Word: controllable
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...study published in the journal Psychological Science sheds more light on this phenomenon by showing how we respond when we watch others exercise self-control, as so many of us are watching fellow Americans cut back in the recession. The authors of the study - psychologists Joshua Ackerman and John Bargh of Yale and social psychologists Noah Goldstein and Jenessa Shapiro of the University of California, Los Angeles - wondered whether people's self-control might be drained vicariously, just by imagining others having to resist temptations...
...foot can cause you to shake yours, even if you don't realize you're doing so. Also, test subjects who mentally simulate a person stubbing his toe often grimace and even feel a bit of phantom pain. So do these same principles apply to the act of self-control...
...answer the question, the authors of the paper replicated an experiment from an important 2007 Journal of Consumer Research study. That paper (here's a PDF) found that people whose self-control had been depleted by taking a demanding test were willing to spend more on items like watches and cars than those who didn't take the test. The Yale and UCLA researchers changed the experiment by having their test subjects read a sad story before putting a value on the same consumer goods. In the story, a struggling waiter arrives at his fancy restaurant hungry...
Sure enough, those who imagined themselves in the waiter's shoes lost some of their self-control. They were willing to spend significantly more on the watches and cars than those who read the waiter's tale without being instructed to empathize...
There may be a physiological as well as a psychological process at work here. A leading theory is that exercising self-control is so hard on your brain that, like physical exercise, it depletes glucose levels, making you feel weaker. It's possible that imagining someone who has to exert self-control, and feeling their misery, tricks your brain into believing that your own glucose levels have declined. As the study says, this trick would, "in effect, set one's internal fuel gauge to 'low' [even if] there is still plenty of fuel left in the tank...