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Don’t Battle Temptation, Preempt It
Doing nothing doesn’t always mean doing nothing. Sometimes, when you decide not to act on an impulse, there’s a whole drama playing out behind the scenes in your mind: “Oh I really want to do it”, “But I can’t do it because it’s not good for me”, “Maybe if I just did it this once”, etc.
In short, controlling yourself is highly effortful, and resisting temptation requires valuable energy. Now, researchers have found a way to calculate exactly how much self-control costs.
How much would you pay to avoid self-control?
A few weeks ago, Raio & Glimcher published a paper titled “Quantifying the subjective cost of self-control in humans”. They recruited 138 dieting participants, made sure they were hungry, and then identified which foods each participant found most tempting.
Each participant then entered a repeating auction game in which they were given $10 and asked how much of it they would bid to avoid being stuck in a room with their favorite food. Each bid had only a 2% chance of reaching an auction, so participants were always incentivized to make their highest possible offer in order to maximize their chances of winning if they got to the rare auction stage. Whenever their bid didn’t make it to auction, they simply kept the $10 and waited for their next auction opportunity.
