Do you make better decisions with a full bladder?
.
Exerting self-control with your bladder carries over to self-control in decision-making as well:
Visceral states are known to have a (detrimental) impact on our ability to exert self-control. In the current research, we investigate the impact of a visceral factor associated with inhibition, rather than with approach: bladder control. We argue that inhibitory signals are not domain specific, but can spill over to unrelated domains, resulting in increased impulse control in the behavioral domain. We show that urination urgency correlates with improved performance on color naming but not word meaning trials of a Stroop task (Study 1). In Study 2 and 3, we show that higher levels of bladder control result in an increasing ability to resist more immediate temptations in monetary decision making. We show that inhibitory spillover effects are moderated by sensitivity of the behavioral inhibition system (BIS, Study 3), and can be induced by exogenous cues (Study 4). Implications for inhibition and impulse control theories are discussed.
Source: “INHIBITORY SPILLOVER: INCREASED URINATION URGENCY FACILITATES IMPULSE CONTROL IN UNRELATED DOMAINS” from Psychological Science
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or RSS.
Digests of posts:
Things you didn’t know about sex
How to quickly and easily improve your life
Things you didn’t know about sports
Things you didn’t know about happiness
Things you didn’t know about lies, liars and detecting lies
Things you didn’t know about negotiation, persuasion and influence
