It seems almost certain that San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds will pass Hank Aaron as baseball’s all-time home-run king sometime this summer, but his pursuit has generated little public interest.

There may be several reasons for this, ranging from Bonds’ prickly personality to the suspicion that he may have used performance-enhancing drugs later in his career, say two Duke University professors.

“Career home runs is perhaps the most single hallowed record in American sports. And baseball itself is a sport obsessed by numbers and record-keeping more than any other,” said Orin Starn, a professor of cultural anthropology who studies sports and society. “This makes the lack of fanfare around Bonds nearing Aaron’s mark especially puzzling, and yet also revealing about the state of American sports and society.”

A new study by researchers from Duke, USC, and UPenn is the first to explore how questioning affects behavior when we have mixed feelings about an issue. The study found that asking people questions, like how many times they expect to give in to a temptation they know they should resist, increases how many times they will actually give in to it.

“Research on attitude formation has increasingly recognized that attitudes can be comprised of separate negative and positive components which can result in attitude ambivalence,” explain Gavin Fitzsimons (Duke University), Joseph C. Nunes (University of Southern California), and Patti Williams (University of Pennsylvania). “In the present research we focus on vice behaviors, those for which consumers are likely to hold both positive and negative attitudes. We demonstrate that asking consumers to report their expectations regarding how often they will perform a vice behavior increases the incidence of these behaviors.”