Dr. Kentaro Fujita

I think what you're saying is really interesting and I have a whole bunch of thoughts which I'm gonna try to get out in a systematic and organized way.

So, first again I'm not an expert in this area but we do know that people have differential distress tolerance, how much unpleasantness they're willing to put themselves through and there are individual differences.

As far as I know, it probably can be trained and usually through exposure.

But again, I'm not an expert in this area.

What I can speak to with respect specifically to willpower is that willpower training paradigms have shown to shown very limited success.

So, for example, again, imagine you're doing the Stroop task and you're doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of these trials.

Another training exercise is you literally go home and you practice doing everything with your non-dominant hand as opposed to using your dominant hand.

So these willpower exercises, you do them for a week and you come back.

Some experiments have suggested that they do in fact improve self-control.

Others say that they don't.

And on average, reviews of this literature have suggested that the effect is much smaller than you might hope despite all the work that you put in.

And it's very variable.

So some people will see –

Some gains, but they'll be small, but many people will see no gains.

That's about willpower specifically.

And this is at the point where I have to get a little bit more detailed.

I think there's a difference between willpower and self-control.

So willpower is one of the ways that we improve and enhance our self-control abilities, but it's not the only one.

And so the other ones, I've already described some of them to you that Walter Mischel discovered with the delay of gratification paradigm.

So he wasn't studying willpower.