This strategy works because while you are not denying yourself pleasure, you are also not giving in to the temptation now. You simply say to yourself: I can have this later. We distance ourselves from the temptation and, as our research shows, this actually decreases the desire for the item over time.

At the time of peak desire (i.e., when the temptation is right in front of you), postponing consumption reduces the motivational conflict between give-in and give-up (vice versus virtue). This allows the desire for the temptation to diminish naturally, which enables the person to forgo consumption. Thus, postponement is a “cooling-off” strategy. In the relatively long-term (i.e., a week later), people can continue to forgo the temptation because they continue to desire it less and less.

Importantly, we have shown that postponement must be nonspecific. Don’t say “I’ll have that cake tomorrow or after dinner.” Simply say “I can have the cake later.”

Vanessa Patrick is a professor of marketing at the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston and Nicole Mead is a professor in the Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics.

A Potentially Habitable Alien Planet
“It’s the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it’s not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze,” Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Space.com. “It’s right smack in the habitable zone—there’s no question or discussion about it. It’s not on the edge, it’s right in there.” (Denise Chow, Space.com)

To Be Popular
An area of the brain associated with understanding the minds of others is larger in people who have bigger social networks, a new study finds. (Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience)

What Causes Sports Rioting?
Psychologists have labored to understand the root causes of such violence, and have been able to identify some of the crucial factors that play a role in events like the Port Said riot. (Jeff Wise, The Daily Beast)

Does the Internet Have a Soul?
At the very least, as a universe of songs, images, research projects, existential yearnings, and daily disappointments of hundreds of millions of selves, the Internet forces us to imagine in new ways the places where souls, if you believe in such things, might ultimately reside. (Lisa Miller, On Faith, The Washington Post)

When Skeptics Make Religious Art
How can such folk take up their tools in the name of God—and why would they want to do so? (Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal)

EXHIBIT
Stories From Another World
The exhibit will illustrate the progress of knowledge of the physical universe, from prehistoric times to recent discoveries. The exhibit is organized by the Specola Vaticana—the Vatican-supported observatory—and Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics, together with Pisa University’s physics department. (Alessandro Speciale, Religion News Service)

Kevin Rounding and I investigated the causal link between religious concepts and self-control. An interesting finding was that after subtle reminders of religious ideas, self-control appeared to have been replenished after it was diminished experimentally. That is, after performing a task that drained self-control, participants who received religious primes showed high levels of persistence in the subsequent task—they persisted with the impossible puzzles just as long as participants who had not completed the first self-control depleting task.

The psychological explanation for the replenishing effects of religious concepts on self-control, however, is currently unclear. One possibility is that religion, in many cultures, involves notions of a God who is often viewed as an omnipotent moral police who sees all, knows all, and punishes those who fall short of moral standards. Thus, it makes sense that priming people with religious concepts can bring forth the ideas of a punitive God, hence making them more resilient in the face of temptations. Some evidence has been found recently in support of this claim.

Nevertheless, ideas associated with a moralizing God are by no means the only psychological mechanism that stands between religion and self-control. As suggested by theorists, religion is a multi-dimensional construct—costly rituals, shared faith, doctrines, community, to name a few. Each of these dimensions may affect self-control in their own way. More research is required to systematically unpack and examine these components of religion.

Albert Lee is a doctoral student in psychology at Queen’s University.

Top Five Regrets of the Dying
Bronnie Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. “When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently,” she says, “common themes surfaced again and again.” (Susie Steiner, guardian.co.uk)

“Creation Science” Bill Passed by Senate in Indiana
The Indiana State Senate approved a bill that would allow its schools to teach the origin stories of various religions when a class touches on the origin of life. It now moves on to the state’s House, where one of its co-sponsors is currently the Speaker of the House. Although the bill as written could be used to create a comparative religion class, its sponsor, Senator Dennis Kruse, has made it clear that he hopes to see it foster the teaching of creationism in science classes. (John Timmer, Ars Technica)

A New Strategy for Fighting Anti-Evolution Bills
Hear what Vi Simpson, the Indiana State Senate Minority Leader, had to say about the way she crippled the latest creationism-in-the-schools bill with a brilliant stratagem: by convincing the radical Republicans in the Indiana State Senate that if they want to teach Christianity in the schools, they’re also going to have to teach Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Scientology. (Tony Ortega, The Village Voice)

Best Science Pictures of 2011
Sponsored jointly by the journal Science and the National Science Foundation, the annual International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge was founded because “some of science’s most powerful statements are not made in words,” according to NSF. (Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic)

EXHIBIT
Art by Animals
What is the difference between paintings by humans and other animals? Can animal art truly be considered ‘art’? The exhibition showcases paintings by elephants, apes, and humans, dotted throughout the existing displays of skeletons and preserved animals. (Rebecca Hill, CultureLab, New Scientist)

“So I spend quite a bit of time trying to make sense of how I seem to have a soul, I have this ghostly consciousness, yet I know as a believer in science that this is just coming from carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules. I think if you take science seriously there are a lot of interesting questions to ask. I would be happy if more novelists, not just science fiction writers, paid attention to that.”

Lab studies seek out the most scientifically precise procedures, so usually they select a task that has no personal relevance or meaning that can complicate the scientific interpretation of findings. For example, we might assign right-handed people to use their left hands for routine tasks, such as brushing teeth and opening doors. Outside the lab, it makes more sense to use something that will produce genuine benefits. Starting small is best. Make a simple, positive change in your life, something on the order of making your bed every day, or ceasing to say curse words. After a week or two, pick another one.

Roy Baumeister is a professor of psychology at Florida State University.

The Moral Psychology of Jonathan Haidt
In March, Jonathan Haidt will publish The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. By laying out the science of morality—how it binds people into “groupish righteousness” and blinds them to their own biases—he hopes to drain some vitriol from public debate and enable conversations across ideological divides. (Marc Parry, The Chronicle of Higher Education)

What Would Jesus Say?
Liberal Christians tend to believe that Jesus is more conservative than they are on moral issues, while conservative Christians believe he is more liberal. Liberal and conservative Christians also tend to believe that the matters most important to Jesus are the same ones most important to them. The study findings reveal how so-called “cognitive dissonance” works in Christians whose personal beliefs aren’t identical to those of the founder of their faith, said study author Lee Ross, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. (Randy Dotinga, HealthDay)

Reconstructing Speech From Brain Activity
By peering inside the brain, it is possible to reconstruct speech from the activity that takes place when we hear someone talking. Because this brain activity is thought to be similar whether we hear a sentence or think the same sentence, the discovery brings us a step closer to broadcasting our inner thoughts to the world without speaking. (Helen Thomson, New Scientist)

Researchers Turn Mouse Skin Cells Directly Into “Neural Precursor” Cells
Bypassing stem cells, mouse skin cells have been converted directly into cells that become the three main parts of the animal’s nervous system, according to new research at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The startling success of this method seems to refute the idea that “pluripotency”—the ability of stem cells to become nearly any cell in the body—is necessary for a cell to transform from one cell type to another. (Lisa Krieger, San Jose Mercury News)

My colleagues and I have investigated the power that strangers can have over an individual’s sense of social connection, specifically the benefits of being acknowledged by a passerby and the threat of being looked at as if the individual didn’t exist. We conducted a field experiment and found that individuals who were acknowledged by a passerby (our trained research assistant) felt less social disconnection than individuals who were “looked at as though air” (the passerby looked past them instead of giving them eye contact). This field study supports data we collected in another study where participants completed diary entries every time they felt ostracized in their daily life. These participants indicated they often felt ostracized when strangers ignored them on the bus or when walking down the street, and some participants indicated they felt this way at least once a day!

Taken together, this body of research suggests that we can have both a negative and positive influence on others’ feelings of social connection. How we choose to exercise that influence is up to each of us individually.

Eric Wesselmann is a continuing lecturer in psychological sciences at Purdue University.

Using Willpower
Exerting self-control saps a person’s mental energy and makes the next desire that inevitably comes along feel more compelling and harder to resist, a study of people’s daily struggles with temptation found. (Bruce Bower, Science News)

Resisting Temptation
Unlike simply delaying gratification, promising yourself a temptation at a nebulous later date can actually decrease the amount of your ultimate consumption of that temptation. (Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience)

Videogame Pacifism
Videogames have long been assailed for their violent themes and gruesome imagery. But a small slice of players has embraced a new strategy: not killing. They are imparting real-world morals on their virtual-world characters and completing entire games on a “pacifist run”—the term for beating a blood-and-guts adventure without drawing any blood. (Conor Dougherty, The Wall Street Journal)

Newt Gingrich Says He Would Ban All Embryonic Stem Cell Research
He is drawing an increasingly hard line against the use of embryonic stem cell research—a position that contrasts not only with that of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, but also with statements that Newt Gingrich himself has made on the subject in the past. (Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post)

Q&A
Greg Feist
Psychologist Greg Feist is trying to find out what drives scientific curiosity, from ways of thinking to personality types. (Clint Witchalls, New Scientist)

On the other hand, during a non-optimal time of day (morning for the night owls and evening for the morning larks), people are much less focused and cannot concentrate on one thing as easily. This state of mind leads people to be more susceptible to think about other, seemingly unrelated, information (e.g., things they experienced earlier, their to-do list). This additional information floating around in your mind during your non-optimal time of day then ultimately helps you reach that creative “aha!” moment. So it isn’t really being tired per se that leads to more creative solutions, but having a less focused mind does.

Mareike Wieth is a professor of psychological science at Albion College.