The big idea: should you blame yourself for your bad habits?
In the 1960s the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel devised a way to measure self-control in four-year-olds. He would leave the preschoolers alone in a room with a plate of marshmallows and a challenge: they could eat one marshmallow right away, or wait until the adult returned and eat two. In the decades that followed, he noticed something interesting. The four-yearolds who had waited for the two marshmallows did better at school, were less likely to take drugs or end up in jail, were happier and earned more. He came to believe that self-control, the ability to delay gratification, was the key to success.
More recently, however, psychologists have challenged his findings. Mischel’s original studies followed fewer than 90 children, all of whom were enrolled in the same nursery. Once you start studying bigger and more diverse groups, a different pattern emerges: it is wealthier children who are better able to resist the marshmallow. That’s partly because they are more likely to trust that they really will get two marshmallows if they wait. It’s also because our ability to resist temptation is shaped by our environment in complex and under-recognised ways. Basically: we’re not fully in control of our self-control.
If pushed, most people would accept that luck has played a big role in their life. You had no say over where you were born, whether your parents were loving or abusive, rich or poor. You didn’t choose your talents or personal attributes, your musical gifts or physical attractiveness. What you may take responsibility for, however, is how you played the hand you were dealt, whether you squandered your early advantages or thrived against the odds. And yet, even your capacity for perseverance, your grit and willpower, are shaped by forces well beyond your control. A recent twin study suggested that your genes play a big role in determining your level of self-control. And that’s before you consider the influence of social status, upbringing and income, because childhood adversity,
discrimination, stress, exhaustion and hunger all affect activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that is activated when we try to do the right, hardest thing. If that’s the case, how responsible should we feel for our lapses in willpower?
Environmental influence isn’t just about childhood, of course. Consider weight loss. About half of adults in the UK say that they are usually trying to lose weight, and the chances are they’re fighting a losing battle. But expanding waistlines in much of the world don’t reflect a collective loss of discipline so much as the consequences of the modern western diet, sedentary lifestyles and the rise in ultra-processed foods that are designed to hijack your appetite. Companies know the secrets to making junk food “hyperpalatable”. They know we can’t resist food that has a similar carb-to-fat ratio as breastmilk, that we don’t even notice we’re overeating when food is so soft it barely needs chewing. It’s expecting a lot of yourself to resist a multibillion-pound global industry with a vested interest in stoking your hunger.
Much of the modern world has been deliberately engineered to tap into our reward systems, making temptation ubiquitous and harder to resist. If you can’t seem to focus at work because you keep wasting time on social media or getting distracted by WhatsApp notifications, consider that your phone was designed to be addictive: it was built to capture your attention. “There are a thousand people on the other side of your screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation that you have,” the tech ethicist Tristan Harris observed. If you can’t stick to your budget and keep buying pointless stuff, think of how many adverts you encounter daily, how often a new one will pop up on your computer screen, targeted specifically to your tastes.
None of this suggests that you should give up on giving up bad habits or abandon any attempts at self-discipline. We’d be miserable, unhealthy and ethically compromised if we resigned ourselves to having no say in how we behave. Instead, it may help to think about willpower differently. Research suggests that the people we tend to admire for their self-control actually have to exercise it less frequently. They are good at engineering their environment so that they don’t need to wrestle with temptation: they know, for example, that it’s easier to not buy a packet of biscuits than to stop eating after you’ve opened the packet, and they are good at building healthy habits and routines.
They are also better at understanding their own motivations. When you find yourself apathetic at work, is it because you’re unable to resist distractions? Or is it because you don’t want to do your job any more? One study linked self-control to the pursuit of goals that you value and enjoy – “wanting to do it” rather than “having to do it”. In other words, if you really want to excel at self-mastery, try to avoid ending up in the same situation as Mischel’s poor preschoolers, staring down a plateful of marshmallows and wondering why you have to play this stupid game anyway.
Further Reading
Determined: Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky (Vintage, £22)
Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … And Why Can’t We Stop? by Chris van Tulleken (Cornerstone, £22)
Irresistible: Why You Are Addicted to Technology and How to Set Yourself Free by Adam Alter (Vintage, £9.99)
The modern world has been engineered to tap into our reward systems, making temptation ubiquitous and harder to resist
toxic waste.”
She describes his recent appearance in front of the judiciary committee of the Senate, also attended by parents who had lost their children to suicide after horrific experiences online. “They were there,” Swisher tells me, “and they had pictures of their kids. They held them up, these photographs. I saw him look at the entire group. And you could see – like: ‘Oh my God.’ But he couldn’t bring himself to apologise directly. He had to say: ‘I’m sorry for what was done to you.’ And that’s not an apology. I don’t know what that is.” She pauses. “It’s an acknowledgment of pain.”
What does that say about him? “It says he still can’t take responsibility. You could see in his eyes that he was just like: ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’” He could see the impact. But he couldn’t say: ‘I’m sorry.’ They were saying: ‘Things you did directly, decisions you made, helped kill my child.’ And he couldn’t address that. It’s so passive.”
Meta’s president of global affairs, let us not forget, is the former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg. Has she had any dealings with him? “Yes. Of course. Nick.
Smoothie Nick. I’ve never interviewed him: he won’t give me an interview because he’s smart. I just feel like: ‘Do you believe anything you’re saying?’ I don’t know. He’s such a pretty sayer of things. I’m sort of like: ‘What do you actually believe in here? What is your goal?’ That’s what I often think of with him.”
In the book, Swisher says Zuckerberg is “the most damaging man in tech”. Elon Musk, by contrast, is maligned as the “most disappointing”, which reflects Swisher’s long period of thinking of the founder of Tesla and SpaceX as one of the tech industry’s most promising sons. In 2016, she contacted him ahead of the big meeting with Trump, warning that the president-elect would “screw” him; two years later, Musk told her she had been right. All told, she seemed to believe that he operated on a higher level than most of his peers.
“Here’s someone who actually was doing serious things,” she says. “There’s a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are always doing a dry cleaning app. He was thinking of everything from cars to space to solar. Even the silly stuff like [his imagined high-speed transport system] Hyperloop: what a great idea.
What an interesting idea.” She also mentions Neuralink, the venture working on computer interfaces that can be implanted in people’s brains. “How could we upgrade our intelligence? That’s a big, fascinating problem.”
Initially, she thought his ownership of X would be a good thing: “He used the product and he understood it. And he’s a guy who got things done.” But then came a rupture: in October 2022, she tweeted about a Washington Post article that questioned his work on the satellite-based internet system Starlink, and he emailed her the eloquent words: “You’re an asshole.” Soon after, he began opening X up to the kind of far-right voices that had been banned, and plunging into conspiracy theories – as she puts it, “going off the rails every day of the week and twice on Sunday”.
She says she is saddened by all this. “The drug that’s hurting Elon Musk is all his enablers, who suck up to him. And needing to be adored. That’ll kill you.” And she watched it happen, tweet by tweet: “You could see him getting more and more radicalised. He suddenly got obsessed with the woke mind virus, whatever the hell that is, and angry all the time.”
Given its huge financial problems, does she think X will eventually fold? “Why would it? He’s the world’s richest man. It’s like having a mega-yacht: it’s expensive, but he’s got the money to keep it up. And they’ll give him loans … so it will only go down when he decides to stop paying for it.”
Does he think he will? “No! I think he loves it. He desperately needs attention. Trump is running for president because he desperately needs attention, among other things. And Musk really needs attention. If he owns X, he becomes quantumly more interesting to people across the globe.”
Which brings us to one of the biggest questions of all. As that summit with the titans of Big Tech proved, Trump is arguably the quintessential politician of the internet age. Whether Musk explicitly supports him or not, X’s reshaping as something of a right-wing hellscape will be a sizable help to his re-election campaign. Come November, does Swisher think he’ll win?
“No. No. This is where I believe in the American people. There’s an angry strain through the American experience that’s never left us. We’re an angry people, in many ways. But we’re also hopeful people. And people have had enough of him, especially women.
“They’re tired of being groped. They’re tired of being cheated. They’re tired of loudmouths. Biden is not the ideal candidate, but he’s a decent man and he’s done a lot of stuff, and it will sink in enough to get rid of Trump.”
Swisher has not spent the last 90 minutes mincing her words, and so it proves again. “He might be in jail, and I hope he is,” she says. “I hope they put him away and throw away the key.”
Burn Book by Kara Swisher (Piatkus, £25) is out now.To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
The Google guys always had strange clothes, said odd things to you and wandered away