temptation

What do you desire most right now? A drink? A cigarette? A nap? That hottie at the next table? Come on, be honest. What you really want to do this instant, if you haven't already done it, is to tweet the headline of this story.

You really thought I'd buy "coconut water" as an answer? I write for Crave, people.

In fact, perhaps the only group more tuned in to people's desires than our stable of writers is the team from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business that conducted an experiment with more than 200 people to try to gauge what tempts them most.

Lead researcher Wilhelm Hofmann explained to the Guardian that the participants, located in the German city of Wurtzburg, were pinged seven times a day via their BlackBerrys and asked to report any desires they had experienced in the past 30 minutes, as well as the intensity of each want.

Sorting through the thousands of "desire episodes" reported, the team found that it was easier for people to resist more traditional temptations like coffee, alcohol, sex, work, or spending money than it was to spurn the yearning to tweet.… Read more