If you’ve ever tried to go on a calorie-controlled diet or do a “digital detox”, you’ll likely have experienced the high-stakes battle between willpower and temptation. This capitulation to our base impulses is often framed, in mainstream culture, as weakness. We should be able to exercise enough self-control to put our phones aside or turn down the offer of a free cookie with our morning coffee.
But what if our inability to stop doing things that are bad for us wasn’t really our fault at all? What if our core biological instincts were being manipulated?
