The spoiled pleasure of giving in to temptation
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The spoiled pleasure of giving in to temptation Wilhelm Hofmann • Hiroki Kotabe Maike Luhmann
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Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract Satisfying one’s desires is typically a pleasurable experience and thus a source of momentary happiness. Getting happy in the here and now, however, may be more complicated when people yield to temptations—desires that conflict with personal self-regulatory goals so that they have reason to resist them. Using data from a large experience sampling study on everyday desire, we show that people receive considerably smaller gains in momentary happiness from enacting tempting as compared to nontempting desires. We further demonstrate that this ‘‘spoiled pleasure’’ effect can largely be explained by self-conscious emotions, as statistically accounting for guilt, pride, and regret as mediators reduced the observed hedonic gap to nonsignificance. The present findings challenge the assumption that the costs associated with temptation lie only in the future. Keywords Self-control Temptation Happiness Well-being Self-conscious emotions
Introduction One of the most fundamental principles of motivation is the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure (Bentham 1988; Carver and Scheier 1990; Hull 1943; Lewin 1935). Humans experience immediate pleasure by fulfilling basic
W. Hofmann (&) H. Kotabe Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, 5807 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. Luhmann University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
needs such as eating, sleeping, and reproducing, or modern desires such as eating cake, drinking alcohol, and checking emails on their smartphone. But despite these immediate hedonic rewards, enacting one’s desires is not always wise because the fulfillment of the desire might be in conflict with important long-term goals (e.g., the desire to eat that cake vs. the goal to lose weight). In such cases, the desire becomes a temptation which people attempt to resist through the use of self-control (Baumeister and Heatherton 1996; Hare et al. 2009; Mischel et al. 1989). In other words, people feel tempted when they both desire something and simultaneously perceive the desire to be at odds with endorsed self-regulatory goals so that they have reason to resist enacting the desire (Hofmann and Kotabe 2012; Mele 2001). During tempting episodes, people are therefore torn between immediate hedonic payoff and delayed long-term costs (Loewenstein and Elster 1992; Loewenstein et al. 1997). The standard utilitarian explanation for why people sometimes yield to temptation is that they expect the immediate reward resulting from indulgence to outweigh the (temporally discounted) long-term reward resulting from abstinence (Ainslie 2001; Stroud and Tappolet 2003; Thaler and Shefrin 1981).
How does giving in to temptation affect momentary happiness? But is giving in to temptation even worth it in the here and now? What gain in momentary happiness does indulgence really bri
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