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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences
Hunger And Reduced Self-Control In The Laboratory And Across The World: Reducing Hunger As A Self-Control Panacea, Matthew T. Gailliot
Hunger And Reduced Self-Control In The Laboratory And Across The World: Reducing Hunger As A Self-Control Panacea, Matthew T. Gailliot
Faculty Publications
Ten studies link hunger to reduced self-control. Higher levels of hunger-as assessed by self-report, time since last eating, or physiology-predicted reduced self-control, as indicated by increased racial prejudice, (hypothetical) sexual infidelity, passivity, accessibility of death thoughts and perceptions of task difficulty, as well as impaired Stroop performance and decreased self-monitoring. Increased rates of hunger across 200 countries predicted increased war killings, suggestive of reduced aggressive restraint. In a final experiment, self-reported hunger mediated the effect of hungry (v fed) participants performing worse on the Stroop task, suggesting a causal relationship of hunger reducing self-control.
Improved Self-Control Associated With Using Relatively Large Amounts Of Glucose: Learning Self-Control Is Metabolically Expensive, Matthew T. Gailliot
Improved Self-Control Associated With Using Relatively Large Amounts Of Glucose: Learning Self-Control Is Metabolically Expensive, Matthew T. Gailliot
Faculty Publications
The current study examined whether changes in glucose during a self-control task would predict changes in self-control performance later on. Participants attended two experimental sessions, spaced two weeks apart. During each session, they had their glucose measured, completed the Stroop task as a measure of self-control, and then had their glucose measured again. Larger decreases in glucose (from before to after the Stroop task) during the first session predicted larger increases in improvement on the Stroop task during the second session, in the form of increased speed. Learning self-control might benefit from using larger amounts of glucose. Learning self-control is …
Breaking The Rules: Low Trait Or State Self-Control Increases Social Norm Violations, Matthew T. Gailliot, Seth A. Gitter, Michael D. Baker, Roy F. Baumeister
Breaking The Rules: Low Trait Or State Self-Control Increases Social Norm Violations, Matthew T. Gailliot, Seth A. Gitter, Michael D. Baker, Roy F. Baumeister
Faculty Publications
Two pilot and six studies indicated that poor self-control causes people to violate social norms and rules that are effortful to follow. Lower trait self-control was associated with a greater willingness to take ethical risks and use curse words. Participants who completed an initial self-control task that reduced the capacity for self-control used more curse words and were more willing to take ethical risks than participants who completed a neutral task. Poor self-control was also associated with violating explicit rules given by the experimenter. Depleting self-control resources in a self-control exercise caused participants subsequently to talk when they had been …