Two Minds Blog

Did you know that you can subscribe to the Two Minds Blog? Just click on the button with 3 horizontal bars at the upper right, enter your email address, and click the "get email notifications" button. Then you will get an email whenever a new blog entry is posted. You can also copy this address  https://twomindstheory.blogspot.com, and post it into your favorite news reader program -- anything that accepts an RSS feed. OK, enough procrastinating ... on to today's topic: I wrote my dissertation on procrastination (yes, I got it done on time). In that study we worked with college students who identified themselves as procrastinators in doing their schoolwork. Procrastinators are an interesting example of the intention-behavior gap: They experience negative consequences like bad grades as a result of their own behavior, they are well aware that their own behavior is getting in their way, and yet they continue to waste time instead of studying. Many people becom...

Do you ever imagine yourself in some extreme situation and wonder how you will react? Most of us will never find ourselves at the scene of a crime. Many people trained in CPR are never called on to actually use it. Being lost in the wilderness is, these days, quite rare. But a friend recently related an interesting story about an experience where he was in some danger of drowning, and it has a useful lesson about how people tend to react in a crisis, including health crises. There are two important pieces of background information from my friend’s childhood: First, he never learned how to swim. Second, he had very bad asthma as a child. The two may have been related to one another: Children with asthma in the 1970s had fewer treatment options, and therefore much more often had the experience of not being able to breathe. They were also routinely advised not to do anything too strenuous (like swimming), for fear of provoking an uncontrolled asthma attack. When an attack did occur, ...

“Willpower” means exerting conscious effort to perform (or avoid) a particular behavior. The concept of “willpower” is an older one more linked to moral frameworks than to scientific ones, but it fits with most people’s experiential reality of behavior change – they want to change (or at least wish they wanted to change), and they have difficulty doing so. But from the perspective of Two Minds Theory, willpower is a construct that may not actually exist. One recent line of study has found substantial correlations between willpower and blood glucose: Researchers Matthew Gailliot and Roy Baumeister started from the experientially derived premise that willpower seems to be a limited resource (similar to attention , as described in our previous blog post). A limited resource, they argued, implies an energy source that gets used up, is higher or lower at various points in time, and can be replenished in some way. They thought that glucose would be a logical candidate as the body's ...