The Power is Yours

Simply believing in our power to resist the attraction of others can help keep us on the straight and narrow, research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests.

Romantically involved subjects completed a word task that they were told would measure their self-control. Some received positive feedback informing them that they had an above-average ability to control their impulses. The feedback was bogus, but when all the participants then viewed pictures of attractive people, the “high performers” reported less interest in meeting them, on average, than subjects who had received an arbitrarily negative review—or none at all—on the word task.

Worried partners might benefit from boosting their significant other’s sense of self-restraint in a similar way, according to Myrte Hamburg, a psychologist at VU University Amsterdam who co-authored the study. “You can prime them by saying, ‘I know it’s a challenge to not flirt with others, but I believe that you can do it—because I know you.’”

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