http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-science-temptati...

November 3, 2009 | 11 comments

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.

Are you a scientist? Have you recently read a peer-reviewed paper that you
want to write about? Then contact Mind Matters co-editor Gareth Cook, a
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe, where he edits the
Sunday Ideas section.

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