Members in the Media
From: The Times of India

Low self-control makes you selfless

The Times of India:

When people face the choice of sacrificing time and energy for a person that they love or taking a self-centered route, their first impulse is to think of others, a new research has suggested.

Lead researcher Francesca Righetti of VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said that for decades psychologists have assumed that the first impulse is selfish and that it takes self-control to behave in a pro-social manner, which she said they did not believe that this was true in every context, and especially not in close relationships.

Righetti and colleagues found that participants whose self-control was taxed were more willing to sacrifice time and energy for their romantic partner or best friend than participants whose self-control wasn’t taxed.

In one study, to find out whether they would sacrifice in actual practice, researchers told couples that they would have to talk to 12 strangers and ask them embarrassing questions. The participants didn’t know that they wouldn’t actually have to follow through with the task.

Read the whole story: The Times of India

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