Did the depleted participants recuse themselves from the tempting situation more often, or did they gravitate toward it? As it turned out, they were more likely than nondepleted participants to choose the sheet that tempted them to cheat. As a result of their depletion, they suffered a double whammy: they picked the premarked bubble sheet more frequently, and (as we saw in the previous experiment) they also cheated more when cheating was possible. When we looked at these two ways of cheating combined, we found that we paid the depleted participants 197 percent more than those who were not depleted.
Depletion in Everyday Life
Imagine you’re on a protein-and-vegetable diet and you go grocery shopping at the end of the day. You enter the supermarket, vaguely hungry, and detect the smell of warm bread wafting from the bakery. You see fresh pineapple on sale; although you adore it, it is off limits. You wheel your cart to the meat counter to buy some chicken. The crab cakes look good, but they have too many carbohydrates so you pass them by, too. You pick up lettuce and tomatoes for a salad, steeling yourself against the cheesy garlic croutons. You make it to the checkout counter and pay for your goods. You feel very good about yourself and your ability to resist temptation. Then, as you are safely out of the store and on the way to your car, you pass a school bake sale, and a cute little girl offers you a free brownie sample.
Now that you know what you know about depletion, you can predict what your past heroic attempts of resisting temptation may cause you to do: you will most likely give in and take a bite. Having tasted the delicious chocolate melting over your deprived taste buds, you can’t possibly walk away. You’re dying for more. So you buy enough brownies for a family of eight and end up eating half of them before you even get home.
NOW THINK ABOUT shopping malls. Say you need a new pair of walking shoes. As you make your way from Neiman Marcus to Sears across a vast expanse of gleaming commercial temptation, you see all kinds of things you want but don’t necessarily need. There’s that new grill set you’ve been drooling over, that faux- shearling coat for next winter, and the gold necklace for the party you will most likely attend on New Year’s Eve. Every enticing item you pass in the window and don’t buy is a crushed impulse, slowly whittling away at your reserve of willpower—making it much more likely that later in the day you will fall for temptation.
Being human and susceptible to temptation, we all suffer in this regard. When we make complex decisions throughout the day (and most decisions are more complex and taxing than naming the colors of mismatched words), we repeatedly find ourselves in circumstances that create a tug-of-war between impulse and reason. And when it comes to important decisions (health, marriage, and so on), we experience an even stronger struggle. Ironically, simple, everyday attempts to keep our impulses under control weaken our supply of self-control, thus making us more susceptible to temptation.
NOW THAT YOU know about the effects of depletion, how can you best confront life’s many temptations? Here’s one approach suggested by my friend Dan Silverman, an economist at the University of Michigan who was facing grave temptation on a daily basis.
Dan and I were colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The Institute is a lovely place for lucky researchers who can take a year off to do little else besides think, go for walks in the woods, and eat well. Every day, after we’d spent our mornings pondering life, science, art, and the reason for it all, we enjoyed a delectable lunch: say, duck breast served with polenta and glazed mushroom caps. Each lunch menu was accompanied by a wonderful dessert: ice cream, creme brulee, New York cheesecake, triple chocolate cake with raspberry-creme filling. It was torturous, particularly for poor Dan, who had a powerful sweet tooth. Being a smart, rational, cholesterolically challenged economist, Dan wanted dessert, but he also understood that eating dessert daily is not advisable.
Dan thought about his problem for a while and concluded that when faced with temptation, a rational person should sometimes succumb. Why? Because by doing so, the rational person can keep him- or herself from becoming too depleted, remaining strong for whatever temptations the future may bring. So for Dan, who was very careful and concerned about future temptations, it was always carpe diem when it came to the daily dessert. And yes, along with Emre Ozdenoren and Steve Salant, Dan wrote an academic paper justifying this approach.
ON A MORE serious note, these experiments with depletion suggest that, in general, we would be well served to realize that we are continually tempted throughout the day and that our ability to fight this temptation weakens with time and accumulated resistance. If we’re really serious about losing weight, we should get rid of temptation by clearing our shelves and refrigerator of all the sugary, salty, fatty, and processed foods and acclimating to the taste of fresh produce. We should do this not only because we know that fried chicken and cake are bad for us but also because we know that exposing ourselves to such temptations throughout the day (and every time we open a cupboard or the refrigerator) makes it more difficult for us to fight off this and other temptations throughout the day.
Understanding depletion also means that (to the extent that we can) we should face the situations that require self-control—a particularly tedious assignment at work, for example—early in the day, before we are too depleted. This, of course, is not easy advice to follow because the commercial forces around us (bars, online shopping, Facebook, YouTube, online computer games, and so on) thrive on both temptation and depletion, which is why they are so successful.
Granted, we cannot avoid being exposed to all threats to our self-control. So is there any hope for us? Here’s one suggestion: once we realize that it is very hard to turn away when we face temptation, we can recognize that a better strategy is to walk away from the draw of desire before we are close enough to be snagged by it. Accepting this advice might not be easy, but the reality is that it is much easier to avoid temptation altogether rather than to overcome it when it sits lingering on the kitchen counter. And if we can’t quite do that, we can always try to work on our ability to fight temptation—perhaps by counting to a hundred, singing a song, or making an action plan and sticking to it. Doing any of these can help us build our arsenal of tricks for overcoming temptation so that we are better equipped to fight those urges in the future.
FINALLY, I SHOULD point out that sometimes depletion can be beneficial. Occasionally, we may feel that we are too much in control, dealing with too many restrictions, and that we’re not sufficiently free to follow our impulses. Perhaps sometimes, we just need to stop being responsible adults and let loose. So here’s a tip: next time you really want to let it all hang out and indulge your primal self, try depleting yourself first by writing a long autobiographical essay without using the letters “a” and “n.” Then go to a mall, try on different things, but buy nothing. Afterward, with all of this depletion weighing on you, place yourself in the tempting situation of your choice and let ’er rip. Just don’t use this trick too often.
AND IF YOU really need a more official-sounding excuse to succumb to temptation from time to time, just use Dan Silverman’s theory of rational self-indulgence as the ultimate license.
CHAPTER 5
Why Wearing Fakes Makes Us Cheat More
