The salience of self-awareness as a bulwark against self-regulatory failure is also underscored in the work of two Cambridge University researchers who developed a scale to measure a person’s “susceptibility to persuasion.” They found that the single most important determinant of one’s ability to resist persuasion is what they call “the ability to premeditate.”23 This means that people who harness self-awareness to think through the consequences of their actions are more disposed to chart their own course and are significantly less vulnerable to persuasion techniques. Self-awareness also
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