Showing papers by "Roy F. Baumeister published in 2008"

Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative.

Abstract: The current research tested the hypothesis that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. Drawing from a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function, the authors hypothesized that decision making depletes the same resource used for self-control and active responding. In 4 laboratory studies, some participants made choices among consumer goods or college course options, whereas others thought about the same options without making choices. Making choices led to reduced self-control (i.e., less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations). A field study then found that reduced self-control was predicted by shoppers' self-reported degree of previous active decision making. Further studies suggested that choosing is more depleting than merely deliberating and forming preferences about options and more depleting than implementing choices made by someone else and that anticipating the choice task as enjoyable can reduce the depleting effect for the first choices but not for many choices.

Depletion Makes the Heart Grow Less Helpful: Helping as a Function of Self-Regulatory Energy and Genetic Relatedness

Abstract: Often people are faced with conflict between prosocial motivations for helping and selfish impulses that favor not helping. Three studies tested the hypothesis that self-regulation is useful for managing such motivational conflicts. In each study, depleted self-regulatory energy reduced willingness to help others. Participants who broke a habit, relative to participants who followed a habit, later reported reduced willingness to help in hypothetical scenarios (e.g., donating food or money; Studies 1 and 3). Controlling attention while watching a video, relative to watching it normally, reduced volunteering efforts to help a victim of a recent tragedy- but drinking a glucose drink undid this effect (Study 2). Depleted energy reduced helping toward strangers but it did not reduce helping toward family members (Study 3). Helping requires self-regulatory energy to manage conflict between selfish and prosocial motivations-a metabolically expensive process-and thus depleted energy reduces helping and increased energy (glucose) increases helping.

Toward a Physiology of Dual-Process Reasoning and Judgment: Lemonade, Willpower, and Expensive Rule-Based Analysis

Abstract: This experiment used the attraction effect to test the hypothesis that ingestion of sugar can reduce reliance on intuitive, heuristic-based decision making. In the attraction effect, a difficult choice between two options is swayed by the presence of a seemingly irrelevant "decoy" option. We replicated this effect and the finding that the effect increases when people have depleted their mental resources performing a previous self-control task. Our hypothesis was based on the assumption that effortful processes require and consume relatively large amounts of glucose (brain fuel), and that this use of glucose is why people use heuristic strategies after exerting self-control. Before performing any tasks, some participants drank lemonade sweetened with sugar, which restores blood glucose, whereas others drank lemonade containing a sugar substitute. Only lemonade with sugar reduced the attraction effect. These results show one way in which the body (blood glucose) interacts with the mind (self-control and reliance on heuristics).

Free Will in Scientific Psychology

Abstract: Some actions are freer than others, and the difference is palpably important in terms of inner process, subjective perception, and social consequences. Psychology can study the difference between freer and less free actions without making dubious metaphysical commitments. Human evolution seems to have created a relatively new, more complex form of action control that corresponds to popular notions of free will. It is marked by self-control and rational choice, both of which are highly adaptive, especially for functioning within culture. The processes that create these forms of free will may be biologically costly and therefore are only used occasionally, so that people are likely to remain only incompletely self-disciplined, virtuous, and rational.

Satiated With Belongingness? Effects of Acceptance, Rejection, and Task Framing on Self-Regulatory Performance

Abstract: Seven experiments showed that the effects of social acceptance and social exclusion on self-regulatory performance depend on the prospect of future acceptance. Excluded participants showed decrements in self-regulation, but these decrements were eliminated if the self-regulation task was ostensibly a diagnostic indicator of the ability to get along with others. No such improvement was found when the task was presented as diagnostic of good health. Accepted participants, in contrast, performed relatively poorly when the task was framed as a diagnostic indicator of interpersonally attractive traits. Furthermore, poor performance among accepted participants was not due to self-handicapping or overconfidence. Offering accepted participants a cash incentive for self-regulating eliminated the self-regulation deficits. These findings provide evidence that the need to belong fits standard motivational patterns: Thwarting the drive intensifies it, whereas satiating it leads to temporary reduction in drive. Accepted people are normally good at self-regulation but are unwilling to exert the effort to self-regulate if self-regulation means gaining the social acceptance they have already obtained.

Not so innocent: Does seeing one's own capability for wrongdoing predict forgiveness?

Abstract: People are more forgiving toward transgressors if they see themselves as capable of committing similar offenses, as demonstrated in 7 studies Methods included hypothetical scenarios, actual recalled offenses, individual and group processes, and correlational and experimental designs Three factors mediated the link between personal capability and forgiveness: seeing the other's offense as less severe, greater empathic understanding, and perceiving oneself as similar to the transgressor In terms of predicting forgiveness, it was important that people's own offenses were similar to the target offense in terms of both severity and type The personal capability effect was independent of other established predictors of forgiveness and was more pronounced among men than women

Are We Free

Abstract: 1. Introduction: Psychology and Free Will 2. How Can Psychology Contribute to the Free Will Debate? 3. Determined and Free 4. Self-Theories: The Construction of Free Will 5. Free Will, Consciousness, and Cultural Animals 6. Reconstrual of "Free Will" from the Agentic Perspective of Social Cognitive Theory 7. Free Will is Un-natural 8. The Automaticity Juggernaut - or, Are We Automatons After All? 9. The Hazards of Claiming to Have Solved the Hard Problem of Free Will 10. Free Will and the Control of Action 11. Self is Magic 12. Some Observations on the Psychology of Thinking about Free Will 13. Whose will? How free? 14. Free Will as a Proportion of Variance 15. Willing Creation: The Yin and Yang of the Creative Life 16. Free Will Requires Determinism 17. The Fear of Determinism 18. Psychology and Free Will: A Commentary

We're All Victims Here: Toward a Psychology of Revenge

Abstract: When people are hurt or angered by another person they may try to restore equity to the relationship. Yet each party's perception of what is equitable may vary. Study 1 compared incidents of revenge from the revenge-seeker perspective (avengers) to those from the revenge-recipients' perspective. Study 2 compared avenger incidents to those from victims of interpersonal transgressions who did not seek revenge. Avengers portrayed the revenge as equitable, whereas recipients portrayed the revenge as excessive. Both avengers and recipients presented themselves as victims. In light of these findings, it is understandable why vendettas take place. Each seeks a fair and equitable solution, although what one party believes to be fair, the other party sees as excessive. The result, then, may be an escalating cycle of revenge, stemming from ongoing and spiraling attempts to restore equity.

Is the allure of self-esteem a mirage after all?

Abstract: Comments on the original article "Do people's self-views matter? Self-concept and self-esteem in everyday life," by W. B. Swann, Jr., C. Chang-Schneider, and K. L. McClarty. Swann et al argued that people's self-views, and their global self-esteem in particular, yield a suite of behavioral effects that are beneficial to the individual and to society at large. The Swann et al article is the latest link in a debate on the causal utility of self-esteem. Specifically, the article is a reply to a report published by the American Psychological Society Task Force on Self-Esteem (Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, & Vohs, 2003). As members of that task force, the current authors wish to express their broad agreement with Swann et al. At the same time, in the comment presented here, they clarify pockets of disagreement.

Social Rejection Can Reduce Pain and Increase Spending: Further Evidence That Money, Pain, and Belongingness Are Interrelated

Abstract: At first blush, money, pain, and social support would seem to be worlds apart. Pain is a fundamental biological fact built into the bodies of almost all animals. Social support, reflected in the su...

Can satisfaction reinforce wanting?: A new theory about long-term changes in strength of motivation.

Abstract: The purpose of this chapter is to provide a preliminary, speculative statement of a new motivational theory. We propose that motivation for a certain outcome can gradually change in strength over time as a function of whether it is satisfied or frustrated. Specifically, we propose that satisfaction will increase the strength of the motivation, whereas nonsatisfaction will gradually weaken it. This theory runs directly contrary to the standard motivational theories, which have long held that satisfaction will reduce drive (Hull, 1943; Spence, 1956). However, we do not present the new view as a contrary or rival view, but rather a compatible one. The difference lies in the time frames. In the very short run, satisfying a motivation will decrease the drive. In the longer run, however, satisfaction will ensure that when the drive does come back, it will do so with increased strength. Satisfaction reinforces desire, and so when desire emerges again, its strength will be increased. Conversely, to want something without getting it is at best an absence of reinforcement and quite possibly is punishing, and so that experience will gradually diminish and perhaps ultimately extinguish the motivation. STATEMENT OF THEORY From our perspective, the field of motivation theory is hardly full of metatheory or other integrative, overarching theories. The main — and often implicit — integrative model is what we call the satiation cycle, which is the presumption that motivation conforms to a standard pattern: The person desires something, pursues satisfaction, achieves satisfaction, whereupon the motivation diminishes substantially. At some point, and for possibly unexplained reasons, the motivation re-emerges, and the cycle of seeking and getting starts again. We have no quarrel with the satiation cycle. We propose, however, that if one adopts a longer temporal view, there is another pattern that motivation theorists have overlooked. The idealized form of the satiation cycle (wanting, seeking, getting, not wanting, then wanting again) is not a steady state. Rather, when it occurs on a regular basis, the latter wanting may become stronger than the initial wanting, which is what the current theory suggests. Conversely, if the satiation cycle is frustrated, such that wanting and seeking do not meet with satisfaction, the subsequent wanting may be diminished. Hence our theory proposes two central hypotheses. The first, which we have dubbed " getting begets wanting, " holds that when a motivation leads to satisfaction or some other form of reward and then …

Is the conscious self a help, a hindrance, or an irrelevance to the creative process?

Abstract: Four studies suggested that conscious processing makes valuable, essential contributions to the creative process. A conscious goal to be creative elicited more creative story titles, whereas nonconscious priming of creativity failed to increase creativity. A cognitive load that preoccupied conscious processing lowered the creativity of musical improvisation, while uncreative aspects of performance were unaffected. Conscious distraction reduced the creativity of drawings — but again did not have any impact on the uncreative aspects of performance. Depletion of the conscious self’s resources by a manipulated exercise in habitbreaking led people to generate fewer and less creative responses on an alternate uses task. Creativity may depend on effective interplay between conscious and nonconscious processes.

Rejection Exaggerates Egocentric Perception of Fairness in Resource Allocation

Abstract: The present research tests the idea that rejection may exaggerate the egocentric perception of fairness. Rejection was induced by social exclusion. Participants then received monetary compensation for enduring dissonant noise, and another manipulation involved the amount of noise. In the self-suffered-more condition, participants were told that they had endured more noise than the other person. In the partner-suffered-more condition, participants endured less noise than the other person. All participants were asked to distribute a monetary compensation fairly between themselves and an anonymous individual external to their group. The results showed that the rejected participants kept more money as their fair compensation than the accepted participants when they encountered the prospect of receiving less payment than their partner.