Temptation Science Move Over, Satan - Researchers Take Willpower To Its Limits

In the recesses of your brain, there is a little courtroom where the temptation cases are argued.

Some are pretty small cases, but to get to court at all, they have to be compelling. The judge and jury listen, weigh the evidence. Sometimes, they decide to bend the law in your favor. “Go ahead. The apple looks tasty; besides, nobody will miss it.”

That’s more or less the way David Bersoff, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, explains the workings of temptation. He studies stealing and lying, and he’s fascinated by the subtle mental adjustments people use to preserve their self-esteem even as they reach for forbidden fruit.

New research such as his may shed light on a human dilemma dating back to Adam and Eve. And while temptation always has commanded the attention of the clergy, science now is busy trying to qualify and quantify the way moral failings work.

In soon-to-be-published research, Bersoff explores the kind of rationalizations used to justify such common trespasses as pilfering office supplies or quietly pocketing a cashier’s overpayment. People are more likely to give in to temptation when they can remain passive, the study finds, and when they feel no one is being harmed.

Meanwhile in Ohio, researchers studying temptation soon will publish the results of research using a chocolate chip fatigue test they say helps prove willpower is like a muscle that gets tired under stress.

Society places a huge emphasis on the importance of being good, and people want to think of themselves as good.

Yet resisting temptation, too, extracts a cost, found researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. They baked chocolate chip cookies in their lab. Subjects were asked to skip a meal before they came in for testing.

“We told them it was a test of taste impressions and memory and that your assignment is going to be radishes,” said social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who headed the research.

“We left the person alone in the room to increase the temptation,” said Baumeister. “We observed in secret to make sure they didn’t cheat.”

Some people, facing a plate of cookies and a plate of radishes, studied the cookies. Some went as far as to pick up a cookie and smell it, said graduate student Ellen Bratslavsky, who ran the test. Others couldn’t bear to even look at the cookies. They pushed the plate away. But none of them cheated.

They ate radishes instead. “They struggled through” she said.

Their forbearance, however, cost them. The radish-eaters were asked to work on a confounding mental puzzle for as long as they could. They gave up on the puzzle much faster than a group of subjects allowed to eat the cookies and a group of subjects who were asked to perform the puzzle without being offered any food at all.

“The point is resisting temptation is draining. It takes something out of you,” said Baumeister. “It really sheds light on the strength of moral character and people’s ability to resist temptation.”

For Baumeister, whose study will be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, self-control is “a muscle that gets stronger with exercise.” It’s also “something that gets used up. It needs time to get replenished before you use it again.”

Everyone has felt his or her will power tested and found its limits.

It’s with good reason people pray “lead us not into temptation,” said Bersoff, the University of Pennsylvania researcher.

He has watched the moment of surrender closely, and it’s not an enviable place to be.

In his research, to be published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, he recruited East Coast university students to take part in what they were led to believe was a product test. The participants were then overpaid $2 for their efforts.

The first group was told a big foreign company was sponsoring the test. The subjects were paid by an impersonal cashier. In that group, 80 percent kept the extra money.

The next subjects were told the test was being run by a graduate student and being paid for out of his own funds. “Now the victim has a face. It’s harder to deny harm,” said Bersoff. Half of that group accepted the undeserved money.

In the next scenario, the cashier counted out the money on her desk, then asked: “Is that right?” The question made it necessary to tell a lie to get the undeserved $2. Forty percent did so.

In a final scenario, subjects were told a graduate student was paying for the test, and the cashier asked if the payment was right. So there was a victim to hurt and a lie required. Still, 20 percent took the extra $2.

In all cases, it was the same $2, said Bersoff. But one complication and then two made it harder and harder to “find in your mind a way to justify this,” said Bersoff.

“I don’t believe people are bad,” he said. “But certain situations play on their weakness and lead them to do bad things. I think that is the whole nature of temptation.”