The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It

DON’T EAT THE APPLE
James Erskine, a psychologist at St. George’s University of London, is fascinated by Wegner’s
research on white bears. But he believes that thought suppression doesn’t just make it more likely that
we’ll 
think
something—it makes us compelled to 
do
the very thing we’re trying not to think of. He’s
long marveled at people’s tendency to do the exact opposite of what they want to do (himself
included, though this intrepid writer was unable to pry any details out of Erskine). His favorite author
is Dostoyevsky, whose characters routinely vow not to do something, only to find themselves
moments later doing that very thing. Of course, Dostoyevsky’s characters are more likely to be
conflicted over the urge to kill than the desire for dessert. Nevertheless, Erskine suspects that the
process of ironic rebound is behind all of our self-sabotaging behavior, from breaking a diet to
smoking, drinking, gambling, and having sex (presumably, with someone you’re not supposed to be
swapping DNA with).
Erskine first demonstrated how dangerous thought suppression is to self-control with one of the
world’s most craved substances: chocolate. (To appreciate the near universality of chocolate
cravings, consider this: For a study designed to examine the differences between people who crave
chocolate and people who don’t, it took researchers a year just to find eleven men who didn’t like
chocolate.) Erskine invited women into his laboratory for a taste test of two similar chocolate
candies.
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Before the chocolate was brought in, he asked the women to think out loud for five minutes.
He told some women to express any thoughts of chocolate, and others to suppress any thoughts of
chocolate. (A third of the women were given no special thought-control instructions, for comparison.)
At first, thought suppression appeared to work. Women who tried not to think about chocolate
reported fewer thoughts about chocolate—in one study, they had an average of only nine thoughts,
compared with fifty-two by the women who were told to express any thoughts about chocolate. But
anyone rooting for suppression should not get their hopes up. The real measure of success is the taste
test.
The experimenter then presented each woman with two bowls con-taining twenty individually
wrapped chocolates. They were left alone in the room with a survey about the chocolates, and invited
to eat as many chocolates as necessary to answer the questions. In each study, the results were the
same: Women ate almost twice as many chocolates if they tried not to think about chocolate before the
taste test. Dieters showed the biggest rebound of all, revealing that the people most likely to use
thought suppression as a defense strategy against temptation are the most vulnerable to its unwanted
effects. A 2010 survey found that dieters are much more likely than nondieters to try to suppress
thoughts about food. And—as Wegner’s white bears would predict—dieters who suppress thoughts
about food have the 
least
control around food. They experience more intense food cravings and are
more likely to binge-eat than those who do not try to control their thoughts.

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