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.
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Notes
Guilt rather than shame was in the focus of the present work for the following reason: In guilt, the central focus of negative evaluation is on a specific behavior (e.g., “Look at what an awful thing I did”) whereas in shame the object of negative evaluation is the entire self (e.g., “Look at what an awful person I am”) (Lewis 1971; Tangney and Dearing 2002). Because the focus of our study was on whether specific desire-related behaviors were enacted or not, we decided to focus on guilt rather than shame as the more relevant self-conscious emotion.
The analyses reported in this study are based on data that were collected in the Everyday Temptation Study, a large experience sampling project on desire and self-control in everyday life. The addressed research questions, reported analyses, and conclusions reached in this article do not overlap with other research focusing on personality effects and situational influences (Hofmann et al. 2012), and on prospective effects of guilt and pride on subsequent self-control (Hofmann and Fisher 2012).
Including the subset of recent desires, however, yielded identical conclusions in all analyses with the only exception that the overall temptation enactment effect was significantly larger than zero even before the effect of self-conscious emotions was accounted for.
The absence of a regret effect indicates that the enactment of a temptation does not produce higher levels of regret than its nonenactment. However, such a finding could be due to regret being low in both cases or regret being high in both cases. To disambiguate this finding, we computed the average level of regret separately for all combinations of temptation (yes/no) and enactment (yes/no). This analysis revealed that regret was relatively high both when temptations were enacted, M = .87, SE = .05, as well as when they were not enacted, M = .96, SE = .10, when compared with the absolute level of regret following nontemptation enactment, M = .17, SE = .05 (as implied by the above mediation analysis, regret was also high when nontemptations were not enacted, M = .76, SE = .05). This supplementary analysis supports the idea that temptations pose something like a catch-22 with regard to the self-conscious emotion of regret. We will come back to this finding in the discussion.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a grant from the German Science Foundation (HO 4175/3-1) to Wilhelm Hofmann. We thank Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, and all members of the Behavioral Science Workshop at the Booth School of Business for valuable comments.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: List of desire subcategories
Eating: fast food as main dish; healthy main dish; savory main dish; sweet main dish; fast food as snack; sweets; nibble; healthy snack
Non-Alcoholic drinks: water; soft drink; juice; tea; other hot drink
Coffee: no subcategories
Alcohol: beer; wine; sparkling wine; liquor
Tobacco: branded filter tipped cigarette; rolled cigarette; cigar; pipe; water pipe (shisha); chewing; tobacco; joint (tobacco and marijuana)
Other substances: marijuana; activating substances (e.g., cocaine, ecstasy); sedative substances (e.g., barbiturate, opiate); psychoactive substances (e.g., LSD); non-prescribed medical drugs
Sexual desire: for partner in committed relationship; for partner in casual relationship; for ex-partner; for person in circle of friends; for not personally known person; for famous person; for fictitious person
Media: watching TV/video; surfing the internet; using the mobile phone; playing computer or video games
Spending: spending money “for oneself”; spending money “for other”; spending money together with other
Social contact: partner; parents; children; other relatives; friends; acquaintances; crush; getting to know somebody new
Leisure: doing nothing/relaxation; strolling around; desire to be by oneself
Hygiene/maintenance: no subcategories
Desire to work: paid employment; education/apprenticeship; volunteering
Sports: exercise/fitness training; individual sports; team sports; passive consumption of sports
Sleep: no subcategories
Note: The subcategories “other” within each main category are not shown
Appendix 2
See Table 1
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Hofmann, W., Kotabe, H. & Luhmann, M. The spoiled pleasure of giving in to temptation. Motiv Emot 37, 733–742 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-013-9355-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-013-9355-4