If you consider those sweet temptations as a bigger threat you will resist those tempting cookies, according to a new study.
Researchers at University of Texas at Austin found that your ability to resist that temptation depends on how a big a threat you perceive it to be.Authors Ying Zhang, Szu-Chi Huang and Susan M. Broniarczyk studied techniques that enable us to resist food and other temptations.
"Four experiments show that when consumers encounter temptations that conflict with their long-term goals, one self-control mechanism is to exaggerate the negativity of the temptation as a way to resist, a process we call counteractive construal," wrote the researchers.
For example, in one study, female participants were asked to estimate the calories in a cookie. Half the participants were told that they have the option of receiving the cookie as a complimentary gift for participation and half were not.
The results showed that consumers with a strong dieting goal construed the cookie as having more calories and being more damaging to the attainment of their long-term goal of losing weight.
Another study demonstrated that counteractive construal is helpful in situations that involve a self-control conflict.
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In one study, female participants entered a room that either had posters depicting fit models or nature scenery.
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"The mental construal of temptations may be distorted when people experience a self-control conflict, and such distorted construal, rather than accurate representations, determines consumers' actual consumption, helping them resist the temptation and maintaining their long-term goal," concluded the authors.
The study has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Source-ANI
TRI