How Thinking Kills Willpower (and what to do about it)

单集文稿 ...

• 00:03

  Today we're talking about willpower and cognitive load.

• 00:08

  What the heck does that mean?

• 00:11

  Well, I think it's kind of illustrated by a really cool experiment that was done a couple of years back.

• 00:19

  So Stanford University behavioral economist Babashiv decides to run an experiment, and he gets a whole bunch of students involved, because that's what you do when you're at a university.

• 00:31

  You get to recruit undergrads and mess with them and create all sorts of fun experiments and see how they behave.

• 00:39

  So he took the students and put them at the end of one long hallway.

• 00:44

  And one group of students was asked to memorize a two digit number and hold it in their memory.

• 00:51

  So here's two digits.

• 00:53

  Remember this while you walk down the hall.

• 00:56

  Don't forget.

• 00:57

  Now, the second group of students was given seven digits to actually remember while they're walking down the hall.

• 01:05

  So we got it.

• 01:06

  So one group, remember two digits while you walk down the hall.

• 01:10

  The other group, remember seven digit number while you walk down the hall.

• 01:14

  Now, both groups walked down the hall, and here's what happened at the end.

• 01:18

  And they didn't walk down simultaneously.

• 01:19

  It was one at a time, right?

• 01:20

  Student walking down the hall, remembering two numbers walks down.

• 01:24

  And at the end, he gets presented with a choice.

• 01:28

  So you can either have a piece of chocolate cake or a fruit salad, a little bowl of fruit salad.

• 全部文稿