The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,374

age constant, people are more reckless when they have fewer years of unlived life at risk. A rational adjustment of one’s discounting rate in response to the uncertainty of the environment could create a vicious circle, since your own recklessness then figures into the discounting rate of everyone else. The Matthew Effect, in which everything seems to go right in some societies and wrong in others, could be a consequence of environmental uncertainty and psychological recklessness feeding on each other.

A fourth way people in a society might boost their self-control is by improving their nutrition, sobriety, and health. The frontal lobe is a big slab of metabolically demanding tissue with an outsize appetite for glucose and other nutrients. Pushing the metaphor of self-control as physical effort even further, Baumeister found that people’s blood glucose level plummets as their ego is depleted by an attention-consuming or a willpower-demanding task.121 And if they replenish their glucose level by drinking a glass of sugar-sweetened lemonade (but not a glass of aspartame-sweetened lemonade), they avoid the usual slump in the follow-up task. It is not implausible to suppose that real-world conditions that impair the frontal lobes—low blood sugar, drunkenness, druggedness, parasite load, and deficiencies of vitamins and minerals—could sap the self-control of people in an impoverished society and leave them more prone to impulsive violence. Several placebo-controlled studies have suggested that providing prisoners with dietary supplements can reduce their rate of impulsive violence.122

Baumeister stretched the metaphor even farther. If willpower is like a muscle that fatigues with use, drains the body of energy, and can be revived by a sugary pick-me-up, can it also be bulked up by exercise? Can people develop their raw strength of will by repeatedly flexing their determination and resolve? The metaphor shouldn’t be taken too literally—it’s unlikely that the frontal lobes literally gain tissue like bulging biceps—but it’s possible that the neural connections between the cortex and limbic system may be strengthened with practice. It’s also possible that people can learn strategies of self-control, enjoy the feeling of mastery over their impulses, and transfer their newfound tricks of discipline from one part of their behavioral repertoire to another.

Baumeister and other psychologists tested the exercise metaphor by having participants undertake regimens of self-control for several weeks or months before taking part in one of their ego depletion studies.123 In various studies the regimens required them to keep track of every piece of food they ate; enroll in programs of physical exercise, money management, or study skills; use their nonpreferred hand for everyday tasks like brushing their teeth and using a computer mouse; and one that really gave the students’ self-control a workout: avoid curse words, speak in complete sentences, and not begin sentences with I. After several weeks of this cross-training, the students indeed turned out to be more resistant to ego depletion tasks in the lab, and they also showed greater self-control in their lives. They smoked fewer cigarettes, drank less alcohol, ate less junk food, spent less money, watched less television, studied more, and washed the dishes more often rather than leaving them in the sink. Score another point for Elias’s conjecture that self-control in life’s little routines can become second nature and be generalized to the rest of one’s comportment.

In addition to being modulated by Ulyssean constraints, cognitive reframing, an adjustable internal discount rate, improvements in nutrition, and the equivalent of muscle gain with exercise, self-control might be at the mercy of whims in fashion.124 In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch. In others it is jeered at as uptight, prudish, stuffy, straitlaced, puritanical. Certainly the crime-prone 1960s were the recent era that most glorified the relaxation of self-control: Do your own thing, Let it all hang out, If it feels good do it, Take a walk on the wild side. The premium on self-indulgence is on full display in concert films from the decade, which show rock musicians working so hard to outdo each other in impulsiveness that it looks as if they put a lot of planning and effort into their spontaneity.

Could these six pathways to self-control proliferate among the members of a society and come to define its global character? That would be the final domino in the chain of explanation that makes up the theory of the Civilizing Process. The exogenous first domino is a change in law enforcement and opportunities for economic cooperation that objectively