On Social Science Experiments

 Charles Duhigg, in his book The Power of Habit, cites an experiment done on willpower at Casewestern University.  The experiment was fascinating to me for two major reasons.

For one, the design is very clever.  In the experiment, a room is set up with one dish containing cookies and another horse radish.  Participants are told to skip a meal and broken into two cohorts.  One group is to dine on the cookies while the other one on the horseradish.  

The experimenters got to witness the comfort of the cookie group and contrast it with the pain of the horseradish group.  Then, they introduced the next part of the experiment: they supplied an unsolvable puzzle to the two cohorts.  Neither group was told the right reason why the puzzle was given to them nor that the puzzle was unsolvable.

This clever experiment demonstrated that people who were given cookies had the stamina to work on the puzzle For much longer period while the other cohort gave up easily.

Fascinating experiment to force us to see that willpower is a deplete last resource and we cannot depend on it to deliver consistent positive result.  We have to recourse to other options, possibly ingraining positive habits and leverage the power of habit.

The second reason for my fascination is the role that Charles Duhigg and other authors play in picking such works from academic journals and embed them into more captivating non-fiction work.  Reading academic papers can be tough.  Reading the findings Of the journals embedded in fascinating narratives is much more easier and admittedly more palatable.  I suppose the non-fiction books are the cookies and the academic journal horseradish for a readers like me.

However, thanks to such authors, I get to be fascinated by cleverly designed experiments without depleting my willpower through reading the more taxing academic papers.   

One day, I hope, the academic paper would be my next cookie!  Till then...