The sweetness of control

The sweetness of control When humans and other animals travel the road to excess, whether for food consumption, violence, power, or sex, it is either because they gave in to an in-the-moment impulsive itch or because a history of losing self-control turned into an addictive habit. What causes us to lose our sense of moderation, allow our mental brakes to slip, and give in to temptation? What causes our preferences to inconsistently and irrationally shift over time, allowing seductive offerings to win? If you are the eminent social psychologist Roy Baumeister who has contributed fundamental insights into the nature of evil, the answer is simple: sugar. Love it. Want it. Need it. When we work hard, focusing on a difficult problem or trying to figure out the best decision, exhaustion strikes. Part of our exhaustion comes from the fact that we have depleted a critical resource: sugar, or more precisely, glucose. When the availability of this resource diminishes, we also lose self- control. This is why the loss of self-control has a cycle that follows the time of day, with the greatest losses occurring late rather than early: diet breakers are more likely to pig out in the evening than early in the morning; shoppers are more likely to buy impulsively as the day moves on; impulsive crimes and relapses of addiction are evening affairs; judges are more likely to dole out punishment at the end of a day in court than when they start a new day. Dozens of experiments show that if you have to exert self- control in one context it taxes your capacity to exert self-control in another. For example, if you ask subjects to avoid laughing while watching a comedy routine, avoid thinking about a white bear, or avoid eating chocolates now to have radishes later, these same subjects will squeeze a hand grip for a shorter period of time than subjects who never contended with the various self-control tasks. When you deplete your personal resources, you lose your grip, opening yourself up to binge eating, unnecessary violence, sexual promiscuity, and drug relapses. How do we know that glucose is responsible? If you give people a milkshake with real sugar before they have to take a hard test involving self-control, they do better than if you give them a milkshake with an artificial sweetener. If you first make people take a test that taxes their attention, and causes their glucose to drop, they do worse on a subsequent test, including the hand grip squeezing test. In an extraordinary series of experiments and observations, the American psychologist Nathan DeWall found that subjects who drank lemonade with glucose were less likely to respond aggressively to an insult than subjects who drank lemonade with artificial sweetener; individuals with diabetes — who have difficulty regulating blood glucose, and thus have less of it— reported higher levels of aggression on a questionnaire than non-diabetics; within the United States, those states with higher numbers of diabetics showed higher crime rates; and countries with a higher frequency of a genetic disorder that lowers glucose levels showed higher killing rates both in and out of war. Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 129 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012875