What the weak-willed lack in discipline, they make up for in ingenuity. Although the story of Odysseus binding himself to the mast to resist the Sirens’ song may belong to the mythical imagination, plenty of desperate souls have gone to heroic lengths to obstruct their wayward desires. Plutarch claims that Demosthenes shaved half his head so that he’d be too ashamed to leave his study in search of distraction. Twenty-four centuries later, Jonathan Franzen destroyed his laptop’s Ethernet port so he wouldn’t be tempted to go online. “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT,” the artist Jenny Holzer once blazoned over Times Square, articulating a self-alienation recognizable to anyone who has downloaded a focus app or taken a dose of Antabuse before meeting friends at a bar. Casinos offer voluntary self-exclusion programs for compulsive gamblers; birth plans allow devotees of natural labor to deny their future selves an epidural. The activist Zelda Gamson kicked a nicotine addiction by swearing that if she smoked another cigarette she’d donate five thousand dollars to the Ku Klux Klan.
These self-binding tactics, sometimes known as “Ulysses pacts” or “commitment devices,” attempt to solve what ancient Greek philosophers called akrasia, the baffling human tendency to act contrary to our higher aspirations. If the resolutions you make in a “cool” state cannot survive the “hot” state of desire, there are any number of hacks—physical barriers, peer pressure—that can keep you from succumbing, or help you avoid the battle entirely. So contends Angela Duckworth in her new book, “Situated,” which promises the secret to conquering temptation “without willpower.” Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies self-control, believes we put far too much stock in brute effort; success and personal growth largely depend on the “situation” we inhabit—our community, our associates, the spaces in which we work and live. While the book offers many tips about how to trick yourself into sticking with your goals, it ultimately advocates a far more extensive form of self-binding, arguing that it’s possible to strategically engineer one’s entire life so as to make success more likely, without struggle. “Of all the ways you can change your behavior,” she writes, “willpower is the absolute worst.”
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This conclusion will likely confound anyone familiar with Duckworth’s previous work. For the past two decades, her name has been synonymous with “grit,” a concept she began writing about in 2007, then popularized in her 2016 best-seller, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.” “Grit” is essentially will power sustained over time; Duckworth researched high achievers and found that it was a better indicator of success than I.Q. and was a skill that could be learned. The term caught fire among school reformers and earned her a MacArthur “genius” grant. Duckworth also faced backlash from critics who argued that her message was, at best, a series of hollow exhortations to simply try harder and, at worst, an insidious form of victim-blaming that ignored structural inequality. (As one lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education put it, in 2015, “Grittiness is often situational.”)
High-profile authors are obviously under pressure to offer novel frameworks, but rarely do these second acts feel like an about-face. Duckworth insists that “Situated” is not a reversal but an expansion of her earlier research; as an account of individual success, grit is “necessary but not sufficient,” and must be complemented by the larger picture. That explanation turns out to be tenuous, but, in its attempt to address the problem of conflicting desires, “Situated” reveals some of the paradoxes inherent in the prevailing beliefs about will power and self-control.
While “grit” may be the most enduring buzzword of its era, Duckworth was one of many popular psychologists in the aughts and twenty-tens who argued that it was possible to white-knuckle your way to success. Roy Baumeister’s “ego-depletion theory” posited that will power was a muscle you could strengthen; Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” maintained that personal success came down to positive self-talk, a conclusion in tune with the relentless work ethic of the gig economy, sometimes called the “grindset.” These theories and other will-power research ran into replication difficulties a decade ago. The grit literature failed to replicate in a 2017 meta-analysis, which found that the effects of grit were exaggerated and that the concept was nearly identical to “conscientiousness,” one of the Big Five personality traits that psychologists have studied for decades and that are widely thought to be fixed. Duckworth acknowledged that this critique was valid and said she aspires “to be a scientist who remains open to criticism.”
In the years since grit’s heyday, much of American culture has succumbed to a state of emotional and spiritual defeat. The A.I. tools that promised to lighten workloads have intensified many jobs while eliminating others; the chaos of two Donald Trump Administrations and a global pandemic have engendered various neologisms for exhaustion (“coasting culture,” “quiet quitting”). At a moment when “doing nothing” has become a form of resistance, the skepticism about muscling through marks a discernible vibe shift—or perhaps a generational passing of the baton, the Gen X “Just Do It” ceding to the millennial “I can’t even.”
In recent years, a flurry of popular psychology books—including James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” and Benjamin Hardy’s “Willpower Doesn’t Work”—have dismissed will power as ineffective and looked instead at how environmental cues influence decision-making. Duckworth, meanwhile, has been co-authoring papers with titles like “Beyond Willpower,” and proposing complementary strategies drawn from choice architecture and nudge theory, friendly rebrands of social engineering. She now co-directs the Behavior Change for Good Initiative (B.C.F.G.) at the Wharton School, which partners with major corporations to study, for example, whether e-mail reminders can get bank customers to save more. Cass Sunstein, an originator of nudge theory and a colleague of Duckworth’s at B.C.F.G., has argued that people are, by default, “somewhat mindless, passive decision-makers,” and that corporations and governments should design environments that prod them, sometimes unconsciously, toward better choices.
In “Situated,” Duckworth claims that individuals can harness these techniques to achieve personal goals—that it’s possible to “nudge thyself.” “Want to read more books? Keep books on your nightstand,” she writes. “Watch less TV? Cancel a streaming subscription.” In short, if you’re the kind of person who would fail the marshmallow test, don’t keep marshmallows in the house. Since “Grit,” Duckworth writes, “my curiosity has taken me from what goes on inside the minds of high achievers to everything and everyone around them.” The foundation of this new focus is the three-box model, a “revolutionary” framework on which she collaborated with the Stanford psychologist James Gross: the first box is the “situation,” the objective circumstances you find yourself in; the second box represents “thoughts,” or how you mentally appraise your situation; the third box is your “response,” the emotions and actions that flow from the previous two boxes.
Imagine you’re at Thanksgiving dinner and your brother-in-law starts spouting opinions you find objectionable. It’s almost impossible, Duckworth argues, to will yourself not to feel anger—that is, to change your emotional response (Box Three). It might be more effective to change your thinking (Box Two) by mentally reframing the situation. “Instead of thinking, My brother-in-law is an idiot,” Duckworth writes, “you might consider, I don’t have the same view. What does he see that I don’t?” But the best strategy is an earlier intervention: