Quantifying Willpower
 

From time to time in pop culture you'll hear a line like "he kept going on willpower alone" or "kept going long after his body quit" etc. In a less media centered context, you might hear a person complaining only to have someone else tell them to suck it up or fight through it. So, something I've wondered then, largely due to my RPG background I guess, is if there's ever been any serious research done regarding devising a serious measure of human willpower.

For intelligence, we've come up with a number of IQ tests, for stamina we can measure VO2(max), and for strength we can just see how much shit you can lift, but what can we do for willpower?

Now, the idea of willpower seems ubiquitous enough across cultures that it seems reasonable to suspect that there's something real going on, but how much of these phenomenon can be attributed to force of will and not other factors? After the battle of Marathon, there's that greek dude who ran the whole way back to Athens to report the victory, then promptly died. Did his body JUST HAPPEN to only be good for the 26 miles or did he really manage to push himself past his limits? Now, that's a millenia old story and so there may be more than a little hyperbole in there by now, but it's documented fact that we put our modern special forces through some pretty brutal training. Is this some affect of willpower, or would anyone with sufficient physical conditioning be able to make the cut? Then, there's all the crap attributed to tibetan monks...

Basically, if me and some other dude have a contest to see who can run at a given pace for the longest time, (or stay awake longest, whatever) is it completely determined by our states heading into the event, or is there really something to all that "you gotta want it more than the other guy" stuff you see so often?

Ehh, you are trying to quantify something that people don't know they have in them until it happens.

Honestly though, humanity has a lot of flaws, but one thing I really respect about us as a species is our ability to give fate the middle finger and push on despite or perhaps because things can't get worse.

Will is a construct of the mind without any physical component. It could be said to be imaginary, like so many of the things in our heads. And there's really no way to quantify how much we can imagine.

As to special forces and/or monk training, I think that only practices self-control and self-knowledge. Not that that doesn't help. I saw a Shaolin monk push a car across a stage using a spear with the blunt end against the bumper and the sharp end against the base of his throat, to take a magnificent example. Obviously that kind of training helps you locate, harness and focus ridiculous amounts of your body's energy. But it probably won't help you survive losing 40% of your water content walking through a desert and that sort of thing. That's pure will.

What willpower is largely depends on who and how you ask the question. I've been hearing a lot recently about how mainstream psychology is operationalizing willpower as a function of glucose use in the brain. Basically, what this view boils down to is that you can only have so much willpower before you exhaust your supply, causing a switch in thinking/behavior patterns. However, this view is predicated on a pretty narrow definition of willpower as self-control, and the experiments that have been done are designed around that assumption.

The problem is that there is just no way to easily operationalize a concept like willpower that doesn't require a pretty narrow definition. What regularly happens then is that, instead of recognizing that our understanding only applies to the operationalization of a concept, the operationalization becomes the concept.

There would be no way possible to control enough variables to determine whether something like willpower would have an effect in a scenario like you describe. That's where you run into the limits of psychology. There are just too many areas of human experience, culture, and thought that can't be studied empirically. We try anyway, but often it hinges on assumptions that get taken as fact.