14 DAY TRIAL // Exerting self-control is a very tricky business, psychologists and brain experts agree. It's especially hard when you have to have the interests of others in mind as well, which adds extra pressure on you to do one thing or the other, which you probably don't agree with. This has been evidenced by the fact that people are very likely to feel the effects of an action even if they're just imaging it and not really doing it – as it's the case with those thinking about eating some disgusting food and getting sick, even if the meal itself is nowhere to be seen.
That's why a group of researchers, comprised of Yale University psychologists Joshua M. Ackerman and John A. Bargh and University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) experts Noah J. Goldstein and Jenessa R. Shapiro, have sought to understand how other people's self-control influences our own thoughts and behavioral patterns, and why. A paper detailing their finds has been published in a recent issue of the Association for Psychological Science's scientific journal, Psychological Science.
For their experiments, the experts asked a number of volunteers to separate into two groups. One was given a story about a hungry waiter who was surrounded by food and could not eat out of fear of being fired to read, while the other group was asked to imagine they were the waiters. Afterwards, all were required to look at pictures of cars, TV sets, and other similar objects, and to say how much they would pay for them if they were to buy them.
The results revealed that those who were told to imagine they were the waiters were more likely to spend larger amounts of money on the luxury goods. The team said that this happened because they lost their ability to exercise self-control, while placing themselves in the “shoes” of another person. The actual probes that the participants had to undergo after assessing the images – a word game and a memory test – were handled best by those who didn't have to imagine they were the waiters. They scored highest in assessing the correct prices of the objects and also in the ensuing tests.
The authors stress in the study that individuals imagining another one's self control “could [suffer] small breakdowns of self-control, such as employees speaking out improperly during a meeting, to catastrophic ones, such as police officers responding to an emotionally charged encounter with deadly force.”