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Fallacy Files Reviews Nudge on Temptation

The Fallacy Files has a review of the 2nd Chapter of Nudge, Resisting Temptation.

"The second chapter concerns what philosophers call "weakness of the will", that is, succumbing to temptation.

T&S give the example of a bowl of nuts (p. 40): knowing that eating the entire bowl will ruin your appetite?as well as being bad for your diet?you may wish not to do so. Yet, if the bowl remains within reach, you may find yourself consuming them all, seemingly against your own will.

T&S explain temptation as the result of a kind of internal conflict between a "cold", rational part of the brain and a "hot", emotional part.

The cold part recognizes that you should not eat too many nuts, but the hot part wants to eat them all.

When you're confronted by the bowl of nuts, the emotional part heats up and may gain the upper hand over the cold part, and there go the nuts."

He is rightly skeptical of this conclusion or simply bifurcation between hot and cold parts of the brain.

Here is his explanation of why snacks are tempting:

"I suggest that there is a "slippery slope" phenomenon at work: foods which come in small pieces, such as nuts and chips, tempt you out on to a slippery slope.

"I don't want to eat the whole bowl, but one nut won't hurt," you think.

So you eat one nut. However, the same piece of reasoning applies again: one more nut won't hurt, and so on.

Once we start down this road the only non-arbitrary stopping point is when the bowl is empty.

A single large piece of cake may be just as tempting as the nuts, but instead of a slope there is one step followed by a plummet to the bottom."

This makes more sense too me; at each stage of the decision it appears reasonable and rational to have just one more - until we get to the end, and all 24 bottles of beer have been consumed.

What is odd, however, is that while we have ample opportunities to forecast exactly what will happen after just one more ends, it doesn't seem that knowledge is an effective barrier or constraint. We even know our knowledge is going to be that effective. Odd, very odd.

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Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on July 08, 2008 (boomark / email).