November 3, 2009

The New Science of Temptation

What happens when Harvard scientists use a brain scanner to look for the devil inside?

By Piercarlo Valdesolo

The power to resist temptation has been extolled by philosophers, psychologists, teachers, coaches, and mothers. Anyone with advice on how you should live your life has surely spoken to you of its benefits. It is the path to the good life, professional and personal satisfaction, social adjustment and success, performance under pressure, and the best way for any child to avoid a penetrating stare and a cold dinner. Of course, this assumes that our natural urges are a thing to be resisted – that there is a devil inside, luring you to cheat, offend, err, and annoy. New research has begun to question this assumption.

A new brain imaging study by Josh Greene and Joe Paxton at Harvard University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that what separates the well-behaved from the poorly-behaved might not be the ability to control your temptations but rather what kind of temptations you have. For example, foregoing the opportunity for short-term gain and satisfaction, whether it is a delicious slice of tiramisu or that wallet stuffed with cash you stumbled across in the empty parking lot, will depend more on the nature of your automatic urges than your ability to control them.

Greene and Paxton were interested in why people behave honestly when confronted with the opportunity to anonymously cheat for personal gain. They considered two possible explanations. First, there is the “Will” hypothesis: in order to behave honestly people must actively resist the temptation to cheat. In other words, returning the wallet depends on your ability to stifle your desire to take the cash and buy yourself something nice. Alternatively, there is the “Grace” hypothesis: honest behavior results from the absence of temptation. Returning the wallet requires no particular ability to control your treacherous urges – the urge simply isn’t there.

These two hypotheses make competing predictions regarding the brain regions activated when acting honestly as well as the time it should take participants to decide to act honestly. If “Will” is correct then people who choose to act honestly should exhibit heightened activity in brain regions responsible for cognitive control (presumably resulting from the struggle to ignore immediate desires). But if “Grace” is right then no such increase should occur. Furthermore, people should take a longer time to decide to act honestly if doing so requires a conscious act of “Will,” but a relatively shorter time to act if all you need is a bit of “Grace.”

In order to test these possibilities the researchers measured neural activity in an fMRI machine while participants played a computerized game wherein they could gain money by predicting the outcome of coin flips. Correctly guess heads or tails, you get some cash. In one condition, participants recorded their predictions before seeing any of the flips, precluding the opportunity to cheat. In the other condition, participants were rewarded based on self-reported accuracy after the flips, and therefore could fudge their predictions in accordance with the outcome of the flip. I got 100 percent correct, Mr. Experimenter, must be my lucky day!

Consistent with the “Grace” hypothesis, those who acted honestly (who guessed wrong and self-reported as much) showed no increased activity in control-related areas relative to others who guessed wrong but did not have the opportunity to cheat. Honest reporting of scores, then, didn’t require will-power, these participants simply did not feel the urge to cheat. Reaction time data further supported “Grace” showing that participants who acted honestly took no longer to do so, on average, when they had the opportunity to cheat than when they did not. The authors suggest that these findings demonstrate the human capacity to, at least temporarily, achieve a state of “moral grace” – a state devoid of selfish temptation.

But what good does this state serve? Why would we be averse, or even indifferent, to cheating when we could benefit from it? Perhaps because our automatic responses have evolved in social environments where self-interested behavior in the short-term has not always lead to personal gains over the long-term. Gaining a reputation as a cheat would be a one-way ticket to ostracism. Having intuitions sensitive to equity and the needs of others would promote the formation and maintenance of cooperative relationships that would ultimately be of benefit to the individual.

Greene and Paxton’s findings fit nicely with this idea, as well as past research showing that many of our intuitions regarding equity/fairness actually promote prosocial behavior, and we overcome them at our peril. This is not only because of the positive social consequences they confer, but also because the cognitive processes we use to overcome them can be susceptible to bias, motivated reasoning, justification and rationalization.

This is not to say that self-control is an impediment to social life. Clearly certain desires and urges are better off ignored. The psychologist Dan Gilbert has found that participants, when given the choice between receiving $50 now or $60 a month from now, prefer the immediate reward. The strong desire for cash in hand trumps the thought that you’d be better off if you waited for the higher sum. In this case, if it weren’t for those pesky urges, life would be much easier – you could more effectively plan for the long-term. But what’s also clear is that many of our urges guide us towards decision and actions that, while contrary to short-term goals, are in our long-term interests. Given Greene and Paxton’s findings, it seems that at least in some situations the best way to consider the future is by not considering it at all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Piercarlo Valdesolo is a Keiter Fellow in psychology at Amherst College.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ence-temptation

This article is confusing.
One part in particular: 'Alternatively, there is the “Grace” hypothesis: honest behavior results from the absence of temptation. Returning the wallet requires no particular ability to control your treacherous urges – the urge simply isn’t there.'

'Grace', as opposed to 'Will' (using Will and Grace conjures up sitcom images - couldn't there have been different terms?) is something I'm familiar with. I drank heavily when I was younger. For years, it was an 'escape' when I came up against something I didn't think I could deal with.
Then, sometime around the advent of a new stage of my life (which was an engagement, buying a house, marriage, children...), I lost the need to use Will to deal with the temptation to drink. Grace took over. The urge to drink myself into oblivion wasn't there when I had a terrible situation to deal with. It was just gone.
I have explained it to myself and other people using a quote I read in an interview. In the 60's, when living in communes and getting high daily on drugs and having lots of sex with lots of partners without emotional attachment was considered a 'not-so-bad' thing, a child (in the interview) grew up in a commune where all of that took place. She did all those things, too. She was left to 'raise herself' because the adults were busy finding themselves in all those activities and kids ran wild and unprotected. But 'FREE' so that made it all OK in the adults' eyes. Would anyone be surprised to find out that she grew into an adult with horrible traumas she had to deal with? She tried everything available on the commune at some point but she concluded: 'I realized that there was not enough wine in the world to deaden the pain I felt. There were not enough drugs I could take to make the pain that I felt go away...'
That's exactly how I felt. Once I was in the new stage of my life (the family -building and commitment stage), I hit rocky places and horrible crises like anyone else. But when I thought about the old habit of 'self-medicating', I also thought immediately that it was not the answer - there was not enough alcohol to deaden the pain when I was hurt and it would not make anything difficult easier. The stakes were higher. Any quantity of alcohol was not going to change that. In the past, quantity was exactly what I had used - drinking to deaden the feelings.
I reached 'Grace' where the temptation doesn't exist.
There's a saying in Weight Loss programs, 'Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.'
It may be true but who listens to that? Yet the person who has really beaten the temptations that made them overeat to gain weight over the years has got to have reached some realization that temptations from food are fewer than before. Some if not all the temptations of overeating are gone.
If every day is a battle because the temptations have to fought again and again, then Will is still at work. Not Grace. Grace is when you can say, as I did recently, 'McDonald's doesn't tempt me anymore.'
My weight hasn't changed. But it is true that McDonald's doesn't tempt me any more. I don't know how it happened.

Caveman, thanks for this lovely article. I'd comment on it but it's way over my head

I think the $50 now, $60 in a month, doesn't really take into account that most people put a value on immediacy that's bigger than $10. If time had no part in value then you could offer people $50.01 in 15 years and they'd go for it. Clearly it is a better deal. But when the time is THAT long and the value gained that little you realize why the immediacy has value... we don't live all that long that waiting 15 years to earn an additional penny makes sense. If we lived forever, then it might.

I bet if you shrank the amount of time to a few days, more people would take the $60.

At some point exchanging time for amount makes sense and I think we sort of balance decisions around that, perhaps even unconsciously.

I think that was the point. Get it? It's cute.

I'm fascinated by the mind/brain and how it works. I always have been, and since I adopted a teenaged boy with behavior problems stemming - probably - from his early life, I'm even more interested.

My son would never act in anyone's interest but his own. He almost completely lacks empathy and a conscience. Not only would he keep the wallet stuffed with cash if he found it in a parking lot, he'd steal it if he found it in your house and you had invited him in as a friend. And if you noticed he'd stolen it and complained, he'd look you right in the eye and lie so convincingly you'd almost doubt yourself. If you called the police on him, he'd feel justified in retaliating. etc., etc., etc. The concept of taking care of your interests so that he fits in socially is alien to him.

Possibly his problem is partly genetic, but it's hard to sort the nature and nurture out when his whole biological family acts the same way. I believe, though, that his problems stem largely from a lack of attachment to a significant caregiver in his first three years. It's in our earliest relationship/attachment - with mom - that we become "human" in the most important ways. We learn it so very early, though, and it's so hard to "teach" a conscience past those early years, that it feels "natural" and "inborn."

Personally I think we're born little savages, completely self-centered, and we need adults to civilize us. Look at mathmaniac's friend who grew up "free" in a commune.

Anyway I'm not sure why this article is on this forum, but attempting to apply this to the subject of this forum, though, I think our energy urges and cravings are largely biological. For example, I'm sitting here hungry. Fourth day of trying something new to get my weight loss moving again. Just came from yoga class which I didn't enjoy because I felt weak and tired. I need to eat something. Not because I'm neurotic or weak-willed or gluttonous - but because I'm hungry. The protein shakes I've had today didn't satisfy my energy needs. And trying to run this deficit is clearly not forcing my body to give up stored fat for use as energy. If that were working, I wouldn't be sitting here hungry and weak. Grrrr!!!

I'll never successfully lose weight by pure will power, by fighting my biology. I need to figure out how to work with my hormones to achieve my goals.

There's an article in Harvard Magazine, March, 2006, 'The Marketplace of Perceptions' that discusses behavioral economics. There is a section of the article that treats Neuroeconomics, a branch of behavioral economics.
It is about just this kind of thing.
Here's something about it...
http://www.micromotives.com/2006/03...of-perceptions/

Costello, I think you're right about what may have happened in your child's early years having that effect, the lack of early attachment/normal/positive human experiences and such. I know of and have read of other cases where this is the case. I wish you and your son the best in having to deal with a hard situation. Changing the thought, I have never found "temptations" very tempting if I perceive them as an ethical/moral matter. I've been taught all my life the religious perspective that's it's wrong to steal, lie, etc., and since I sincerley believe in my religion, things that violate my belief in what God would be pleased for me to do just have no appeal. Things that I don't consider ethical matters may be "tempting" (like freshly baked cookies) and I might decide indulging is more important to me at the time than a more nebulous goal of someday being thinner, but it's not at all the same to me as something where honesty or the like is involved.

There is book called "Kids Without Conscience" that I think relates to this a little but probably not in any insightful way.

Once my daughter hit about 10 months old I would watch her 'hunt'. It was astonishing how natural the predator/thief "hunter" is in humans. She could barely walk (like a drunk sailor), couldn't really talk at that point, but she could *run* (go figure!), and she could "plan sneakily" to get things we did not want her to have either by deviousness or speed. Sure, we saw right through her most the time, but it was that these things were present so naturally in someone so young that I always found most astonishing.

I have seen, from my daughter and her friends and the neighbor girl, how much compassion and ethics must be TAUGHT. Because children naturally are utterly mercenary, happily cruel. and naturally fail to see any reason whatever why they should care about any welfare but their own. I observed this with some fascination. I'm a "closet sociologist" of sorts.

From the time she was little we would sit down and say, "Imagine what it is like to be them. Now imagine xyz happened to you. If that were you, would you not feel hurt and sad? Ok, now that you know how they feel, why would you do that to them? You're a good person. You should apologize."

Once she hit about 10, we would have actual conversations about compassion, and ethics, and loyalty, and so on. What she noticed, and I noticed, was how many of the people around her utterly lacked all this. It was like they spent all their formative time watching bad TV sitcoms; they were so shallow, so constantly mean without cause, so removed from the concepts of loyalty or honor. When she would go to her friends houses (it might relate that we live in a poor county in a poor state in the midwest), the children had almost no relationship with their parents. The parents when there were exhausted, or watching TV or busy with their own stuff. They and the kid spent most 'communication' time bitching/whining rather than anything of meaning. Then going to bed they'd say 'I love you' as if that made up for an entire day totally lost for any decent human relationship. My daughter would come home and tell me, "They don't even hardly know each other."

I admit that I have not taught her solely based on emotion though. For a few years, I will sometimes make her talk with me about something with pretty mercenary reasoning. I say, "So you want this thing. And you want me to give it to you. But you have been unkind to me and made me angry. Do you think this will get it for you? What better approach might get you what you want? What if instead you were good to me and put me in a happy mood toward you? What if instead of phrasing your demand like X, you made it a polite-sweet question like Y? This is important. You need to know how to communicate with people for the end-result you want. If you naturally piss everybody off, you won't have many friends and your working life as an adult will be hell. So learn this now and practice. BEFORE you approach someone that you want something from, ask yourself, what behavior, what phrasing, is most likely to achieve what I want from this communication?" As she gets older, and is already pretty well steeped in the compassion/justice/kindness angle, I lean more on the "practical communications" angle.

One part of me thinks I'm teaching her to be manipulative. Another part of me thinks I am teaching her to be 'aware' of the effect of her communications on others and to think-first. I'm a little ambivalent but I have decided in favor of her learning that, either way.


Reactive Attachment Disorder is horrible. I don't know what can be done to ever make people into human beings when that happens. No amount of kindness or drugs changes the fundamentals of them. It's like they're damaged goods and not fixable. So far in our culture these people are labeled in childhood, a nightmare as teenagers, and then go out and basically spend the rest of their lives (what isn't in prison) utterly ruining the lives of anybody around them.


I think when that happens, the only possible salvaging of it is to find a way to teach the behavior as a form of mercenary self-interest. For example I know people who are really lousy people, but because they are salesmen with some very good NLP training, they can interact with people in a positive way. They would not steal a wallet if they thought they would be caught but they would rob you blind if they thought they wouldn't. What is important is that they have gradually learned cognitive awareness of their behavior and how to structure it to their own best self-interests. It is much like major criminals who are the ultimate law abiding citizens. They aren't going to go down over some minor crap so they have learned to behave very well within the laws and communities except their focus area, not because they want to or always need to or care at all, but because they know that their best interests are served by being squeaky clean. Maybe if you can structure an attempt at teaching that is based more on the longer-term outcome of behavior -- not for any emotional or 'should' reasons, but for what-good/bad-will-it-do-you reasons -- that might work a little bit.


Absolutely. I can hardly stand the constant attempt to relegate biochemistry, including feeding and movement behaviors, to the armchair of psychology instead of the chemlab of endocrinology where they belong.

PJ

Yeah, I've been doing a lot of reading on hypothyroidism in the last few days, since learning that apparently my thyroid is totally whacked. And the case histories of people who were institutionalized for mental illness, sent to psychologists and psychiatrists, but on anti-depressive and anti-psychotic drugs, etc, often for YEARS - before their problems were eventually diagnosed as hypothyroidism is truly an astounding and depressing tale. And of course those were the lucky ones who finally DID find and answer. How many never did?

And even sadder are the dozens of stories of people who found they had thyroid issues, were happy and healthy for years on medication, then either moved, or had their doctor retire or die - and the new doctor totally refused to renew their thyroid med prescriptions because their numbers now looked "normal" - causing them to develop all sorts of horrible physical and mental problems again.

Costello, I feel for you in your situation with this adolescent boy. You write:
'he'd steal it if he found it in your house and you had invited him in as a friend.'
I'm not disagreeing with your ideas about the importance of early years. However, I'm also thinking that it is possible for a child to be raised without any sense of ownership at all. Either he owns nothing, calls nothing his own, or his feelings of ownership were never respected.
In the example of the commune where the kids ran free and unprotected, they could have been - and possibly were - abused sexually. When everything is shared and no one is uptight enough to say, 'This is mine and you must leave it alone,' there's that danger. When you have to give anything you call your own to anyone who grabs it, and move on to the next toy, then you don't respect ownership.
Perhaps this boy had a history of having things he owned 'disappear' when someone helped themselves and didn't feel the need to explain and then would lie about taking it.
How, then, can someone learn to empathize with another person's feeling of loss when something is taken without their permission? You'd think he would empathize because he experienced it firsthand but what may have happened is he was desensitized - had to learn to 'get over it' so that he wouldn't be so hurt by it the next time it happened.
I'm guessing a therapist would try to dredge up those feelings of being robbed of his things for him to feel again. But I don't know.
It's just an idea - the lying would have been learned behavior. The stealing would feel natural.
As to why the article is on this forum: I think it has to do with being able to delay gratification (which is sort of what you're talking about with your son, too.)
If you can delay gratification, you can diet successfully. Not that you postpone the sacher torte and that is your diet. Instead, you refuse to gratify yourself in the present (eating sacher torte) for gratification in the future (a slimmer body, weight loss on the scale).
The article about behavioral economics in the Harvard magazine issue deals with just this kind of delaying strategy - and why people can't seem to do it. It deals with money, not calories. However, the same kind of budgeting goes on with money that goes on with calories or carbs.
The author of this Science of Temptation article writes:
'Why would we be averse, or even indifferent, to cheating when we could benefit from it? Perhaps because our automatic responses have evolved in social environments where self-interested behavior in the short-term has not always lead to personal gains over the long-term. Gaining a reputation as a cheat would be a one-way ticket to ostracism. Having intuitions sensitive to equity and the needs of others would promote the formation and maintenance of cooperative relationships that would ultimately be of benefit to the individual.'
He's talking about how a person automatically decides not to cheat (or in the case of dieting, decides not to give in to temptation and go 'off diet for a short while.') His guess that self-interested behavior has not led to personal gains over the long term for most people is something your son might not have learned - because it didn't work that way in his environment.
The whole 'Grace' thing, where you automatically do NOT cheat, is discussed in the article about behavioral economics in terms of immediacy trumping waiting. The example used is investing in a 401K when it actually doubles your money immediately; people still refuse to do it because they prefer to do virtuous things in the future. They can't use the money right now; in their minds, that's so bad, they'd rather not sign on. Despite the fact in the example, each dollar that goes in the 401K is matched by their employer! The person who is in the minority, who jumps at the chance to sign up for a 401K; that's the person who doesn't get distracted by the now vs. the future tug-of-war. He just does it because it is logical and right (Grace).

I think psychology is catching up a little. We're all just bundles of electrical wiring and chemicals. However we can redo our own wiring sometimes.

Having had a thyroid problem I know how drastically that affected my personality. I was extremely impatient, irritable and prone to anger outbursts when hyperthyroid. When I was hypothyroid I so mellow nothing could phase me.

When my low oxygen (via asthma and sleep apnea) was unrecognized and untreated, I was a maniac. I had 'instant rage' all the time, and other issues. Now I often recognize what is probably undiagnosed sleep apnea in others just by watching how they behave.


About 'delayed gratification', I seriously think this is an unfortunate area for supersized dieters. You know, most people, the less they have to lose, or the more there is some substantial goal associated with a certain lesser amount to lose, the more that "delayed gratification willpower" -- so to speak -- makes sense.

But you take a body like mine, where weight loss doesn't always even happen anymore or not at any speed, and you say,

"OK, if you do everything right, it still might not even work. And if it does, you probably still won't ever be a normal size. But you might be ONLY "fat" in about, oh... well maybe a few years. And by the way, every pound thinner you get, is a pound more disgustingly deformed you get in loose skin."

Gee, I don't know why it's so hard to find this motivating.

Setting smaller goals is important to that. But at my size, aside from my eventually making the 350 goal I set for myself just over three years ago (sigh), much like with clothes sizing, the goals and recognizeable differences tend to be so much farther apart at the larger sizes.

Pretty much the way I have dealt with this so far, is to say (a) if eating carby foods on holidays is able to be 'reigned in' for back-on-plan promptly after, then I allow it, and (b) if I start feeling like I cannot trade eating well most the time against that nebulous future, then I will set some future point not more than a month in advance as a day to eat other foods I normally can't have and use it either as a sort of reward incentive (since I am not much inspired by other things) or use it as a delay-incentive ("yes, you can have it. But just not yet. Just wait a few weeks.").

Because the 'delay on gratification' is just too nebulous to be sure it'll happen at all, too long-term, and too small a gratification result in context, to be any motivator for me.

PJ

The 'delayed gratification' gets quantified - that's where the behavioral economists get excited. As if there's an equation - of course, there's not. But they try anyway.
The article I was referring to, 'The Marketplace of Perceptions', refers sometimes to diets and exercise but it's just because those are examples of how decisions can be determined by assigning value to action in the present or in the future.
I can see how it's frustrating to face losing small amounts of weight when you have a lot to lose (just tonight, I told my friend's mother that I'd love to get under 200 pounds - that would be a lot for me!) What interests me is that at some point, you just reach a limit and then you do consistently the thing you need to do to lose. And you don't go off course. How that happens is what these behavioral economists are trying to figure out when they hypothesize about what you need to do to get someone to sign up for a 401K.
When you get to that point, you're not tempted (Grace) so it's easier. Just as much hard work but without the temptations to fight all the time, it's lots easier. That's why I think hypnosis is a powerful way to lose weight - however, you have to get there... to the hypnotist, and not just for one visit. Not getting there is dragging your feet, which is like dragging your feet over exercise or counting points or whatever.
I know where the hypnotist has his office. I know how much it costs. I'm not going. That's me and my dragging feet.

I worked with hypnosis for many years, and with many associates in private practice, some for weight loss. Some were successful with that. Many weren't. If that's your aim, I think you need to find a hypnotist who understands metabolism. Someone trying to make you less hungry, or make you avoid fatty foods, is obviously not the answer. Often, hypnosis as therapy can have many positive side-effects just as any internal upgrade can, including weight loss, even when that isn't the direct goal.

PJ

`Nothing tastes as good as thin feels'=$50.01 in fifteen years.

Or so it seemed to me when I first heard this (quoted to me by a SO who's never made it to 145 in his life). If all we had to do was forgo one taste of food and trade that for thin, we'd all do that. Instead, we look down a road that is months or years in the traveling, and assume the white-knuckle craving that we feel at the beginning is what we're faced with for this indeterminate amount of time, in exchange for a maybe-someday-thinner-but-never-airbrushed-perfection.

Hope is triggered by achieving a state of critical mass. We will ourselves into grace, and thus break the stranglehold of biochemical cravings.