Need More Self-Control? Try a Simple Ritual | Hacker News Reader

Need More Self-Control? Try a Simple Ritual

scientificamerican.com

212 pointsyarapavan94 comments

Let's look at the first experiment.

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Enacting%20Ri...

Voluntary enrollment, knowing in advance that they have to do this stupid ritual. ~10% dropped out, and another ~20% didn't fill out their food diaries properly. That's selecting for discipline.

Relied on self-reported food diaries ie opening room for placebo effect and/or guilt-motivated lying.

Only lasted 5 days. Pretty much every dietary intervention works for short periods of time.

Relies on calorie-counting, which is wildly inaccurate.

Finally:

> Despite the effectiveness of rituals, participants tended to think the ritual was not very helpful and reported being unlikely to continue it.

I think it's pretty plausible that rituals can have useful effects on behavior, but I don't think experiments like this tell us anything about it, especially once you add in the effects of publication bias etc.

Comes back to http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.392...

> Null hypothesis testing of correlational predictions from weak substantive theories in soft psychology is subject to the influence of ten obfuscating factors whose effects are usually (1) sizeable, (2) opposed, (3) variable, and (4) unknown. The net epistemic effect of these ten obfuscating influences is that the usual research literature review is well-nigh uninterpretable.

And an unknown number of participants most likely self-reported incorrect information. People don't like admitting they didn't do something that was asked of them.

Self-reported data is shaky data at best and basing scientific results on it makes the science shaky at best.

> Relies on calorie-counting, which is wildly inaccurate.

Some sources on this? (not that I doubt you, it's just that you probably have better references than a quick search might bring up)

Also, if it's inaccurate, what's the alternative?

People are really bad at estimating portion sizes - https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/35/4/727/4812...

Calories in food vary depending on how it is prepared - https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/5283945/Carmody_...

Calories reported on food labels are often incorrect, because we digest some foods poorly and (because food companies are allowed to use multiple methods and report whichever result suits them best) - http://www2.centralcatholichs.com/copied%20articles%20to%20r...

Individual calorie absorption varies between people depending on gut biome - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steven_Heymsfield/publi...

> Also, if it's inaccurate, what's the alternative?

Depends on what you're doing with it. For dieting, counting calories is probably better than not counting calories [citation needed].

For a non-preregistered non-blinded experiment testing an intervention with small effect sizes on a measure where people are known to be bad at self-reporting, well, you're already screwed. There are more direct methods of measurement (eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233774/) but they are costly.

It's inaccurate because people tend to be biased towards under-counting their own calories. However, calorie counting is very effective -- knowing the absolute number of calories you consume is not that important, as long as the reported amount consistently decreases over time.

Calorie counting diet helps by forcing you to stop and look at the food before you eat it, so you end up eating less compulsively.

Another way to eat less is to reduce unjustified feeling of hunger, which is often time produced by a sugar crash, specifically a vicious cycle of crash-gorge-crash that’s promoted by sugary foods. If you exclude all sugar and bread from your diet, the appetite will stabilize and you will only ever eat as much as you need, no self control required.

The difficult part of this diet is that pretty much all prepared foods have tons of sugar and bread is also all over the place. The other difficulty is that sugar is addictive, so it takes a few weeks before you stop craving it.

Despite your many reasons to discount the first experiment, their conclusion over six separate experiments is more or less the same as yours: "it's plausible that rituals can have useful effects on behavior" vs "Our body of evidence suggests that rituals can have beneficial consequences for self-control."

What evidence is there that people in this study might have been lying?

I think it's interesting that you completely dismiss calorie counting, which is the only long term strategy that I've seen work consistently for myself & others for weight loss. Why do you say it's wildly inaccurate? How inaccurate is wildly? How accurate does it need to be in order to work?

Calorie counting can be wildly inaccurate while still producing the desired effect of weight loss. It probably has more to do with mindful consumption of food than getting the numbers exactly right.

> What evidence is there that people in this study might have been lying?

People tend to systematically misreport food intake (eg https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/133/3/895S/4688054).

People are really bad at estimating portion sizes (eg https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/35/4/727/4812...).

If you run a non-blinded experiment using a self-reported measure that is well known to be wildly misreported and only get a small effect size to boot, it's on you to prove that you actually affected behavior and not just reporting.

I totally buy both of those claims (and thanks for the sources!), but I don’t see how that necessarily affects this study. The human bias is (unsurprisingly) toward under-reporting consumption in both studies you cite. People aren’t randomly inaccurate, they are consistently underestimating. The self control study showed a decrease in reported consumption, so it doesn’t matter if people under-report food intake or portion sizes, what matters is the numbers went down anyway, right? The bias is present before, during, and after the self control study.

> So, we reasoned, when we see ourselves engaging in a ritual, we code that behavior as a sign that we are people with self-control. And thanks to that self-control, we choose the apple (or carrot) over the chocolate and thus reduce our caloric intake.

This is interesting. If I'm understanding the article, the path to applying self-control is to first start viewing ourselves as someone who has self-control. The ritual is merely a trigger to remind ourselves of the identity we've chosen, and then subconsciously we tend to line up our actions with how we view ourselves.

Or maybe it just makes you more aware that you're about to eat something, and instead of mindlessly swallowing that snack you engage the decision-making part of the brain, which leads to actually making the eating a decision, rather than an impulse.

That seems to be part of it since the random gestures group also exhibited better self control than the control “no requirements” group. But the group with an established ritual exhibited even more self control indicating that having a fixed ritual adds something beyond what can be achieved through actions that are random.

So in the words of Vonnegut, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

Someone once said, "You can't think yourself into right action; you have to act your way into right thinking."

Because that sounds good and makes some sense to me, I choose to consider it acquired wisdom that I can draw psychological sustenance from with loose regard to its veracity.

In a Philosophize This! podcast on Kant I learned that he was extremely consistent in his routines. Every day he would walk at the same time, eat at the same time, etc. Not exactly the same as rituals, but it finally got me to consider that perhaps consistent routines every day would help me essentially slip into other creative, productive habits via auto-pilot.

If you approach life as a physical system, regular rhythm is the most efficient way to save energy and avoid wearing. Predictable flow is probably very nice on your mind, body and ultimately everything else. And it seems biology tuned us to a lot of external rhythms too. Sun, seasons. I think using every period the best : day to move and work, night to sleep. It seems stupid but I think you end up leveraging a lot of builtins subsystems in you.

Seems like a reasonable hypothesis to me. Thanks for the perspective.

As a counterpoint, biological systems grow stronger when stressed then allowed to recover.

Routines are great when interspersed with periods of non-breaking stress. Growth is dependent on stress.

I refer to a more general term of stress, not necessarily psychological. Although the latter can make you a stronger/more empathetic person; the danger is in not being able to let go of them for the restoration/growth period.

totally, and I recently learned biology has a name for it: hormesis. I use to borrow Taleb's coined antifragile term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

We all know that we need stress/efforts to stay in shape (the weak bones of astronauts being a nice example). And it's indeed baked in us.

And by rhythm I didn't mean stress free. I meant having clear periods of a certain kind of stress (or the opposite). Basically, stress your system with all the subsystems ready for it, then allow them to rest in an appropriate context.

As a young adult (remains of teen spirit I guess) I prefered to attack everything at once in parallel. But when things get too complex I realized the value of going depth rather than breadth first. It's related, you do one thing fully, then stop entirely, instead of constantly feeding small amount of stress and never large enough amount of rest.

Agreed, what you say reflects my own growth as I've gotten older. I'm hesitant to call it wisdom, but it's served me better than the outlook from my youth.

However, eating the same dish everyday is not recommended.

I vaguely remember my high school philosophy teacher telling us that Kant had lived freely in his early years, he drank a lot, partied all the time. But after reaching a certain age, he arrived at the conclusion that he had a duty in the society, so he organized his life rigidly. He told his servant to wake him up very early every day at the same hour. He worked and ceased partying. He carefully planned all parts of his life, for example for enjoyment he invited friends to his house for dinner.

I think taking Kant as an example could be flawed here. He didn't organize his life in routines to benefit himself, to make him more productive/happy etc., he organized his life to fulfill his duty and I personally don't think that he was happy in doing that.

My first thought on reading this, was to revisit the idea of praying before eating. It would be hard to get an experiment on this past the review board, perhaps, but one wonders if praying before eating would work differently for atheist vs. religious dieters.

Also, I note that even though the (intentionally senseless) ritual helped reduce calories eaten, the people who used it did not think it helped and said they were unlikely to continue it. If it was part of your religious belief, one assumes you would be more likely to think it was important to continue.

For me the praying before a meal instills not only a sense of gratitude (disclaimer: Catholic here) but also appreciation and respect of the food itself. Even if it's something bland or otherwise uninteresting, I try to appreciate it for what it is, and savor it as much as possible instead of gobbling it up as fast as possible.

I think this would still be applicable outside of a religious context. You don't necessarily need to pray if that's not how your belief works, but you can still have this savoring appreciation of food, and codify that as a conscious moment where you briefly reflect on it before diving into it.

> respect of the food itself

why? It's fuel. I don't take a moment to respect the water I drink, or the bed that lets me sleep. Irrespective of belief it's not obvious why I'd want to try and be appreciative of food regardless of whether it's actually tasty

Is it so bewildering to you that someone could be thankful for the food they’re about to eat? Not everyone in the world has stable access to food.

I guess it's a sign of human progress that the basic idea of being grateful for having food, as opposed to NOT having food, wouldn't occur to some people.

I'd say it's a sign of the progress of access to food - but not necessarily of human progress (e.g. humans becoming better).

Plentiful access or not, respect for what we get to have, has many other benefits, and goes beyond the mere satisfaction of our needs/desires.

Because if you respect the rice, you respect the farmer that has worked hard to produce it. That should lead you to caring a bit more to not waste the food.

Granted in this mechanized world, that might be misplaced as it might have been produced by a fleet of robots for a corporation. There might be more complicated factors regarding food wastage. And so on. But since me and my family have started thinking this way, we are more careful of how much we cook, what we buy and how we consume. That has resulted in us hardly throwing away food due to excess/carelessness etc.

Well, there are two immediate benefits. First, through "respecting the food" you categorize it as something of value beyond fuel, which may increase your appreciation and enjoyment of the food. And second, in context of the article, the ritual of respecting the food seems to give you better self control over your relationship with the food.

Not OP, but the respect comes from the idea that the food exists and you're able to eat it. We are extraordinarily lucky (or as religious folks might say, blessed) to live in a time where being ambivalent about dinner-time is an option.

You might try it. Gratitude is a pleasant emotion. Expressing gratitude together as part of a group (such as the family before a meal) improves relationships.

Faking emotion to satisfy a group probably doesn't improve relationships.

Try going without comfortable sleep for a time. I can guarantee you that even a short period will massively affect all your daytime performance; lack of food even worse. It's one of the things that seem boring until you no longer have them.

I have spent about 2 years of my adult life sleeping on the floor. The first week is weird. The second week is better. After that it's just normal.

You adapt.

Some objective criteria: with more focus, you are likely to chew more, and therefore to digest better.

I think there could be a couple of reasons:

1. If it's meat, then some animal gave its life and respecting that is part of treating animals with dignity.

2. From a Christian perspective, all good things are given by God. I suspect that many religions have some sort of parallel belief and even an Atheist could respect the science (e.g. animal husbandry) that allowed them to have access to the food.

3. I have heard that there is evidence that expressing gratitude promotes happiness.

4. Taking the idea of "respect" more abstractly, taking the enjoyment of food seriously is a big part of culture and what it means to be human.

>why? It's fuel. I don't take a moment to respect the water I drink, or the bed that lets me sleep.

You would discover that they're worthy of very much respect if you were to lose either, even for a moderate while...

Paul Klee, an Swiss/German painter took it even further when he wrote:

"Imagine you are dead. After many years in exile, you are permitted to cast a single glance earthward. You see a lamppost and an old dog lifting his leg against it. You are so moved that you cannot help sobbing."

Try eat raw grain. Try drink rainwater. Try sleep on ground. Go to nearest war (to aid victims, not to participate in the war), and you will be very respectful for anything you have at the current moment.

When I feel sad I step outside without dressing myself appropriately. After a short while cold becomes uncomfortable, then very unpleasant. I gain new appreciation for the "everpresent warmth that winnners surround themselves with" (that's from a book by Joan D. Vinge). I go back inside and feel less sad and making money seems less pointless.

If I would really follow this thinking, I would need to thank for stuff like water and everything else as well.

That's not feasible at all. I do go through life open and I'm very aware on what has to happen so I have food and water and shelter and it sounds strange and would feel strange praying/thanking someone/something for it.

I'm quite happy that I do have food on my table even as an nihilist.

Also in my experience I'm often enough quite aware that I do something I don't wanna do but that doesn't help me not doing it, some superficial stone in the way is superficial and will mentally just be kicked away.

>If I would really follow this thinking, I would need to thank for stuff like water and everything else as well. That's not feasible at all.

Why? It sounds totally feasible -- and has been practiced by many people.

Even if you atheist, you should be thankful to society, which makes food, water, shelter, safety, etc. for you, and you should be good citizen. If you think otherwise, you will be burden or even toxic to your society.

Look at ants, bees, or other social insects or animals as on example of healthy society, (because unhealthy ones dies pretty quickly).

Are you saying ants and bees feel thankful?

As do I. Being mindful that I have this food to eat, and others are out there who do not know what they will eat next, that someone invested their time and energy to make the food available to me, when it is prepared by others that they spent their time preparing it, and that the food itself will become a part of me for anywhere from 24hrs to 7 years depending on where the nutrients end up being used by my body.

That is a lot to be thankful for, and I take a moment to bring that into my consciousness so that I won't take food on my table for granted.

But you could get anybody to do anything if they truly believed something to such an extent.

eating meditation would be another, perhaps secular, ritual, of the same nature.

Or to put it in somewhat more general and less loaded terms, saying grace.

I grew up in a UU household, and although we said a grace at dinner, it was not a prayer, since we did not believe in any gods. There was no referent for "you" in "thank you for this food"; rather, it's a general expression of gratitude and acknowledgment of the work that brought the food to our table, and the lives sacrificed in doing so. (Perhaps "we give thanks for this food" would have made more sense.)

Saying grace is similar in many ways to giving a toast, which might be worth further exploration.

That's the inverse of how I understand those terms and how loaded they are. “Prayer” is a nearly universal religious practice even in ones that are not especially theistic, whereas “grace” is a distinctly Christian notion.

Interesting! I suppose growing up in a non-Christian household that says grace gives me a very different view from you. :-P

> In order to be in the study, you must do the three steps of this ritual each time you eat.

So the study is selecting for people that have good self control already?

Why aren't more scientific studies written like this one--with straightforward, simple, and clear language? It's a joy to read.

This is not a scientific report of a study, but a popular piece based on multiple studies. In an academic article every material claim has to be supported by data or previous literature. The claims have to be well specified and the study must be (or at least should be) explained in enough detail that reader can understand more or less exactly what was actually done. This tends to make very annoying reading, but also makes it clear that the results very rarely are as straightforward, generalizable and strong as presented in a popular article.

The main study report linked in the article seems to be so well paywalled that it is not available via my university's library nor sci-hub.

Also scientific studies tend to be heavy on jargon, and if they weren’t they would be significantly longer reads, and become extremely tedious for someone who is steeped in the discipline and therefore has the most reason to read the study.

Are you reading the actual study? Because what's linked here isn't a study, it's an article about a study. In other words, it's written by a journalist, not a scientist that worked on the study.

No, it’s a popular article by one of the study authors. Researchers can and do write in both modes sometimes.

Research can, and do, and SHOULD. By writing popular pieces, scientists are basically using the Feynman technique and increasing their own understanding of whatever it is they're learning about

Now ask yourself “how many people did they test” and “what statistical test did they use to show significance”.

This popular-press article doesn’t say, and doesn’t have to. Their actual scientific report will have these dry details and be a more formulaic read.

The answer is this is not a study, and the audience for this piece is not scientists. This is from scientific american, whose mission is to present easily digested scientific content. Scientific american is written for those interested, but not steeped in, science.

Articles/studies themselves are written for a professional audience, and as such include many jargon terms and require knowledge of advanced methods to fully comprehend. It may be harder for the public to engage with, but if research is dumbed-down in its study/article format, reproducibility would be even harder due to a lack of detail.

I've found that behavior that isn't quite a ritual, but unique to that activity can be highly motivating and beneficial to focus as well. Whenever I want to get deeply focused on code writing, I'll start speaking to myself under my breath. A bit like the intention behind vocalizing your thoughts during a coding interview, it's been very helpful for keeping my mind on track.

Those sound like rituals someone with OCD might perform. I wonder if the common thread is that they reduce anxiety in both healthy and unhealthy, and that this reduction leads to increased agency.

Also it would be good to seem other groups replicate this.

My ritual is checking hacker news. I practice it often.

I believe mundane daily routines, when ritualized, can be a great way to get focused and in cognitive flow: https://medium.com/@jasoncomely/the-secret-ceremony-46000940...

TLDR; They encouraged people to make random gestures or perform meaningless tasks before eating and they found a ~10% reduction in calories (self-reported) and ~20% difference in people choosing vegetables over cake.

I wonder if breathing and presencing would have the same effect or stronger. I think our initial urge for sugar / instant gratification comes from our monkey brain and is overpowering but brief. Slowing down allows our rational brain to catch up and make a better long term decision.

This probably applies to more in life than just eating.

tldr; adding bureaucracy makes people give up on everything.........even eating

I am skeptical of the conclusion because of the imprecise language. For example, concluding ritual may be more effective than stringent dieting. 1. What is the documented efficacy of dieting over the same limited time period? 2. Are dieting and ritual mutually exclusive?

Is eating a carrot instead of chocolate necessarily a demonstration of will power? At least with the other studies, the subjects had a stated goal of weight loss.

How many subjects participated? Were the trials run more than once? The scholarly articles are paywalled, so all we are left with is this article. And this article seems more fitting for a grocery store checkout line rag than for Scientific American.

It’s a popular article, not a formal report. It contains links as references to the papers.

SciAm never publishes formal scientific articles as far as I know. It is a popular magazine about science, not a primary source journal.

As noted, the papers are paywalled.

My criticism is actually less about the language that the quality of the study. However, without reading the actually papers, I cannot be sure it is the study that is flawed.

Why is this scientific publication using such magical language?

What magical language are you opposed to? The term "ritual" is pretty well defined: "Rituals are series of steps we take while attaching some kind of symbolic meaning."

In the article, they link to multiple papers they've written on the topic of rituals, as well as quantify their results in the experiment they performed:

"About 58% of the participants in our ritual condition chose the carrot over the chocolate, as compared to only about 35% of those in the control condition and 46% of those in the random-gestures condition."

As the article is in the magazine's "Behavior & Society" section the science in the article seems cogent.

I never said I was opposed. Both "ritual" and "vexing" are magical language.

Sorry, in what way are "ritual" and "vexing" magical language? They are both English words in relatively wide use.

In what way are they not? Magical language can be in very wide use. I think one of the top grossing authors has written an entire series about magic.

From the article: "Many of our most vexing problems, from overeating to not saving enough for retirement to not working out enough have something in common: lack of self-control."

The definition of the word: "make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, especially with trivial matters"

Still not seeing the magical connotation; seems pretty well grounded in human behavior, which is topical for Scientific American.

"I think one of the top grossing authors has written an entire series about magic."

Wait.... what? Are you talking about Harry Potter?

It's hard to tell if you started as serious but are now becoming a parody troll account.

'Ritual' can be used in religious or magical contexts, but is not inherently magical and is routinely used in other contexts. I don't actually know of any magical connotations for 'vexing', except that it sounds somewhat like 'hexing'.

It's routinely used in some magical contexts. Vexing things are mysterious, which is often an object of magical displays.

"vexing" is defined as "annoying, worrying, or causing problems" [1]. I have encountered the word hundreds of times, but until your comment I wasn't aware that it was used in a magical context too.

If you look up a linguistics corpus like the Corpus of Contemporary American English [2] or the British National Corpus [3] -- visit those sites, search for "vexing", and click on "VEXING" again -- you'll see a representative set of usages of the word "in the wild", and none of them appear to have anything to do with magic. There's also something in C++ called the "most vexing parse" [4], which too doesn't seem to have anything to do with magic. (By the way, you may like to try this exercise with "ritual" too, to see how the word is used in practice.)

[1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/vexin...

[2]: https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

[3]: https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_vexing_parse

If you search the Authorized King James Version of the Bible you will find this[0] passage:

>And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.

[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+15%3A22...

It is deep in the literature that vexation is a domain of devils.

Is "grevious" in the domain of devils, too?

Begone, you.

I'm not sure, but from this context, it would seem that possibly, if "vexing" is also in the domain of others as well (seems so).

>Begone, you.

Not very welcoming around here?

Rituals can come before scientific knowledge, like cleaning.

Anything can come before scientific knowledge.

"Ritual" is a word with a variety of connotations. Note that a marriage ceremony is a ritual. That's an everyday use of the word that I don't think you would have objected to or called magical.

Then there's the academic definition, covered elsewhere in this thread.

Many people think marriage ceremonies are magical, I think.

Brushing your teeth in the morning is a ritual.

Shaking hands with everyone before starting a meeting is a ritual.

Tucking your kid into bed is a ritual.

>Brushing your teeth in the morning is a ritual.

Repeated event, but presumably done for your benefit.

>Shaking hands with everyone before starting a meeting is a ritual.

Not usually done in most corporate meetings I've been to.

>Tucking your kid into bed is a ritual.

I suppose it could be, but I guess I'm not sure what you mean by 'ritual' anymore.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

I don't get why you think comments that generate conversation are "unsubstantive".

On HN the idea is to value quality above quantity.

Here it is: "First, cut your food into pieces before you eat it. Second, rearrange the pieces so that they are perfectly symmetric on your plate. Finally, press your eating utensil against the top of your food three times."

No... That's not really the point of the article. The secret sauce is that /that/ ritual, its /any/ ritual. The premise is that by doing the ritual, you are more liking to do the "correct" thing. Probably (and this is my speculation here) because thus far the "correct" thing was tied to the ritual, and as humans, we like the sense of completion, so once we start the "random" part of the ritual, we want to finish the process, which involves doing the thing.

You're right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com