A Whole Field of Psychology Research May Be Bunk. Scientists Should Be Terrified. →

Yikes. I don’t quite know where to begin on this one. 

It’s scary for me because a lot of my theories on behavior change on this blog rest upon Baumeister and his experiments. The idea of conservation of willpower, of working on habits individually, lowering thresholds of willpower in order to facilitate habituation with Bj Fogg’s Tiny Habits….

As the article says (despite the sensational title) it could be that his theories are still correct. But we don’t know yet based on this problem with reproducibility in psychology.

The chance that it might be wrong can also be quite freeing - if willpower isn’t depleteable or acts differently than I thought it does, it could open the gateway for change that’s much more rapid. Rather than working on one or two habits, I could work on a dozen.

But my initial hunch is that it is true, at least with respect with willpower across times. This whole project started with the question - how come highly motivated people aren’t good at more than one thing? Baumeister’s theories explain this pretty well.

Also, every single time I’ve bitten off more than I could chew my entire project fell a part. I’ve never been good at doing things long term for myself even when I was in very structured conditions, even when I didn’t assume that willpower was depleteable. And this project has allowed me to concretely change this based on this theory.

I guess we’ll just have to see.

Day 665 & New Eating Habit

Day 665 Record Keeping (81)
Day 634 Fixed Meditation
Day 511 Writing (81)
Day 51 Rowing (79)
Day 1 Eating (19)
Good sleep, good wakeup. 

New Eating Habit
My eating habit has been on it’s last legs for a long time so I decided to destroy it. I talked about a reimplementation recently and did a test run last week.

What I found was that it solved issues regarding decision fatigue. And I’m focusing on my SRHI index referring to specifically my first shelf - “automatically eating a clean meal right after recording” - as evidenced in my score it’s no where near any sort of automaticity. I’m recording this habit for the previous days actions, as this fits neatly in my daily schedule of tasks.

But what I’m realizing is that automaticity really depends on a crisp, clear, if-then and a Tiny Habit. It worked (is working) for rowing and it’s definitely working for my writing habit - which should be more correctly described as a Writing/Work habit.

In it I’m pushing specific tasks I find incredibly difficult, but I’m being very attentive to when I do the task (after I drink a glass of water after my rowing) and the tinyness of the habit (30 minutes). I’ve been shocking myself at how much I’ve been getting done over the course of a week with very little anxiety - this is usually the amount I get done after screaming at the computer and tiring myself over the course of full days.

I’m hoping that breaking up eating into little tiny bits will be a more long term solution.

The Imagination Institute

I randomly came across this and wondered…”what in the world is an imagination institute?” - The Imagination Institute’s mission is “measurement, growth, and improvement of imagination across all sectors of society”. 

What interested me is their grants competition which seeks to “lay the foundation for the long-term development of an “Imagination Quotient” and how to build imagination.” 

This sounds an awful like what this project is seeking to do with habits and self improvement in general. It joins other groups like Duckworth’s lab for grit and other labs for habituation (like BJ Fogg’s TinyHabit program) in attempting to quantify and measure what were previously thought of as vagaries of the mind.

I love it. But unlike habit formation, their grants are being offered from $150,000 - $200,000!!! Up to 15 of them!

I suppose imagination is a sexier idea than habit formation, because I don’t see that much money being offered up to habit researchers. Though Duckworth did get a MacArthur “Genius” Grant…..I wonder if I could apply for a grant?

Hmm….