The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,371

Breaking a diet by eating ice cream from a container after rating a spoonful in a taste experiment.

• Drinking more beer in a taste experiment, even when having to take a simulated driving test immediately afterward.

• Failing to stifle sexual thoughts, such as in solving the anagram NISEP as penis rather than as spine.

• Failing to keep up a running conversation while teaching someone how to putt in golf.

• Being willing to pay more for an attractive watch, car, or boat.

• Blowing your payment for participation in the study on gum, candy, Doritos, or playing cards, which the experimenters had mischievously offered for sale.

Various control conditions allowed the psychologists to rule out alternative explanations such as fatigue, difficulty, mood, and lack of confidence. The only common denominator was the need for self-control.

An important implication of the research is that the exercise of self-control can conceal the differences among individual people.114 It’s no coincidence that 1960s popular culture, which denigrated sobriety and self-control, also denigrated conformity, as in the signature motto “Do your own thing.” Everyone has a different thing, but society insists on just one thing, so we must apply self-control to do it. If self-control flattens individuality, one can predict that when the ego is depleted, individuality will pop back up. And that is what the Baumeister group found. In the ice-cream-tasting experiment, when the participants had not been called on to exercise self-control beforehand, the dieters and the indiscriminate eaters consumed the same amount of ice cream. But when their willpower had been exhausted, the dieters ate more. Other individual differences unmasked by depletion of the ego included the degree of stereotyping by prejudiced and unprejudiced people, the amount of beer drunk by tipplers and moderate drinkers, and the amount of small talk made by shy and outgoing people.

The Baumeister group also vindicated the Victorian idea that some people—particularly men—have to exert their will to control their sexual appetites.115 In one study, the psychologists assessed how emotionally close a participant had to feel to another person before engaging in casual sex. People of both sexes differ along that dimension, and there is also a robust difference between the sexes, captured in the movie dialogue in which Diane Keaton says, “I believe that sex without love is a meaningless experience” and Woody Allen replies, “Yes, but as meaningless experiences go, it’s one of the best.” Half the participants in the study went through an ego depletion task (crossing out letters according to shifting rules), and all were then asked to imagine themselves being in a committed romantic relationship and then finding themselves in the hotel room of an attractive acquaintance of the opposite sex. They were then asked whether they imagined themselves succumbing to the temptation. Whether their wills had been tuckered or not, the participants (of both sexes) who had indicated that sex without love was a meaningless experience imagined they would resist the temptation. But a transient weakness of their will affected the ones who were more open to casual sex: if their ego had just been fatigued, their imagined selves were far more likely to say yes.

The pattern for the two sexes was revealing. When the willpower of the participants was fresh, men and women didn’t differ: both were resistant to imaginary cheating. When their wills had been weakened, the women were just as resistant, but the men imagined themselves likely to stray. Another sign that gallantry requires self-control came from an analysis that simply compared people who reported having a lot or a little self-control (ignoring momentary ego depletion). Among those with high self-control, neither the men and nor the women imagined cheating on their partners, but among the people with low self-control, the men imagined that they probably would. The pattern suggests that the exercise of self-control hides a deep difference between men and women. Freed from their own willpower, men are more likely to act as evolutionary psychology predicts.

Baumeister and Gailliot pushed their luck in one more experiment, aiming to show that self-control affects real, not just imagined, sexual activity. They invited couples into the lab who were either sexually experienced or just beginning their relationship, separated them, gave them an ego depletion task (concentrating on a boring video while shutting out distractions), reunited them, and invited them to be affectionate with each other for three minutes while the experimenter discreetly left the room. A sense of propriety prevented the experimenters from videotaping the couple or observing them from behind a one-way mirror,