"It doesn't even really sound like they are addressing the theory itself but some particular implication."
Agreed. This is just another priming study-- NOT a willpower study. Here's another:
"But the priming effect does not just affect our behavior. It can also, incredibly, have significant effects on our actual performance. In another study cited by Gladwell, two groups of students were asked to answer forty-two questions from the game Trivial Pursuit. But first, one group was first asked to sit and think about professors, the other to think about soccer hooligans. And the difference was dramatic: an average of 55.6% of the questions were answered correctly by the first group, while only 42.6% were answered correctly by the second.
How can these results be explained? Can priming somehow temporarily infuse the brain with an expanded store of facts? Obviously not. Instead, what seems to be happening is that encouraging people to "think smart" briefly increases mental qualities like their ability to focus, their sense of recall, and their ability to quickly and correctly integrate diverse pieces of information. In other words, priming does not make us more intelligent, but it does briefly make us better at using the intelligence we already have." [1]
The scarier one is about race:
"The psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson created an even more extreme version of this test, using black college students and twenty questions taken from the Graduate Record Examination, the standardized test used for entry into graduate school. When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement - and the number of items they got right was cut in half..."
1: grabbed from http://www.daylightatheism.org/2007/01/priming-the-mind.html