According to a new study, our brains are capable of saving us from yielding to temptation even when we're not aware of it.
Not many people have the strength to resist temptation. Picking up a cigarette, having an extra drink, eating high calorie food when on a diet and spending more money than one should are some common temptations that people often succumb to. A new study found that the brain is capable of saving a person from yielding to such temptation, even when the person is not aware of it.
The study conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that certain inaction-related words in our environment can unconsciously influence our self-control.
"Many important behaviors such as weight loss, giving up smoking, and saving money involve a lot of self-control," the researchers noted in a press release. "While many psychological theories state that actions can be initiated automatically with little or no conscious effort, these same theories view inhibition as an effortful, consciously controlled process. Although reaching for that cookie doesn't require much thought, putting it back on the plate seems to require a deliberate, conscious intervention. Our research challenges the long-held assumption that inhibition processes require conscious control to operate."
For the study, a group of volunteers were given a few instructions to follow. They were asked to press a computer key when they saw the letter "X" on the screen and not to press any key when they saw the letter "Y" on the screen. These letters were accompanied by words that flashed on the screen to affect the participant's actions. Action words and inaction words alternately flashed on the screen and all participants were equipped with electroencephalogram recording equipment to measure brain activity.
Those both sets of words had nothing to do with the actions the participants were conducting; researchers found that these words had a definite effect on the volunteers' brain activity. While inaction words increased the activity of the brain's self-control processes, action words decreased this same activity.
