Cognitive Engineering

Our relationship with temptation stretches back to stories from the bible and antiquity. Whether it is eating the forbidden fruit or opening Pandora’s box, temptation seems intimately linked to human nature. But is it our responsibility to remove temptation from others or is this an area where the so-called nanny state seeks to interfere with our personal choices? In this week’s podcast, we discuss temptation. We focus our attention on the example of bringing cake into the office. In doing so, we discuss deontology and consequentialism, ego depletion, the marshmallow test, and the economic theory of time inconsistency. Nick presents his temptability index and we reveal our favourite cakes and gastronomic temptations. A few things we mentioned in this podcast: - Bringing cake to the office is as harmful as passive smoking https://news.sky.com/story/bringing-cake-to-office-as-harmful-as-passive-smoking-uk-food-watchdog-says-12789287 - The psychology of temptation https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.10