Ying Zhang, PhD
Ying Zhang, PhD, associate dean, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, China anf formerly assistant professor of marketing, University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business, Austin.
Adding a bit of drama to your inner dialogue may help you stick to your exercise routine or take a pass on that second helping. That’s the lesson from a study from the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. It reveals how some people are able to look temptation in the eye… and then say no.
To investigate how consumers (in this case, college students) respond to temptations that are in conflict with their personal goals, the researchers created four different scenarios—three involving tempting foods and the other an invitation to a Friday night party that might make it challenging to wake up early for Saturday morning classes or studying.
To test the mechanisms of self-control, the researchers manipulated the situations in a variety of ways to make temptations more or less accessible. They discovered that the study participants who were most committed to, in this case, their healthy bodies or their grades, countered temptation by substantially exaggerating the threat it carried. That is to say, in their minds, they embellished the temptation with all sorts of vile, horrific and hair-raising characteristics, making it easier to just say “no.”
For example, when faced with access to a 100-calorie cookie, women who described themselves as diet-conscious estimated that it had as many as 800 calories. In the party-invitation group, the students who already had high grade point averages told themselves that the Friday night party would run extremely late, while the students with lower grades rationalized that it would end reasonably early.
According to Ying Zhang, PhD, lead study author, this study demonstrates an excellent tool for buttressing self-control—one you can use anywhere, anytime, whether to go to bed earlier, save money, eat more healthfully, exercise longer or for any other goal. The idea is to make the potential consequences of the temptation so bad, he says, that giving in to it becomes completely out of the question. The more accessible the temptation, the stronger the threat you should attach to it, says Dr. Zhang. “If you are faced with an impulsive purchase, exaggerate what a huge dent it will make in your retirement savings or the money that you need for your big vacation,” he suggests. “This will make you much less likely to buy it because you are now thinking ‘this would be so bad, I definitely must not do it!’
According to Dr. Zhang, your first attempts to do this may be self-conscious. You’ll have to remind yourself to overstate the consequences of giving in, but in time this behavior can become automatic. If you consistently exaggerate threats to your goals, he says, you’ll build this tactic into “an automatic reflex tool for long-term self-control.” And the consequences of that will be terrific!
