Posts related to this topic: Kurzban et al. on opportunity cost models of mental fatigue and resource-based models of willpower, Why Self-Control Seems (but may not be) Limited. Both discuss the "cognitive load depletes willpower" hypothesis.
I find the second link really interesting. If I interpret it right, the core idea is that in an ancestral environ have-to and want-to are nowhere nearly as opposed as today having to do boring admin tasks vs. screwing around on Reddit. For an animal, almost everything is they do is have-to (increases fitness) and almost everything is want-to too, either interesting or terrifying but boring is it not. For an animal, the closest thing to boredom may be doing a task without any immediate reward, which is kind of rare, a good example would be for an ape to tr...
I was recently reading a blog here, that referenced a paper done in 1999 by Baba Shiv and Alex Fedorikhin (Heart and Mind in Conflict: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making). In it, volunteers are asked to memorise short or long numbers and then asked to chose a snack as a reward. The snack is either fruit or cake. The actual paper seems to go into a lot of details that are irrelevent to the blog post, but doesn't actually seem to contradict anything the blog post says. The result seems to be that those with a higher cognitive load were far more likely to chose the cake than those who weren't.
I was wondering if anyone has read any further on this line of research? The actual experiment seems to imply that the connection between cognitive load and willpower may be an acute effect - possibly not lasting very long. The choice of snack is made seconds after memorising a number and while actively trying to keep the number in memory for short term recall a few minutes later. There doesn't seem to be anything about the effect on willpower minutes or hours later.
Does anyone know if the effect lasts longer than a few seconds? If so, I would be interested in whether this affect has been incorporated into any dieting strategies.