ABSTRACT
Exposure to temptation is the leading cause of self-control failure. This truism invites policy makers, parents, and often even consumers to work either toward a world where temptations are banned, regulated, or restricted, or toward one where individuals become masters in resisting the pull of temptations. The compelling nature of this general ‘ban or resist’ approach may sometimes obscure a third path where the focus is on reducing the pull of the temptations. In the food domain the most recent approaches indeed identify the ‘ban or resist’ approach as vulnerable to failure (Appelhans, French, Pagoto, & Sherwood, 2016) and identify the centrality of changing food preferences as a more robust way forward (Hawkes et al., 2015). This chapter follows this lead and introduces the pre-exposure effect, where, quite contrary to a ‘ban or resist approach’, the presence of temptation is leveraged to reduce its pull.
