Dealing with forbidden fruit: The human dilemma
by Mary Oto Knight Ridder Newspapers
In the recesses of your brain, there is a little courtroom where the temptation cases are argued. Some are pretty small cases, but to get to court at all they have to be compelling. The judge and jury listen and weigh the evidence. Sometimes they decide to bend the law in your favor. “Go ahead.
The apple looks tasty; besides, nobody will miss it.” That’s more or less the way David Bersoff, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, explains the workings of temptation. He studies stealing and lying, and he is fascinated by the subtle mental adjustments people use to preserve their self-esteem even as they reach for forbidden fruit.
New research such as his may shed light on a human dilemma dating back to Adam and Eve. And while temptation has always commanded the attention of the clergy, science is now trying to quantify how moral failings work. In his research, Bersoff explores the rationalizations used to justify common trespasses like pilfering office supplies or quietly pocketing an overpayment. People are more likely to give in to temptation when they can remain passive, the study finds, especially when they think no one is being harmed.
In Ohio, researchers studying temptation used a chocolate-chip fatigue test they say helps prove will-power is like a muscle that gets tired under stress. Both temptation studies seem relevant to a nation where professor Bersoff suggests one in three employees steal at work. Another that followed 500 shoppers at random and observed at least 40 of them shoplifting.
Society places a huge emphasis on the importance of being good. Yet resisting temptation extracts a cost, researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland found. Subjects were asked to skip a meal before they came in for testing. “We told them it was a test of taste impressions and memory and that your assignment is going to be radishes,” said social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who headed the research. “We left the person alone in the room to increase the temptation. “We observed in secret”. Some people, facing a plate of cookies and a plate of radishes, went as far as to pick up a cookie and smell it. Others couldn’t bear to even look at the cookies and pushed them away! But none of them cheated. They ate radishes instead. “They struggled through”.
Their self control, however, cost them. The radish-eaters were then asked to work on a confounding mental puzzle as long as they could. They gave up on the puzzle much faster than both a group of subjects allowed to eat the cookies and a group who were asked to do the puzzle without being offered any food at all. “The point is that resisting temptation takes something out of you,” said Baumeister. “self-control is “a muscle that gets stronger with exercise.” It’s “something that gets used up and needs to get replenished before you use it again.” Everyone has felt his or her will power tested and found its limits. Does this explain why the bible says we need to hear the word?
Howard Rankin, has worked to develop a “temptation management” regime that teaches people to imagine themselves resisting temptation until they are actually able to do it. “They go through a crisis and come out the other side. They feel empowered because they’ve survived,” he said. “The power of the temptation lies in your approach to it rather than any intrinsic energy it has on its own. “The core principle is impulse control, learning to tolerate frustration.”
Rankin recruited East Coast university students to take part in what they were led to believe was a product test. The participants were then overpaid $2 for their efforts. The first group was told a big foreign company was sponsoring the test. The subjects were paid by an impersonal cashier. In that group, 80 percent kept the extra money. The next subjects were told the test was being run by a graduate student and being paid for out of his own money. “Now the victim has a face. It’s harder to deny harm,” Bersoff said. Half of that group accepted the undeserved money.
In the next scenario, the cashier counted out the money on her desk, then asked: “Is that right?” The question made it necessary to tell a lie to get the undeserved $2. Forty percent did so. In a final scenario, subjects were told that a graduate student was paying for the test, and the cashier asked if the payment was right. So there was a victim to hurt and a lie required. Still, 20 percent took the extra $2. In all cases, the $2 was the same!
