The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,372

so they asked each partner to write a confidential paragraph describing exactly what had gone on between them. Experienced couples, if their wills had been depleted, were a bit less physical, as if sex had switched from a passion to a chore. But ego depletion made the inexperienced couples far more physical. According to the write-up, “They kissed open-mouthed for prolonged periods of time, groped and caressed each other (e.g., on the buttocks and woman’s chest), and even removed articles of clothing to expose themselves.”

According to the theory of the Civilizing Process, a dearth of self-control in medieval Europe underlay many forms of dissoluteness, including slovenliness, petulance, licentiousness, uncouthness, steep discounting of the future, and most important, violence. The science of self-control vindicates the idea that a single capability of mind can counteract many of these forms of dissipation. But it remains to be shown that violence is one of them. We know that people with less self-control are more cantankerous and trouble-prone. But can manipulating self-control in an experiment bring out the beast within?

No one wants a fight to break out in the lab, so Baumeister went to the hot sauce. Hungry participants were asked to take part in a study on the relation between tastes in food and written expression.116 They indicated their favorite and least favorite flavors, wrote an essay expressing their views on abortion, rated the essay of a bogus fellow participant, rated the taste of a food, and finally read their partner’s feedback on their essay. In the taste test, half of them had to rate the taste, texture, and aroma of a donut; half had to rate the taste, texture, and aroma of a radish. But just as they raised the stimulus to their mouth, the experimenter exclaimed, “Wait! I’m sorry; I think I screwed up. This isn’t for you. Please don’t eat the rest of it. Let me go figure out what’s supposed to be next.” He then left the participant alone with the donut or the radish for five minutes. Lest there be any doubt that this was a valid test of self-control, one may note the following passage in the write-up:Participants: Forty undergraduates participated in this study in exchange for course credit. Data from seven participants were discarded from all analyses, four due to expressed suspicion about the feedback and three due to participants having eaten the entire donut.

The participants then read the partner’s feedback on their essay, which was scathing. They also were shown his or her taste preferences, which indicated a dislike of spicy foods. And then they were asked to prepare a snack for the partner from a bag of chips and a container of hot sauce prominently labeled SPICY. The amount they applied was measured by weighing the container after they left. The participants were also asked to rate their moods, including anger. The ones whose self-control had been depleted by having to forgo the donut didn’t get mad, but they did get even. They applied 62 percent more hot sauce to the chip of their insulting partner, presumably because they could not resist the impulse for revenge. Will-depleted subjects were also more likely to torment a critic by leaning on a button to blast him with an air horn every time he made an error in a computer game.

Another study tapped aggressive fantasies by asking participants to imagine standing at a bar with a beloved girlfriend when a rival shows up and begins to flirt, to her visible enjoyment. (In the scenario given to women, it was a boyfriend who was chatted up by a rival woman.) The participant imagines confronting the rival, who responds by shoving him into the bar. Close at hand is a beer bottle. The participant was asked: “How likely would you be to smash the bottle on the person’s head? Indicate your response on a scale from -100 (not at all likely) to 100 (extremely likely).” The participants who were low in self-control, if their wills were ready and rested, indicated they probably would not retaliate. But if their wills had been depleted, they indicated they probably would.

If we combine (1) Baumeister’s experiments, which found that reducing self-control in the lab can increase tendencies toward impulsive sex and violence; (2) the correlations across individuals between low self-control on the one hand and childhood misconduct, dissolute behavior, and crime on the other; (3) the neuroimaging studies that showed correlations between frontal lobe activity and self-control; and (4) the neuroimaging studies showing correlations