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Researchers have proposed that the emergence of religion was a cultural adaptation necessary for promoting self-control. Self-control, in turn, may serve as a psychological pillar supporting a myriad of adaptive psychological and behavioral tendencies. If this proposal is true, then subtle reminders of religious concepts should result in higher levels of self-control. In a series of four experiments, we consistently found that when religious themes were made implicitly salient, people exercised greater self-control, which, in turn, augmented their ability to make decisions in a number of behavioral domains that are theoretically relevant to both major religions and humans' evolutionary success. Furthermore, when self-control resources were minimized, making it difficult for people to exercise restraint on future unrelated self-control tasks, we found that implicit reminders of religious concepts refueled people's ability to exercise self-control. Moreover, compared with morality- or death-related concepts, religion had a unique influence on self-control.

Preferences for life-sustaining treatment are dependent on the context in which they are made, and thus individuals may express different treatment preferences when they are healthy than when they are ill. These results challenge a key psychological assumption underlying the use of instructional advance directives in end-of-life decision making.

Visceral cues indicating proximity to objects of desire can lead people to be disproportionately influenced by the anticipated rewards of immediate gratification rather than the risks of consummatory behavior. Two studies examined this hypothesis. In Study 1, participants were given the choice of playing a game in which they risked time in the lab to win chocolate chip cookies. Participants who could see and smell the cookies while they made their decision were less sensitive to risk information than were participants for whom the cookies were merely described. In Study 2, male condom users either saw a video or read a description depicting a young couple deciding whether to have sex without a condom. Participants seeing the video expressed a greater likelihood of having unprotected sex in the situation than did participants reading the description. The underappreciated role of visceral factors in social cognition theory and research is discussed.