Neuroscience
If at first you don’t succeed, cheat. In Walter Mischel’s classic studies of young children’s self-control, he found that the kids able to resist cookies and marshmallows for longer periods tended to adopt distraction strategies, such as covering their eyes or singing to themselves. Even our chimpanzee cousins are adept at this, although admittedly in their case it’s for greater gain rather than to avoid sin. In a 2007 study Michael Beran at Georgia State University showed that chimps played with toys as a way to distract themselves from a self-filling jar of sweets. The longer they waited before grabbing the jar, the more sweets they’d get. If the jar was out of reach, they didn’t play with the toys so much, which suggests they really were using the toys as a form of distraction.
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This post is part of the Research Digest's Sin Week. Each day for Seven days we'll be posting a confession, a new sin and a way to be good. The festivities coincide with the publication of a feature-length article on the psychology behind the Seven Deadly Sins in this month's Psychologist magazine.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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- Seven New Deadly Sins: 3) Narcissistic Myopia
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Neuroscience
Seven ways to be good: 7) Distract yourself
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This post is part of the Research Digest's Sin Week. Each day for Seven days we'll be posting a confession, a new sin and a way to be good. The festivities coincide with the publication of a feature-length article on the psychology behind the Seven Deadly Sins in this month's Psychologist magazine.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Seven New Deadly Sins: 6) Excessive Debt
‘The financial crisis we're in originated partly because of people running up huge debts they couldn't pay,’ says Roy Baumeister of Florida State University. ‘Politicians and governments also spend beyond their means, creating debts that...
- Seven New Deadly Sins: 5) Mobile Abuse
Mobile abuse: ‘Shouting into your cell phone on the bus, or as the curtain is going up at the opera – that happened to me,’ says Helen Fisher at Rutgers University. ‘I mean where are these people coming from, where is their brain? It is extreme...
- Seven Ways To Be Good: 4) Practise Self-control
Willpower is like a muscle – the more you train it, the more powerful it will become, thus helping you to resist the Seven Deadly Sins. For example, in a study published last year, Mark Muraven at the University of Albany had a subset of participants...
- Seven New Deadly Sins: 3) Narcissistic Myopia
Tim Kasser at Knox College, Illinois, says Narcissistic Myopia is the tendency to be short-sighted and self-centred, ‘taking whatever one wants now and forgetting that future generations of humans rely on the current generation to leave them a habitable...
- Seven New Deadly Sins: 2) Iphonophilia
Iphonophilia: ‘The sin of constantly checking one's smartphone for e- mails/texts/facebook updates, while in conversation with people in the real world,’ says Jessica Tracy at the University of British Columbia. ‘I'm a big fan of these high-tech...