The Instability of Health Cognitions: Visceral States Influence Self-efficacy and Related Health Beliefs Loran F. Nordgren, Joop van der Pligt, and Frenk van Harreveld University of Amsterdam Objective: To determine how visceral impulses, such as hunger and drug craving, influence health beliefs. Design: The authors assessed smokers’ self-efficacy and intentions to quit while in a randomly assigned state of cigarette craving or noncraving (Study 1), and assessed dieters weight-loss beliefs while hungry or satiated (Study 2). Main outcome measures: Self-efficacy, smoking cessation, weight-loss goals. Results: The authors found, in both the context of smoking and weight-loss, that participants in a cold (e.g., satiated) state had different health beliefs than participants in a hot state (e.g., hungry). Specifically, in Study 1, the authors found that smokers who experienced cigarette craving had lower self-efficacy than did satiated smokers. Consequently, smokers who craved a cigarette had less intention to quit smoking in the future compared with satiated smokers. In Study 2, the authors found that hungry dieters had less self-efficacy than did satiated dieters. This difference led hungry dieters to form less ambitious future weight-loss goals and view prior weight-loss attempts with more satisfaction. Conclu- sion: These findings contribute to our understanding of the nature of health beliefs and reveal that health beliefs are more dynamic than previously assumed. Keywords: hunger, smoking cessation, self-efficacy, health goals The modern lifestyle, with its sedentary jobs and supersized portions, often does not make for a healthy lifestyle. Yet the principle obstacle for many types of health behavior is age-old: visceral drives, such as hunger, drug craving, or sexual arousal, make unhealthy behavior difficult to avoid. Visceral drives provide information about the state of the body and direct behavior toward satisfying bodily needs. Hunger, for example, is a visceral sensa- tion that creates a desire for food consumption, particularly for food that is high in caloric energy (i.e., fatty foods). Therefore, for anyone who tries to reduce caloric intake, hunger makes food consumption a daily temptation that can undermine even the most determined plans to lose weight. Health researchers have long understood that visceral drives can be an impediment to healthy behavior, and have conducted extensive research on ways to dampen the corrupting influence of visceral states. Methadone, nicotine patches, and appetite suppressants, for instance, are all methods used to try and reduce the impulsive influence of partic- ular visceral drives. Although visceral drives have an undeniable influence on health behavior, empirical studies in a number of domains suggest that people often underestimate this influence (Loewenstein, 1996, 2005). More specifically, when people are in a “cold,” affectively neutral state they tend to underestimate the influence of “hot,” affective states. For example, in a series of studies Nordgren, van der Pligt, and van Harreveld (2006) used visceral states to hinder participants’ performance on a variety of tasks. Afterward, they asked participants to indicate how various factors impacted their behavior. They found that when people were in a hot state (e.g., fatigued), they attributed their behavior primarily to the visceral influence, whereas when people were in a cold state (e.g., nonfa- tigued), they underestimated the influence of the visceral state and instead attributed behavior primarily to dispositional factors. In a study designed to test the impact of drug craving on decision-making, heroin users were asked to indicate how much money they would be willing to pay for the heroin substitute Buprenorphine (Badger et al., in press). They found that heroin addicts would value an extra dose of Buprenorphine more highly when they were craving heroin than when they were currently satiated. The “empathy gap” effect has also been shown to have impor- tant implications for people’s perception of control. For example, Nordgren, van der Pligt, and van Harreveld (2007) conducted an experiment in which participants watched a video of a man who binge eats. Participants, half of who were hungry and half of who were satiated, were then asked to evaluate the man’s (impulsive) behavior. They found that hungry participants made more favor- able evaluations of the binge eater than satiated participants. This effect was found to be due to differences in perceptions of control. Unlike hungry participants, satiated participants were under the illusion that hunger craving was easy to control, and therefore perceived binge eating to be undertaken freely (and thus blame- worthy). In the present study, we examine whether visceral states simi- larly influence people’s perceptions of control over their own health behavior. Control perceptions are crucial to the initiation and maintenance of healthy behavior (Bandura, 1986). For exam- Loran F. Nordgren, Joop van der Pligt, and Frenk van Harreveld, Social Psychology Department, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Loran F. Nordgren is now at Kellogg School of Management, North- western University. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Loran F. Nordgren, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208. E-mail: l-nordgren@ kellogg.northwestern.edu Health Psychology Copyright 2008 by the American Psychological Association 2008, Vol. 27, No. 6, 722–727 0278-6133/08/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0278-6133.27.6.722 722