Whether you survey the annals of academe or the self-help books at the airport, it’s
clear that the nineteenth-century concept of “character building” has been out of fashion
for quite a while. The fascination with willpower ebbed in the twentieth century partly in
reaction to the Victorians’ excesses, and partly due to economic changes and the world
wars. The prolonged bloodshed of World War I seemed a consequence of too many stubborn
gentlemen following their “duty” to senseless deaths. Intellectuals preached a more
relaxed view of life in America and much of Western Europe—but not, unfortunately, in
Germany, where they developed a “psychology of will” to guide their country during its
bleak recovery from the war. That theme would be embraced by the Nazis, whose rally in
1934 was featured in Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film, The Triumph of the
Will. The Nazi concept of mass obedience to a sociopath was hardly the Victorian
concept of personal moral strength, but the distinction was lost. If the Nazis represented
the triumph of the will . . . well, when it comes to bad PR, there’s nothing quite like a
personal endorsement from Adolf Hitler.
The decline of will didn’t seem like such a bad thing, and after the war there were
other forces weakening it. As technology made goods cheaper and suburbanites richer,
stimulating consumer demand became vital to the economy, and a sophisticated new
advertising industry urged everyone to buy now. Sociologists identified a new generation
of “other-directed” people who were guided by their neighbors’ opinions rather than by
strong inner moral convictions. The stern self-help books of the Victorian era came to be
seen as naïvely self-centered. The new bestsellers were cheery works like Dale Carnegie’s
How to Win Friends and Influence People and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of
Positive Thinking. Carnegie spent eight pages instructing readers how to smile. The
right smile would make people feel good about you, he explained, and if they believed in
you, success was assured. Peale and other authors came up with an even easier method.
“The basic factor in psychology is the realizable wish,” Peale wrote. “The man who
assumes success tends already to have success.” Napoleon Hill sold millions of copies of
Think and Grow Rich by telling readers to decide how much money they wanted, write
the figure down on a piece of paper, and then “believe yourself already in possession of
the money.” These gurus’ books would go on selling for the rest of the century, and the
feel-good philosophy would be distilled to a rhyming slogan: “Believe it, achieve it.”
The shift in people’s characters was noticed by a psychoanalyst named Allen Wheelis,
who in the late 1950s revealed what he considered a dirty little secret of his profession:
Freudian therapies no longer worked the way they were supposed to. In his landmark book,
The Quest for Identity, Wheelis described a change in character structure since
Freud’s day. The Victorian middle-class citizens who formed the bulk of Freud’s patients
had intensely strong wills, making it difficult for therapists to break through their
ironclad defenses and their sense of what was right and wrong. Freud’s therapies had
concentrated on ways to break through and let them see why they were neurotic and
miserable, because once those people achieved insight, they could change rather easily. By
midcentury, though, people’s character armor was different. Wheelis and his colleagues
found that people achieved insight more quickly than in Freud’s day, but then the therapy
often stalled and failed. Lacking the sturdy character of the Victorians, people didn’t
have the strength to follow up on the insight and change their lives. Wheelis used
Freudian terms in discussing the decline of the superego in Western society, but he was
essentially talking about a weakening of willpower—and all this was before the baby
boomers came of age in the 1960s with a countercultural mantra of “If it feels good, do
it.”
Popular culture kept celebrating self-indulgence for the “Me Generation” of the 1970s,
and there were new arguments against willpower from social scientists, whose numbers and
influence soared during the late twentieth century. Most social scientists look for causes
of misbehavior outside the individual: poverty, relative deprivation, oppression, or other
failures of the environment or the economic and political systems. Searching for external
factors is often more comfortable for everyone, particularly for the many academics who
worry that they risk the politically incorrect sin of “blaming the victim” by suggesting
that people’s problems might arise from causes inside themselves. Social problems can also
seem easier than character defects to fix, at least to the social scientists proposing new
policies and programs to deal with them.
The very notion that people can consciously control themselves has traditionally been
viewed suspiciously by psychologists. Freudians claimed that much of adult human behavior
was the result of unconscious forces and processes. B. F. Skinner had little respect
for the value of consciousness and other mental processes, except as needed to process
reinforcement contingencies. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he argued that to
understand human nature we must get beyond the outmoded values in the book’s title. While
many of Skinner’s specii c theories were discarded, aspects of his approach have found new
life among psychologists convinced that the conscious mind is subservient to the
unconscious. The will came to seem so unimportant that it wasn’t even measured or
mentioned in modern personality theories. Some neuroscientists claim to have disproved its
existence. Many philosophers refuse to use the term. If they want to debate this classical
philosophical question of freedom of the will, they prefer to speak of freedom of action,
not of will, because they doubt there is any such thing as will. Some refer disdainfully
to “the so-called will.” Recently, some scholars have even begun to argue that the legal
system must be revamped to eliminate outdated notions of free will and responsibility.
Baumeister shared the general skepticism toward willpower when he started his career as
a social psychologist in the 1970s at Princeton. His colleagues were then focusing not on
self-control but on self-esteem, and Baumeister became an early leader of this research,
which showed that people with more confidence in their ability and their self-worth tended
to be happier and more successful. So why not help everyone else succeed by finding ways
to boost their confidence? It seemed a reasonable enough goal to psychologists as well as
the masses, who bought pop versions of self-esteem and “empowerment” in bestsellers like
I’m OK—You’re OK and Awaken the Giant Within. But the eventual results were
disappointing, both inside and outside the laboratory. While international surveys showed
that U.S. eighth-grade math students had exceptionally high confidence in their own
abilities, on tests they scored far below Koreans, Japanese, and other students with less
self-esteem.
Meanwhile, in the 1980s, a few researchers started getting interested in self-
regulation, the term that psychologists use for selfcontrol. The resurrection of self-
control wasn’t led by theorists, who were still convinced that willpower was a quaint
Victorian myth. But when other psychologists went into the laboratory or the field, they
kept happening on something that looked an awful lot like it.