understand that those options aren’t actually worth much. A lot of truly capable people see one thing clearly: most worthwhile achievements in life come from gradual accumulation and sudden breakthroughs; they’re the result of long-term persistence. So continuing to do the right thing over the long term is the only correct choice. With that understanding, no matter how many other options there are, their opportunity cost is extremely low. But some people see all those other options without seeing through this point. So in their eyes, doesn’t the opportunity cost of sticking with one thing become enormous?
Tell me, isn’t willpower a cognitive issue?
All right, that’s where I’ll leave it for today. I encountered this idea of explaining willpower through opportunity cost in the book The Sweetness of Suffering by the famous psychologist Paul Bloom—a book ruined by its awful translated title. It should have been translated as The Sweetness of Suffering. It’s about why some suffering is pleasurable in itself.
I’m Zhichao Wei. From now on, I’ll keep sharing the psychology knowledge I come across, along with all sorts of other interesting and entertaining things, on this channel. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please give it a like, share it, and follow this channel too. It really means a lot to me. Thanks for your support, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
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