These are mostly "personal intuitions" and should be take only as inspiration and with a big grain of salt, as I gravitated towards this subject mainly from a selfish interest for self improvement, I must admit. If I were a sociologist I would've probably kept this ideas to myself, formulated a proper theory or set of theories and designed experiments to prove or select the best theory... but I'm not in the field so it's probably better to just pass the ball and let someone with more skill in the field put it in the basket :)
The base of the ideas are Muraven's idea of "willpower as a muscle" and "not as a skill" (google for his articles starting from '98 http://scholar.google.ro/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=... ), but I think (more like "my intuition says") he only got half of the problem right: there's a "muscle" type of willpower (the "make yourself do smth" willpower) and a "skill" type of willpower (the "make yourself want to do something" type) and maybe his experiments just created the conditions that favored people exerting the first type (I'll really have to reread his articles to arrive at a "based" conclusion about this... like in... read more than the abstracts and conclusions for some, shame on me :| ).
And the other source of the intuition is my recent very unstructured approach to try and understand some aspects of buddhist philosophy and meditation...
(But again, I'm not in the field of sociology and the only contact with academic research I had is a past "involvement" with clinical medical research (surgery and oncology...) and some aspects of biomedical statistics, so this really is not my field...)
The base of the ideas are Muraven's idea of "willpower as a muscle" and "not as a skill" (google for his articles starting from '98 http://scholar.google.ro/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=... ), but I think (more like "my intuition says") he only got half of the problem right: there's a "muscle" type of willpower (the "make yourself do smth" willpower) and a "skill" type of willpower (the "make yourself want to do something" type) and maybe his experiments just created the conditions that favored people exerting the first type (I'll really have to reread his articles to arrive at a "based" conclusion about this... like in... read more than the abstracts and conclusions for some, shame on me :| ).
And the other source of the intuition is my recent very unstructured approach to try and understand some aspects of buddhist philosophy and meditation...
(But again, I'm not in the field of sociology and the only contact with academic research I had is a past "involvement" with clinical medical research (surgery and oncology...) and some aspects of biomedical statistics, so this really is not my field...)