Is Will Power Overrated?
What the weak-willed lack in discipline, they make up for in ingenuity. Although the story of Odysseus binding himself to the mast to resist the Sirens’ song may belong to the mythical imagination, plenty of desperate souls have gone to heroic lengths to obstruct their wayward desires. Plutarch claims that Demosthenes shaved half his head so that he’d be too ashamed to leave his study in search of distraction. Twenty-four centuries later, Jonathan Franzen destroyed his laptop’s Ethernet port so he wouldn’t be tempted to go online. “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT,” the artist Jenny Holzer once blazoned over Times Square, articulating a self-alienation recognizable to anyone who has downloaded a focus app or taken a dose of Antabuse before meeting friends at a bar. Casinos offer voluntary self-exclusion programs for compulsive gamblers; birth plans allow devotees of natural labor to deny their future selves an epidural. The activist Zelda Gamson kicked a nicotine addiction by swearing that if she smoked another cigarette she’d donate five thousand dollars to the Ku Klux Klan.
These self-binding tactics, sometimes known as “Ulysses pacts” or “commitment devices,” attempt to solve what ancient Greek philosophers called akrasia, the baffling human tendency to act contrary to our higher aspirations. If the resolutions you make in a “cool” state cannot survive the “hot” state of desire, there are any number of hacks—physical barriers, peer pressure—that can keep you from succumbing, or help you avoid the battle entirely. So contends Angela Duckworth in her new book, “Situated,” which promises the secret to conquering temptation “without willpower.” Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies self-control, believes we put far too much stock in brute effort; success and personal growth largely depend on the “situation” we inhabit—our community, our associates, the spaces in which we work and live. While the book offers many tips about how to trick yourself into sticking with your goals, it ultimately advocates a far more extensive form of self-binding, arguing that it’s possible to strategically engineer one’s entire life so as to make success more likely, without struggle. “Of all the ways you can change your behavior,” she writes, “willpower is the absolute worst.”
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This conclusion will likely confound anyone familiar with Duckworth’s previous work. For the past two decades, her name has been synonymous with “grit,” a concept she began writing about in 2007, then popularized in her 2016 best-seller, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.” “Grit” is essentially will power sustained over time; Duckworth researched high achievers and found that it was a better indicator of success than I.Q. and was a skill that could be learned. The term caught fire among school reformers and earned her a MacArthur “genius” grant. Duckworth also faced backlash from critics who argued that her message was, at best, a series of hollow exhortations to simply try harder and, at worst, an insidious form of victim-blaming that ignored structural inequality. (As one lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education put it, in 2015, “Grittiness is often situational.”)
High-profile authors are obviously under pressure to offer novel frameworks, but rarely do these second acts feel like an about-face. Duckworth insists that “Situated” is not a reversal but an expansion of her earlier research; as an account of individual success, grit is “necessary but not sufficient,” and must be complemented by the larger picture. That explanation turns out to be tenuous, but, in its attempt to address the problem of conflicting desires, “Situated” reveals some of the paradoxes inherent in the prevailing beliefs about will power and self-control.
While “grit” may be the most enduring buzzword of its era, Duckworth was one of many popular psychologists in the aughts and twenty-tens who argued that it was possible to white-knuckle your way to success. Roy Baumeister’s “ego-depletion theory” posited that will power was a muscle you could strengthen; Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” maintained that personal success came down to positive self-talk, a conclusion in tune with the relentless work ethic of the gig economy, sometimes called the “grindset.” These theories and other will-power research ran into replication difficulties a decade ago. The grit literature failed to replicate in a 2017 meta-analysis, which found that the effects of grit were exaggerated and that the concept was nearly identical to “conscientiousness,” one of the Big Five personality traits that psychologists have studied for decades and that are widely thought to be fixed. Duckworth acknowledged that this critique was valid and said she aspires “to be a scientist who remains open to criticism.”
In the years since grit’s heyday, much of American culture has succumbed to a state of emotional and spiritual defeat. The A.I. tools that promised to lighten workloads have intensified many jobs while eliminating others; the chaos of two Donald Trump Administrations and a global pandemic have engendered various neologisms for exhaustion (“coasting culture,” “quiet quitting”). At a moment when “doing nothing” has become a form of resistance, the skepticism about muscling through marks a discernible vibe shift—or perhaps a generational passing of the baton, the Gen X “Just Do It” ceding to the millennial “I can’t even.”
In recent years, a flurry of popular psychology books—including James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” and Benjamin Hardy’s “Willpower Doesn’t Work”—have dismissed will power as ineffective and looked instead at how environmental cues influence decision-making. Duckworth, meanwhile, has been co-authoring papers with titles like “Beyond Willpower,” and proposing complementary strategies drawn from choice architecture and nudge theory, friendly rebrands of social engineering. She now co-directs the Behavior Change for Good Initiative (B.C.F.G.) at the Wharton School, which partners with major corporations to study, for example, whether e-mail reminders can get bank customers to save more. Cass Sunstein, an originator of nudge theory and a colleague of Duckworth’s at B.C.F.G., has argued that people are, by default, “somewhat mindless, passive decision-makers,” and that corporations and governments should design environments that prod them, sometimes unconsciously, toward better choices.
In “Situated,” Duckworth claims that individuals can harness these techniques to achieve personal goals—that it’s possible to “nudge thyself.” “Want to read more books? Keep books on your nightstand,” she writes. “Watch less TV? Cancel a streaming subscription.” In short, if you’re the kind of person who would fail the marshmallow test, don’t keep marshmallows in the house. Since “Grit,” Duckworth writes, “my curiosity has taken me from what goes on inside the minds of high achievers to everything and everyone around them.” The foundation of this new focus is the three-box model, a “revolutionary” framework on which she collaborated with the Stanford psychologist James Gross: the first box is the “situation,” the objective circumstances you find yourself in; the second box represents “thoughts,” or how you mentally appraise your situation; the third box is your “response,” the emotions and actions that flow from the previous two boxes.
Imagine you’re at Thanksgiving dinner and your brother-in-law starts spouting opinions you find objectionable. It’s almost impossible, Duckworth argues, to will yourself not to feel anger—that is, to change your emotional response (Box Three). It might be more effective to change your thinking (Box Two) by mentally reframing the situation. “Instead of thinking, My brother-in-law is an idiot,” Duckworth writes, “you might consider, I don’t have the same view. What does he see that I don’t?” But the best strategy is an earlier intervention: engineer a situation (Box One) that circumvents this battle entirely. Choose a seat far from your brother-in-law or excuse yourself to help with the dishes. The problem with will power, Duckworth writes, is that it attacks the problem “at the last possible moment.” The goal is to create a system that automatically elicits the desired response “without any (Box Two) thinking at all.”
Duckworth’s advice to avoid temptation is sound enough. Few of us have the steely resolve of Dwight Eisenhower, who kept his pockets stuffed with cigarettes long after he’d quit, because handing them out to others gave him “a feeling of accomplishment and superiority.” But self-binding tactics are hardly foolproof. Thomas Schelling, the economist who pioneered commitment devices, wrote about the “tortured reasoning” that led him to create work-arounds to his own rules when trying to quit smoking: having promised himself tobacco only after the “evening meal,” he quickly found loopholes—international flights, a token midafternoon sandwich. Once, in the throes of a news addiction, I deactivated my phone’s browser only to discover that I could access the Times home page by locating the paper’s headquarters on Google Maps.
What about more drastic changes to your environment? The most surefire way to spur growth, Duckworth asserts, is to change where you work and live. She looks to high achievers such as Taylor Swift and the Olympic swimmer Léon Marchand who, as teen-agers, moved to different cities (Nashville, Tempe) so they could pursue their dreams among like-minded strivers. She cites studies suggesting that people who move to more walkable towns take more than a thousand additional steps per day. She and her husband made a move of this sort, from the suburbs of Philadelphia to a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood in the city. “We’ll move if priorities change again, and if, in a different place, getting what we want most out of life is easier,” she writes.
For all its attempts to disavow the cult of effort, “Situated” will likely rankle the same critics who accused “Grit” of advocating a crude bootstrap logic. “Very often, the greatest obstacle to getting situated has nothing to do with money or privilege or power,” Duckworth writes. “Rather, it’s assuming it can’t be done.” A major impediment to goal fulfillment, she contends, is “status quo bias,” our preference for things to stay the same. She cites David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, “This Is Water,” which opens with a parable in which a young fish is asked “How’s the water?” and replies, “What the hell is water?” The story, she argues, illustrates how difficult it is to practice “situational awareness,” the art of seeing how our environment, and other people, inflect our behavior. Duckworth peppers her book with aphorisms about the importance of collaboration and community: “the real hero’s journey is from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ ” Or: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” She also suggests that personal growth requires constantly uprooting oneself and challenges the common wisdom that you cannot run away from your problems. Duckworth considers this objection, but her response is tautological: “Wherever you go, there you are—so choose where you go wisely.”
This tautology arguably lies at the very heart of Duckworth’s book. If motivation is conditioned by environment, then all you have to do is change your situation to get what you want out of life. But the decision to change one’s environment is presumably itself subject to some previous desire. “A man can do what he will, but not will what he will,” Arthur Schopenhauer wrote. We can pursue our desires, in other words, but our desires themselves are shaped by our environment and our personal history—a problem that extends backward ad infinitum. Duckworth sees this recursiveness as a virtuous circle that can be harnessed to one’s advantage: change your situation, and you change your thoughts and desires—which changes your actions, leading to better situations, better thoughts and desires, and so on. This framework, which she calls a “flywheel,” is presented with utter authority and an accompanying diagram, and no acknowledgment that it can also work in reverse.
It’s hard to spend much time with “Situated” without sensing a sleight of hand. Although the book insists on the futility of will power, it offers a vision of human agency that is virtually omnipotent, capable of defying all obstacles—class, geography, milieu—and drafting peers into the supporting cast of one’s own heroic narrative. Duckworth calls it “situational agency.” In a 2024 interview, riffing on the famous line from William Henley’s poem “Invictus” (“I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul”), she offered a slight amendment to the poem’s message: “The seas that you decide to sail are part of your agency, too.”
Duckworth has said that her interest in situational agency stems from the story of her mother’s life, which she tells in the book’s epilogue. As a young woman coming of age in Taiwan, her mother was a talented painter, but she gave up art after immigrating to the United States and entering into an unhappy marriage with Duckworth’s father—who was “a bit of a tyrant,” per Duckworth. Her mother assumed that it was her duty to make her husband happy; rather than change her situation, she believed that “the only thing you can control is what’s inside your mind.” It wasn’t until the age of eighty-seven that she finally got a room of her own, in a senior-living community, where she has returned to painting. The story is meant to illustrate the psychic cost of trying to change yourself, rather than your circumstances, though it ends on a hopeful note: “It’s never too late to reimagine, and then reshape, your situation.”
It’s not the only story of an unhappy marriage in “Situated.” In the book’s most personal chapter, Duckworth writes about a crisis she and her husband, Jason, experienced almost two decades ago. Both were working demanding jobs while raising two daughters. On the brink of burnout, Duckworth announced that she was done with the marriage. Jason vowed to try harder, but she insisted they had both tried as hard as they could. Instead of separating, however, they asked for help from their parents and closest friends. They started going to therapy and adjusted their life style to include more sleep and exercise. Today, Jason refers to their marriage as his proudest accomplishment. Rather than willing themselves to try harder, they changed their relationship “from the outside in.”
It’s a powerful and engrossing story. Duckworth has said that she doesn’t see herself as a writer, but throughout her two books she draws on her personal life with the practiced vulnerability of a memoirist. Still, the story stands in stark relief to the book’s celebration of high achievers who uproot themselves. The reader is left to wonder: If your marriage is holding you back, shouldn’t you leave the situation? I suppose that a marriage vow counts as a commitment device, one of the few that are designed to last one’s entire life. The person who promises to love their spouse “for better or for worse” is not unlike Odysseus lashing himself to the mast, insuring that his future self complies with the commitment, despite the siren call of future desires.
Duckworth does not discuss the two marriage stories in tandem, but, taken together, they underscore the conceptual fuzziness of the “situation,” which Duckworth defines as “quite literally everyone and everything around you. All of it.” All of it? But then how do you know whether the problem is your marriage, as with Duckworth’s mother, or the conditions that inflect it, as with Duckworth? When is a relationship salvageable, and when is it time to jump ship?
For all its bluster about the futility of will power, what “Situated” is actually wary of is thinking. “Your thoughts matter, of course,” Duckworth reassures us, but, throughout the book, the mind is a middleman who can be cut out of the picture. She quotes William James on “the effortless custody of automatism” and invokes the usefulness of “neural autopilot.” When you use your situation to change behavior, she writes, “your brain eventually stops deliberating and starts automating.”
It’s true that those of us prone to compulsive behaviors can benefit from ignoring our thoughts in the crucible of temptation, a warning distilled in many twelve-step clichés. (“My best thinking got me here.”) That solution lands differently, however, when it comes to the ordinary friction that characterizes our relations with others. As I read “Situated,” my mind kept drifting back to the Thanksgiving-dinner scenario of the brother-in-law with cringey politics. Although Duckworth ultimately recommends the Box One solution, she admits that she initially found mental reappraisal (Box Two) compelling: “You could think about all the qualities you like about your brother-in-law. Or recall the favors he’s done for you in the past.”
This is, as it happens, precisely the kind of mental reorientation that Wallace recommends in “This Is Water,” which describes a situational awareness that differs significantly from Duckworth’s. His point is that the only way to avoid spiritual death amid the inevitable petty trials of adult life is to deliberately fight “the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world” and endeavor to see the whole picture. If you’re cut off in traffic, you can conclude that the person who’s inconvenienced you is just an asshole. Or you can consider the possible reasons for his behavior. He might be a father rushing his injured son to the hospital, in which case “it is actually I who am in HIS way.”
In social psychology, this failure to consider the situations of others is called the fundamental attribution error. Of course, the notion that self-interest clouds our perception of reality was not invented by modern psychology; it has a long lineage in philosophy and religion. “Since time immemorial, philosophers, coaches, and parents have advised looking within, not without, in order to succeed,” Duckworth notes. But she is suspicious and, at times, dismissive of this wisdom, which she sums up with familiar dictums, such as “Mind over matter.”
But mantras like “Mind over matter” connote a rigid approach that is quite different from the reflective, imaginative thinking that belongs to Box Two. In fact, it’s arguable that attention to one’s thoughts, and to their limitations, offers a more reliable alternative to brute effort when it comes to personal change. The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch argued that the slow, daily work of cultivating good attachments and trying to see reality clearly is more effective than will power. “At crucial moments of choice, most of the business of choosing is already over,” she writes, a conclusion that is echoed by Duckworth’s observation that will power attacks the problem “at the last possible moment.” For Murdoch, though, the solution was not to avoid difficult situations but to attune the mind to one’s higher values, combatting the predictable patterns of the “fat, relentless ego” that frequently obstruct self-transcendence.
“One is often compelled almost automatically by what one can see,” Murdoch writes in her 1970 essay “The Sovereignty of Good.” The work of a moral life, then, is to expand the field of vision. Murdoch considers a mother who finds her daughter-in-law uncouth but realizes one day that her judgment might be unfair. Perhaps her daughter-in-law is not vulgar but, rather, simple and spontaneous? It’s a small correction, one that happens entirely in the mind. But such choices about what to think about, what to attend to, cumulatively build the kind of character capable of acting in accordance with itself: “We act rightly ‘when the time comes’ not out of strength of will but out of the quality of our usual attachments.”
Murdoch was writing in the long shadow of behaviorism, at a time when science and philosophy had so thoroughly abandoned the inner life that she felt compelled to defend the seemingly obvious point that self-questioning constitutes a moral action—that the mother-in-law who labors to change her thoughts “has been doing something.” Duckworth would likely argue that situational awareness requires thinking, too: assessing one’s environment, taking stock of the external factors that prevent you from fulfilling your desires. What it does not ask you to do, however, is to question whether your desires are fair or just—or are even your own.
The problem of akrasia exists because humans, unlike other animals (or, at present, machines), have second-order volitions—the preference to have different preferences. This doubleness arises from “the capacity for reflective self-evaluation,” as the philosopher Harry Frankfurt puts it. For Frankfurt, as for Murdoch, the work of being human involves interrogating the motives and assumptions that guide our actions, asking whether our desires are truly desirable. To refuse this work is to be a “wanton,” he argues, someone who is less a person than an animal—or, one might add, like an algorithm following a script. It is to fall prey to an older form of bondage, one that he Stoics called stultitia (“fickleness and boredom and a continual shifting of purpose,” as Seneca put it) and that Buddhists refer to as samsara, an endless cycle of craving and restlessness that is never satisfied.
Self-interrogation, of course, is often unpleasant and is not a prescription that is likely to sell many books. But the alternative—the freedom to perpetually abandon difficult circumstances—is, in the long run, the more wearying path. One could argue, in fact, that the current popularity of self-binding is a response to the anxiety and exhaustion many of us feel amid the relentless invitations to reimagine our lives. We have more opportunities than ever to eject ourselves from trying situations. Peers can be unfriended; politicians can be unfollowed. Marriages are easily dissolved, and jobs are no longer meant to last your entire life. The ropes that tie us to the mast are made of straw. Although Duckworth presents situational agency as a revolutionary form of self-mastery, it may be another instance of status-quo bias, cleverly disguised. It is simply the water in which we swim. ♦