It’s just like decision fatigue: your capacity for it diminishes the more you use it (within a given time range).
Instead, carefully curate your identity . This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”
The way I like to think of it is that it's possible to have willpower when I'm feeling strong and only have to make a big decision once - what's really hard is having to use that willpower over and over.
Thus, I've always felt it's better to change your environment than trying to improve your willpower. For example, I got a ton of exercise when I lived in a city when the most convenient thing to do was walk everywhere or take public transportation. When I moved out to the suburbs, I tried to force myself to walk more, but it never really worked. Driving was just by far the easier "default" way of getting places in the 'burbs.
The way I think of it is to try to set things up so you don't have to use willpower in the first place.
Buying groceries when you’re feeling good, and changing your route through the store to groom yourself for success instead of failure, are common, effective bits of advice for weight loss and healthy eating. Most of the garbage really is in the middle of the store, and I imagine myself diving into deep water to grab ketchup, soup, flour. Get in, get out, no sightseeing.
Online delivery unfortunately makes it almost impossible to ‘pick an aisle’, as you’re going to get exposed to dark patterns and ads constantly while interacting with the site.
You also can’t actually see what you’re buying (or feel/touch the actual box), which greatly increases the odds of catching shenanigans.
Behavioral economics is ‘white hat’. Influencing (in the actual definition). Figuring out how to get them something that actually does benefit them, and modifying the environment or ‘nudging’ the target to encourage it.
Dark patterns is when the actual long (or short) term benefit of the ‘target’ is not a meaningful part of the goal, and the only consideration given is just a given result for the person with the power. Aka manipulation.
Helping someone looking for an off-road vehicle (because they actually need it), your off-road vehicle which is a pretty good one, is behavioral economics.
Using the same tactics to get the exact same someone to buy your luxury car is dark patterns.
Notably, a con artist/fraud is the criminal face of it - since they never even give the target a car at all, but take their money.
The difference between influence and manipulation is the consideration of the actual well being of the target, and the degree of autonomy allowed the target.
Needless to say, this is also the first thing miscreants start deluding themselves and others on when they start getting predatory.
So it’s a very dangerous area to be in for anyone who actually values ethics/morals.
Hard to disagree with them at some level, but putting toothpaste next to the sweets (or advertising how great your toothpaste in general is) feels pretty different from random online ads calling people’s dicks small to sell enlargement pills or making fun of someone’s makeup to sell a glow up (yes, very much a thing).
The head of UI at Homegrocer was a friend of a friend when they were at their peak, and I was in the middle of my second affair with UX, so we occasionally talked.
He told me he was getting pressure to incorporate dark patterns (though that phrase hadn’t made the rounds at the time) into the site design to get people to do more impulse buying.
According to the article "hundreds" of experiments showed an effect. Then it goes on to talk about the reproducibility crisis, but in this case it has been reproduced, no? At least, that's what the article itself says.
Link to actual debunk study is dead, but "it now appears that ego depletion could be completely bogus" seems too strong. Certainly in my own experience something like ego depletion is very real – maybe not exactly as described, but you do run out of bandwidth at some point, so to speak. One of the reasons this is hard to verify experimentally is that, in my personal experience, everything is fine up to a point, after which it all breaks down. You can't easily re-create that in an experiment.
The Wikipedia page has a pretty good rundown on the criticism and existing studies. From my understanding, it isn’t clear that the studies that have been done indicate any depletion effect at all.
Anyone can make a decision without much thought, which most humans do at every moment of their existence.
Making informed decisions takes conscious thought, much less keeping the decisions equally informed. There's only so much of that you can do and humans are particularly bad at recognizing the subtle decline in quality of thought.
> Instead, carefully curate your identity . This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”
Interesting but orthogonal to the article.
The article: "I am the kind of person who has changed my environment such that doing x is inconvenient enough that I can avoid it most of the time without having to use much willpower."
It’s not always possible to change your environment. In the most difficult scenarios, you will actually have very little control over your environment. But it’s still possible to overcome a challenge, without simply trying to willpower your way through it.
> Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”
We are rarely who we really want to be. Yet, here we are. I’ve been trained, literally since infancy, to obey bedtime, but I’m writing this response an hour past my bedtime.
I think there's slight a difference there. Compare these two:
You: I’ve been trained to obey bedtime
Proposed: I'm a person that obeys bedtime
What I'm getting at here is that while you seem to think you _should do_ it, you don't actually think about yourself as someone that does do it. Which makes sense because it's true, but I think the suggestion is to lie to yourself, just a little.
No. Changing your identity is much more powerful and sort of operates in a background process whereas willpower is more of a conscious foreground one and very difficult to sustain long term.
Read the book. It goes into some detail.
I’ve worked with thousands of people personally over the years to help them with supposedly difficult to treat addictions for instance. Willpower is fine to start, but completely fails in the long term. Identity change is the only thing I’ve found that works long term.
Run a few test theories and see what resonates. Are you the kind of person who goes to the gym every day? Are you the kind of person who works on their hobbies at night? Are you the kind of person who binges Netflix between dinner and bed? Are you the person who cooks dinner from scratch, or orders takeout at every chance? etc. I think of them a bit like stereotypes but applied to myself, and see if I think I fit.
It’s not supposed to be descriptive in this case, unless it’s a reflection or self-assessment. For goals, it’s supposed to be aspirational, like a vision you cultivate for yourself. You can meditate on that self-image, or identify other people with that trait and associate yourself with them, etc. The idea is that you will violate your sense of self by acting against how you expect yourself to be.
For years, I was "a person who liked to ride my bike 300+ miles in a day". Then one day I realized that was a lie, or at least only a half-truth. Then I realized that most of why I did it was that I liked to keep in shape, and to eat a lot.
It's more like discipline. You don't do something because you decide to become a person who just doesn't do that thing. It becomes part of your identity, rather than a decision you have to continuously make.
Instead, carefully curate your identity . This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”