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Willpower is certainly a useful thing to have and in everyday life — this often means overcoming temptation.
But many of us fall short on willpower at least some of the time — but mostly very often. However, the term may be misleading because researchers think of will power in different ways.
There’s one way which is just don’t eat that extra chocolate bar, scoff the dessert, eat the bag of crisps (chips for the rest of the world), or get out for a run in the cold rain. That is what researchers call synchronic regulation.
The other approach is to do what Odysseus did in Homer’s Epic: to get his sailors to strap him to the mast so that he couldn’t be overcome, or better respond, to the Sirens song. This therefore involves changing the environment or creating new habits to avoid temptation in the first place. This is known as diachronic regulation.
Zachary Irving et al. of Rutgers University wanted to know how normal folk view willpower or emotional regulation. They conducted a series of experiments whereby respondents had to judge a person’s actions and the scenarios describe either synchronic or diachronic regulation or a mixture of both.
They found out that we normally only consider synchronic regulation as willpower - that is just resist the temptation through pure force of will. This is interesting…
