Dr. Kentaro Fujita

for what kinds of tasks, what kinds of goals.

And with the idea that maybe sometimes we're picking the wrong pattern for the goal at hand, right?

So for example, if I'm trying to be faithful to my spouse,

Abstinence is probably better than indulgence because the thing about being faithful to your spouse is that if you have the one lapse, you are no longer a faithful spouse.

By definition, that's a situation in which you have failed and that goal is gone forever.

On the other hand, for a student studying for an exam, they can

they can watch a little Netflix or they can study for their exam.

Normally, those two types of conflicts, those two goals aren't in conflict.

But if the night before an exam, now they're in conflict,

Do they exclusively study or do they give themselves a study break?

In that kind of situation, a study break might be okay because taking five minutes for a study break doesn't mean that you fail at studying.

So we're kind of interested in whether people pick certain kinds of strategies for certain kinds of conflicts.

and also whether certain personality types might prefer certain kinds of strategy.

So if I'm the kind of person who likes to keep things black and white, abstinence might be the way to go.

If I'm the kind of person who likes variety, then moderation might be better.

Another thing that we're really interested in is

why people pick the wrong one.

And one of the things that we've been finding, some initial findings that we have from our lab, is that when you present people with targets, other people who have engaged in abstinence versus moderation, at least the participants that we've asked generally say that the person who engaged in abstinence has better self-control than the person who engaged in moderation.

which is interesting to us because actually moderation is more difficult.

So you could have said that the moderation person has more self-control than the person who's abstinent because that's in principle the easier decision.