If you have any patience at all for academic articles, you'll find this one captivating. Three researchers find that when we are confident about our impulse-control abilities, it backfires on us, because we allow ourselves to get into tempting situations — and then we end up caving. Whereas people who are more skeptical about their self-control will tend to avoid those temptations altogether. (By the way, don't miss experiment 3 — a comical case study in temptation involving smokers and the J...