New Research Explains Why We Give into Vices

People succumb to influences, pressures, and give into vices and addictions every day. A new study conducted at the University of Toronto Scarborough has finally shown what happens in the brain that leads to a loss of self-control, not only that, it shows that once a person looses control, they are unable to get it back on their own.

The study was conducted by Michael Inzlicht and Jennifer Gutsell in order to discover just why it is that people fail to prevent themselves from giving into temptations like drug abuse, alcoholism, crime, and obesity, and other problems. People are often viewed as a dichotomy: they have a very well defined ability to suppress their impulses; and yet, they are also continuously giving into temptations. Inzlicht and Gutsell conducted a study and analysis that helped to shed light on the reason behind the dichotomy.

In the study, Inzlicht and Gutsell showed candidates a very sad movie and asked them to withhold their emotions throughout the film. The theory behind this test is that people can only control themselves so much. All self-control comes from the same brain activity and this source can be exhausted. When a person is exerting a lot of energy to control one area of their life, like sticking to a diet, they increase the chances that they will run out of self-control in other areas of life too. Once the source of self-control is exhausted, the person will do things they don't want to do, like eat chocolate.

The candidates who viewed the film were asked to rate their ability to have suppressed their emotions during the film on a scale from one to nine. They were then asked to carry out what is called a Stroop task. Stroop tasks were designed to show a delayed a reaction in tasks which require a person to first override their automatic response to the task. The Stroop task the candidates were required to complete was looking at a list of printed words that named colors, but were colored with different colors from what the words named. For example, the candidates were asked to say "red" when looking at the word "green" in red font.