Willpower

eating by not clearing the table too quickly. In an experiment at a sports bar, people ate far fewer chicken wings when the waiters left the discarded bones on their plates. At other tables, where the waiters zealously cleared away the bones, people could fool themselves into forgetting how many wings they’d eaten, but that was impossible at the tables still holding the evidence. The bones did the monitoring for them.

Never Say Never
    The results of dieting research tend to be depressing, but every now and then there’s an exception, and we’ve saved our favorite cheery finding for last. It’s from a dessert-cart experiment conducted by marketing researchers trying to figure out the central problem of self-control: Why is self-denial so difficult? As Mark Twain put it in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: “To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.” That’s one of the more frustrating aspects of the human psyche, but the researchers, Nicole Mead and Vanessa Patrick, looked for relief by considering different kinds of self-denial.
    They started with some mental experiments using pictures of tasty, appealing foods. The experimental subjects were told to imagine these delicacies being offered on a dessert cart in a restaurant. Some imagined choosing their favorite and eating it. The rest, however, imagined passing up dessert in one of two ways. By random assignment, some imagined that they had decided not to eat these desserts at all, and the others imagined that they had told themselves not to have any now, but that they would indulge at some later time. It was the difference between pleasure denied and pleasure postponed.
    Afterward, the experimenters measured how often the people were troubled or distracted by yearnings for the desserts. These researchers knew that unfinished tasks tend to intrude on the mind (due to the Zeigarnik effect, which we discussed in chapter 3), so they expected the desserts to be especially distracting to the people who had postponed the pleasure. Surprisingly, though, the people who had told themselves Not now, but later were less troubled with visions of chocolate cake than the other two groups—both the ones who had imagined eating it and the ones who had flatly denied themselves the pleasure. The researchers had expected the outright denial to cause fewer yearnings because the mind would consider the case closed—no more debate! But the opposite happened. The postponed pleasures did not intrude as much as the foregone ones. When it came to dessert, the mind wouldn’t take no for an answer, at least not in this mental experiment.
    But what if real food was involved? To find out, the researchers brought people in one at a time to watch a short film while sitting next to a bowl of M&M’s (a perpetual favorite in laboratories because they’re so easy to work with—no muss, no fuss). Some people were told to imagine they had decided to eat as much as they wanted while watching the movie. Others were told to imagine they had decided not to eat any of the candy. A third group was told to imagine they had decided not to eat the M&M’s now but would have them later on. In general, the instructions were effective: The ones told to assume they had decided to eat actually did eat considerably more than the ones told to deny or postpone the pleasure. The study proceeded through some questionnaires, after which the experimenter (falsely) said the experiment was now over. Each person was asked to remain and fill out one more questionnaire, which was ostensibly concerned with the quality of the laboratory setting.
    Then, seemingly as an afterthought, the experimenter gave the bowl of M&M’s back to the person and said, “You’re the last subject we have today, and everyone else is gone, so these are left over. Help yourself.” The experimenter exited, leaving the participant alone to fill out the questionnaire and eat his or her fill, apparently without anyone watching or caring. But, as usual, the researchers cared very much. They had weighed the bowl beforehand, and weighed it once again after the participant left.
    Left alone in that room with the M&M’s, the people who’d told themselves to postpone pleasure had a golden opportunity to indulge themselves. You’d expect them to scarf the M&M’s, while the people who’d sworn off the candy would either remain strong or perhaps just nibble. But exactly the