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.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-science-temptation
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- pjacobs51
- added this
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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.
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The "will" vs "grace" hypothesis is very interesting. I'm curious if there is a way to determine whether it is an innate trait or an environmentally developed trait.
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- WakeUpPeople
- 21 days ago
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wasn't there a show called will and grace?
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Interesting.
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So apparently I decide not to give in to temptation becaue I simply don't feel tempted... sounds awesome, and yet, I'm kinda wondering if maybe there's a possibililty that some people might have developed a "will" programming for some reason.
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I think that means some people value self respect and personal integrity more than money . Not grace , but principals . You either have them , or you don't .
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Very Very interesting.
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- Curtis_Wright
- 21 days ago
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eric bernie in his book on transactual analysis " what do you say after you say hello"; wrote to this point from different points of view. there is one that struck a strong cord with me. when a mother is feeding baby in the high chair and the baby throws the food, if mother laughs then baby is on the way to developing a healthy sense of humor, if mother doesn't laugh then baby isn't funny and if mother gets angry the baby is repressed. the baby with the laughing mother develops a sense of humor called the demon and is a rascal. later in life the demon laugh is developed ( and everyone has heard it), it goes like this. if a friend says to you " i like your girl friend, i really want to cover her in cheeze whiz, ha, ha, ha just kidding ", the ha, ha, ha just kidding is the demon. therapists of all kinds listen for this laugh as an indicator to the true unconscious desire but not necessarily what the person would allow themselves.
so if i don't get positive feedback, i'll find you and bikini wax your dog, ha, ha, ha, just kidding. -
to be a worm. ...
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Psycho bable I simply can't resist. Do you have more?
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it is a simple thing to be at peace.
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I watched Hugh Hefner talk about this issue on his show the other day, and he said the best way to deal with temptation is to give into it.
- yea, easy for a happy old man with unlimited girlfriends to say.
but everyone has their own level of integrity,
the debate would be what is actually 'Right' vs 'Wrong'
(no use in argument because everyone is on a different level of reality)-
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- AliceintheMirror
- 20 days ago
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Very interesting study.
