Everything Is Crumbling

By Daniel Engber
Slate.com
Originally published March 16, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

The authors called this effect “ego depletion” and said it revealed a fundamental fact about the human mind: We all have a limited supply of willpower, and it decreases with overuse. Eating a radish when you’re surrounded by fresh-baked cookies represents an epic feat of self-denial, and one that really wears you out. Willpower, argued Baumeister and Tice, draws down mental energy—it’s a muscle that can be exercised to exhaustion.

That simple idea—perhaps intuitive for nonscientists, but revolutionary in the field—turned into a research juggernaut. In the years that followed, Baumeister and Tice’s lab, as well as dozens of others, published scores of studies using similar procedures. First, the scientists would deplete subjects’ willpower with a task that requires self-control: don’t eat chocolate chip cookies, watch this sad movie but don’t react at all. Then, a few minutes later, they’d test them with a puzzle, a game, or something else that requires mental effort.

The article is here.

How Our Self-Control Affects the Way We See Risk

Research shows that people with low self-control tend to underplay the negative consequences of their decisions.

by Kerry A. Dolan
Stanford Business
November 25, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Academic research has long shown that people with low self-control engage in riskier behaviors than do those with higher self-control. But what is the connection between self-control and risk? Are people with low self-control simply unable to stop themselves from risky behavior?

Not exactly. In a new study, researchers from Stanford and the University of Hong Kong found that people with low self-control look at consequences differently than those with higher self-control.

The article is here.

Humility facilitates higher self-control

Eddie M.W. Tong, Kenny W.T. Tan, Agapera A.B. Chor, E. P.S. Koh, J. S.Y. Lee, R. W.Y. Tan
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 62, January 2016, Pages 30–39

Abstract

Prior evidence and existing theories imply that humility engenders intra- and inter-personal attributes that facilitate self-regulatory abilities. Four experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that humility predicts enhanced self-control. Participants who recalled humility experiences were found to be better able at sustaining their physical stamina in a handgrip task (Studies 1 and 4), resisting indulgence in chocolates (Study 2), and persevering in a frustrating tracing task (Study 3) than those who recalled neutral experiences. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that the effect of humility was distinct from that of self-esteem, which did not affect self-control. Study 2 ruled out two alternative hypotheses concerning achievement and compliance motives. We discuss how the findings might relate to outcomes associated with humility as evidenced in past studies.

The study can be found here.

Haunts or Helps from the Past: Understanding the Effect of Recall on Current Self-Control

Hristina Nikolova, Cait Lamberton, and Kelly L. Haws
Journal of Consumer Psychology
Available online 30 June 2015

Scientific Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that remembering our past, and particularly, the mistakes we have made, will help us make better decisions in the present. But how successful is this practice in the domain of self-control? Our work examines how the content of consumers' recollections (past self-control successes versus failures) and the subjective difficulty with which this content comes to mind (easily or with difficulty) jointly shape consumers' self-control decisions. When successes are easy to recall, we find that people display more self-control than when they have difficulty recalling successes.  However, recalling failures prompts indulgence regardless of its difficulty. We suggest that these differences in behavior may exist because recalling failures has substantially different affective and cognitive consequences than does recalling successes. Consistent with this theory, we demonstrate that self-certainty moderates the effects of recall on self-control. Taken together, this work enhances our understanding of self-control, self-perceptions, and metacognition.

Layperson interpretation can be found here.

Professional article can be found here.

Role of self-control failure in immoral and unethical actions

Roy F Baumeister and Nawal G Alghamdi
Current Opinion in Psychology
Volume 6, December 2015, Pages 66–69

Moral virtue depends on self-control to override immoral impulses, so self-control failure can impair moral action. We discuss three components of self-control and how failure of any component can affect moral behavior. Lack of clear standards and lack of commitment to standards deprives the individual of clear inner guidance. Failure to monitor one's actions, as when self-awareness is low such as due to emotion or alcohol, deprives the individual of the ability to know whether behavior conforms to moral standards. Ego depletion signifies inadequate willpower to make oneself do what is right. Evidence supports these hypotheses but more is needed.

Highlights

• Self-control underpins moral action.
• Unethical actions often reflect failure of self-control.
• Failures of self-control can be caused by unclear or conflicting standards, by failure to monitor relevant actions, and by ego depletion (loss of capacity to alter actions).

The article is here.

Anticipating and Resisting the Temptation to Behave Unethically

Oliver J. Sheldon and Ayelet Fishbach
Published online before print May 22, 2015
doi: 10.1177/0146167215586196

Abstract

Ethical dilemmas pose a self-control conflict between pursuing immediate benefits through behaving dishonestly and pursuing long-term benefits through acts of honesty. Therefore, factors that facilitate self-control for other types of goals (e.g., health and financial) should also promote ethical behavior. Across four studies, we find support for this possibility. Specifically, we find that only under conditions that facilitate conflict identification—including the consideration of several decisions simultaneously (i.e., a broad decision frame) and perceived high connectedness to the future self—does anticipating a temptation to behave dishonestly in advance promote honesty. We demonstrate these interaction patterns between conflict identification and temptation anticipation in negotiation situations (Study 1), lab tasks (Study 2), and ethical dilemmas in the workplace (Studies 3-4). We conclude that identifying a self-control conflict and anticipating a temptation are two necessary preconditions for ethical decision making.

The article story is here.

My brain made me do it, but does that matter?

By Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
The Conversation
Originally published December 12, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

These extreme cases are easy. Despite some rhetoric, almost nobody really believes that the fact that your brain made you do it is by itself enough to excuse you from moral responsibility. On the other side, almost everybody agrees that some brain states, such as seizures, do remove moral responsibility. The real issues lie in the middle.

What about mental illnesses? Addictions? Compulsions? Brainwashing? Hypnosis? Tumors? Coercion? Alien hand syndrome? Multiple personality disorder? These cases are all tricky, so philosophers disagree about which people in these conditions are responsible — and why. Nonetheless, these difficult cases do not show that there is no difference between seizures and normal desires, just as twilight does not show that there is no difference between night and day. It is hard to draw a line, but that does not mean that there is no line.

The entire article is here.

Does 'free will' stem from brain noise?

Press Release
University of California-Davis
Originally published June 9, 2014

Our ability to make choices — and sometimes mistakes — might arise from random fluctuations in the brain's background electrical noise, according to a recent study from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis.

"How do we behave independently of cause and effect?" said Jesse Bengson, a postdoctoral researcher at the center and first author on the paper. "This shows how arbitrary states in the brain can influence apparently voluntary decisions."

The brain has a normal level of "background noise," Bengson said, as electrical activity patterns fluctuate across the brain. In the new study, decisions could be predicted based on the pattern of brain activity immediately before a decision was made.

The entire press release is here.

Ever-so-slight delay improves decision-making accuracy

By Columbia University Medical Center
Press Release
Originally released on March 8, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

“Decision making isn’t always easy, and sometimes we make errors on seemingly trivial tasks, especially if multiple sources of information compete for our attention,” said first author Tobias Teichert, PhD, a postdoctoral research scientist in neuroscience at CUMC at the time of the study and now an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. “We have identified a novel mechanism that is surprisingly effective at improving response accuracy.

The mechanism requires that decision-makers do nothing—just briefly. “Postponing the onset of the decision process by as little as 50 to 100 milliseconds enables the brain to focus attention on the most relevant information and block out irrelevant distractors,” said last author Jack Grinband, PhD, associate research scientist in the Taub Institute and assistant professor of clinical radiology (physics). “This way, rather than working longer or harder at making the decision, the brain simply postpones the decision onset to a more beneficial point in time.”

The entire press release can be found at PsyPost here.

The Power of Conscious Intention Proven At Last?

By Neuroskeptic
The Neuroskeptic Blog
Originally published March 15, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

To simplify, one school of thought holds that (at least some of the time), our intentions or plans control our actions. Many people would say that this is what common sense teaches us as well.

But there’s an alternative view, in which our consciously-experienced intentions are not causes of our actions but are actually products of them, being generated after the action has already begun. This view is certainly counterintuitive, and many find it disturbing as it seems to undermine ‘free will’.

That’s the background. Zschorlich and Köhling say that they’ve demonstrated that conscious intentions do exist, prior to motor actions, and that these intentions are accompanied by particular changes in brain activity. They claim to have done this using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a way of causing a localized modulation of brain electrical activity.

The entire blog post is here.

Human brains 'hard-wired' to link what we see with what we do

University of London
Originally posted March 13, 2014

Summary

Your brain's ability to instantly link what you see with what you do is down to a dedicated information 'highway,' suggests new research. For the first time, researchers have found evidence of a specialized mechanism for spatial self-awareness that combines visual cues with body motion. The newly-discovered system could explain why some schizophrenia patients feel like their actions are controlled by someone else.

The entire story is here.

The War on Reason

Scientists and philosophers argue that human beings are little more than puppets of their biochemistry. Here's why they're wrong.

By Paul Bloom
The Atlantic 
Originally posted on February 19, 2014

Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal has recently taken quite a beating.

Part of the attack comes from neuroscience. Pretty, multicolored fMRI maps make clear that our mental lives can be observed in the activity of our neurons, and we’ve made considerable progress in reading someone’s thoughts by looking at those maps. It’s clear, too, that damage to the brain can impair the most-intimate aspects of ourselves, such as the capacity to make moral judgments or to inhibit bad actions. To some scholars, the neural basis of mental life suggests that rational deliberation and free choice are illusions. Because our thoughts and actions are the products of our brains, and because what our brains do is determined by the physical state of the world and the laws of physics—perhaps with a dash of quantum randomness in the mix—there seems to be no room for choice. As the author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has put it, we are “biochemical puppets.”

The entire article is here.

Theory of Mind: Did Evolution Fool Us?

By Marie Devaine, Guillaume Hollard, and Jean Daunizeau
PLOS One
Published: February 05, 2014 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0087619

Abstract

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) to other people in order to understand and predict their behaviour. If others are rewarded to compete or cooperate with you, then what they will do depends upon what they believe about you. This is the reason why social interaction induces recursive ToM, of the sort “I think that you think that I think, etc.”. Critically, recursion is the common notion behind the definition of sophistication of human language, strategic thinking in games, and, arguably, ToM. Although sophisticated ToM is believed to have high adaptive fitness, broad experimental evidence from behavioural economics, experimental psychology and linguistics point towards limited recursivity in representing other’s beliefs. In this work, we test whether such apparent limitation may not in fact be proven to be adaptive, i.e. optimal in an evolutionary sense. First, we propose a meta-Bayesian approach that can predict the behaviour of ToM sophistication phenotypes who engage in social interactions. Second, we measure their adaptive fitness using evolutionary game theory. Our main contribution is to show that one does not have to appeal to biological costs to explain our limited ToM sophistication. In fact, the evolutionary cost/benefit ratio of ToM sophistication is non trivial. This is partly because an informational cost prevents highly sophisticated ToM phenotypes to fully exploit less sophisticated ones (in a competitive context). In addition, cooperation surprisingly favours lower levels of ToM sophistication. Taken together, these quantitative corollaries of the “social Bayesian brain” hypothesis provide an evolutionary account for both the limitation of ToM sophistication in humans as well as the persistence of low ToM sophistication levels.

The entire article is here.

The Morning Morality Effect: The Influence of Time of Day on Unethical Behavior.

By M. Kouchaki & I.H. Smith
Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University
Psychol Sci. 2013 Oct 28

Abstract

Are people more moral in the morning than in the afternoon? We propose that the normal, unremarkable experiences associated with everyday living can deplete one's capacity to resist moral temptations. In a series of four experiments, both undergraduate students and a sample of U.S. adults engaged in less unethical behavior (e.g., less lying and cheating) on tasks performed in the morning than on the same tasks performed in the afternoon. This morning morality effect was mediated by decreases in moral awareness and self-control in the afternoon. Furthermore, the effect of time of day on unethical behavior was found to be stronger for people with a lower propensity to morally disengage. These findings highlight a simple yet pervasive factor (i.e., the time of day) that has important implications for moral behavior.

The entire story is here, hiding behind a paywall.

Restricting Temptations: Neural Mechanisms of Precommitment

Molly J. Crockett, Barbara R. Braams, Luke Clark, Philippe N. Tobler, Trevor W. Robbins, & Tobias Kalenscher
Neuron, Volume 79, Issue 2, 391-401, 24 July 2013
10.1016/j.neuron.2013.05.028

Summary

Humans can resist temptations by exerting willpower, the effortful inhibition of impulses. But willpower can be disrupted by emotions and depleted over time. Luckily, humans can deploy alternative self-control strategies like precommitment, the voluntary restriction of access to temptations. Here, we examined the neural mechanisms of willpower and precommitment using fMRI. Behaviorally, precommitment facilitated choices for large delayed rewards, relative to willpower, especially in more impulsive individuals. While willpower was associated with activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), posterior parietal cortex (PPC), and inferior frontal gyrus, precommitment engaged lateral frontopolar cortex (LFPC). During precommitment, LFPC showed increased functional connectivity with DLPFC and PPC, especially in more impulsive individuals, and the relationship between impulsivity and LFPC connectivity was mediated by value-related activation in ventromedial PFC. Our findings support a hierarchical model of self-control in which LFPC orchestrates precommitment by controlling action plans in more caudal prefrontal regions as a function of expected value.

The entire article is here.