People Will Pay Money To Avoid Having To Exert Self-Control

By Emily Reynolds Self-control — or lack of it — can have a serious impact on our lives. Poor self-control can lead to feelings of loneliness, while those with higher levels of self-discipline experience states like hunger and tiredness less intensely. Yet despite these obvious benefits, the vast majority of us sometimes experience failures in self-control no matter how hard we try. A new study, published in PNAS, looks to quantify the cost of self-control. Candace M. Raio and Paul W. Glimcher from the New York University School of Medicine find that we’re willing to pay a monetary price to avoid having to exert self-control — and we’ll pay more if the temptation is particularly strong. In the first study, conducted in a lab, dieting participants started by indicating how healthy, tasty and tempting they found particular foods like crisps or chocolate brownies. They then reported how much of a $10 endowment they would be willing to pay to avoid having the highly tempting food placed immediately in front of them for half an hour. The tempting food was then placed in front of them, and the participant was given further opportunities to bid to have it replaced with a less tempting food. Importantly, there was a small chance that each bid would go to auction, where it was compared against a random figure between $0 and $10: if the participants bid a higher amount, they would  have a low-tempting food placed in front of them for the remainder of the 30 ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Eating Money The self Source Type: blogs