This paper focuses on the relationship between individual self-control and peer pressure. To this end, we performed a laboratory experiment that proceeded in two parts. The first part involved an individual real-effort task in which subjects could commit themselves to a particular level of performance while being tempted by an alternative recreational activity. The second part consisted of bargaining in a power-to-take game in which previously earned revenues were at stake. The experimental treatments involved variations in the available information provided to peers about previous individual behavior. The results show that many subjects make a serious commitment. Further, the subsequent revelation of commitment level induces subjects to increase the credible components of their commitment decisions. Past individual behaviors also play a role in bargaining because (i) partners who have committed themselves benefit from lower rates of both take and destruction and (ii) partners who have succumbed to temptation suffer from higher rates of both take and destruction.

In this investigation, we test whether temporal discounting is domain-specific (i.e., compared to other people, can an individual have a relatively high discount rate for one type of reward but a relatively low discount rate for another?), and we examine whether individual differences in the types of rewards one finds tempting explain domain-specificity in discount rates. Adults discounted delayed rewards they found particularly tempting (defined as the visceral attraction to and enjoyment of a reward) more steeply than did adults who did not find the rewards as tempting, contrary to what might be expected from the magnitude effect. Furthermore, we found significant group by domain interactions (e.g., chip lovers who do not like beer have relatively high discount rates for chips and relatively low discount rates for beer, whereas beer lovers who do not like chips showed the opposite pattern). These results suggest that domain-specificity in temptation partially accounts for corresponding domain-specificity in temporal discounting.

Why do many societies moralize apparently harmless pleasures, such as lust, gluttony, alcohol, drugs, and even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, asceticism, sobriety, modesty, and piety as cardinal moral virtues? According to existing theories, this puritanical morality cannot be reduced to concerns for harm and fairness: It must emerge from cognitive systems that did not evolve for cooperation (e.g., disgust-based “purity” concerns). Here, we argue that, despite appearances, puritanical morality is no exception to the cooperative function of moral cognition. It emerges in response to a key feature of cooperation, namely that cooperation is (ultimately) a long-term strategy, requiring (proximately) the self-control of appetites for immediate gratification. Puritanical moralizations condemn behaviors which, although inherently harmless, are perceived as indirectly facilitating uncooperative behaviors, by impairing the self-control required to refrain from cheating. Drinking, drugs, immodest clothing, and unruly music and dance are condemned as stimulating short-term impulses, thus facilitating uncooperative behaviors (e.g., violence, adultery, free-riding). Overindulgence in harmless bodily pleasures (e.g., masturbation, gluttony) is perceived as making people slave to their urges, thus altering abilities to resist future antisocial temptations. Daily self-discipline, ascetic temperance, and pious ritual observance are perceived as cultivating the self-control required to honor prosocial obligations. We review psychological, historical, and ethnographic evidence supporting this account. We use this theory to explain the fall of puritanism in western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies, and discuss the cultural evolution of puritanical norms. Explaining puritanical norms does not require adding mechanisms unrelated to cooperation in our models of the moral mind.

Recently a change to the Italian text of the Pater Noster has been proposed. Motivation for this change centers on worries about the suggestion that God leads us into temptation. This paper argues that these worries issue from a confused picture of the relationship between God and creaturely freedom. More fundamentally, however, the suggestion that these kind of worries ought to precipitate revision of liturgical texts fails to take seriously the nature of the liturgy as prayer, rather than simply a means of communicating information. Drawing on Wittgenstein, the sui generis nature of prayer is laid out before the paper concludes with some comments on the distinctive values of both scholarship and prayer.

Is there a sense in which we exercise direct volitional control over our beliefs? Most agree that there is not, but discussions tend to focus on control in forming a belief. The focus here is on sustaining a belief over time in the face of ‘epistemic temptation’ to abandon it. It is argued that we do have a capacity for ‘doxastic self-control’ over time that is partly volitional in nature, and that its exercise is rationally permissible.

This paper studies the global equilibrium dynamics implied by a Lucas’ tree asset pricing model where the representative agent is subject to temptation in consumption choices, and displays dynamic self-control preferences, as defined by Gul and Pesendorfer [(2004) Econometrica 72, 119–158.]. It shows that endogenous cycles of period 2 and higher, as well as chaotic dynamics exist provided temptation utility is sufficiently important (with respect to standard commitment utility) and sufficiently convex. For parameterizations leading to complex deterministic dynamics, a stochastic version of the model admits rational expectations equilibria displaying excess volatility with respect to the underlying fundamentals.

We construct a microfounded model of money with Gul–Pesendorfer preferences. In each period, agents are tempted to spend all their money by the end of the period, and they suffer from the forgone utility that could have been obtained by adopting the tempting choice. We find that the Friedman rule may not be optimal. A positive nominal interest rate improves welfare because it reduces the real money balances and renders the temptation less attractive. The welfare gained by deviating from the rule is equivalent to 0.67% of consumption.