Self-control
Self-control is an aspect of inhibitory control, one of the core executive functions.[1][2] Executive functions are cognitive processes that are necessary for regulating one's behavior in order to achieve specific goals.[1][2] Defined more independently, self-control is the ability to regulate one's emotions, thoughts, and behavior in the face of temptations and impulses.[3] Thought to be like a muscle, acts of self-control expend a limited resource. In the short term, overuse of self-control leads to the depletion of that resource.[4] However, in the long term, the use of self-control can strengthen and improve the ability to control oneself over time.[3][5]
For other uses, see Self control (disambiguation).
A related concept in psychology is emotional self-regulation.[6]
Self-control is also a key concept in the general theory of crime, a major theory in criminology. The theory was developed by Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi in their book A General Theory of Crime (1990). Gottfredson and Hirschi define self-control as the differential tendency of individuals to avoid criminal acts independent of the situations in which they find themselves.[7] Individuals with low self-control tend to be impulsive, insensitive towards others, risk takers, short-sighted, and nonverbal. About 70% of the variance in questionnaire data operationalizing one construct of self-control was found to be genetic.[8]
As a virtue[edit]
Classically, the virtue of self-control was usually called "continence" and was contrasted with the vice of akrasia or incontinence. "Willpower" is another common synonym.
Sometimes self-control under particular temptations was subsumed by other virtues. For example, self-control in fearful situations as courage, or self-control when angry as good temper.
Christians may describe the struggle with akrasia as a battle between spirit (which is inclined to God) and flesh (which is mired in sin). Jesus, as his crucifixion approached, felt himself recoil from this task, and noticed "the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak".[9] Paul the Apostle, in his letter to the Romans, complained, "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.... I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability".[10] St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions, "As a youth I prayed, 'Give me chastity and continence, but not right away.'"[11]
The related virtue of temperance, or sophrosyne, has been discussed by philosophers and religious thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to the present day. One of the earliest and most well-known examples of self control as a virtue was Aristotle's virtue of temperance, which concerns having a well-chosen and well-regulated set of desires. The vices associated with Aristotle's temperance are self-indulgence (deficiency) and insensibility (excess). Deficiency or excess is in reference to how much temperance is had, for example, a deficiency of temperance leads to over indulgence, while too much or an excess of temperance leads to insensibility or unreasonable control. Aristotle suggested this analogy: The intemperate person is like a city with bad laws; the person without self-control is like a city that has good laws on the books but that does not enforce them.[12]
Research[edit]
Counteractive[edit]
Desire is an affectively charged motivation toward a certain object, person, or activity, often, but not limited to, one associated with pleasure or relief from displeasure.[13] Desires vary in strength and duration. A desire becomes a temptation when it impacts or enters the individual's area of self-control, if the behavior resulting from the desire conflicts with an individual's values or other self-regulatory goals.[14][15] A limitation to research on desire is that people desire different things. In research into what people desire in real world settings, over one week 7,827 self-reports of desires were collected, including differences in desire frequency and strength, degree of conflict between desires and other goals, and the likelihood of resisting desire and success of the resistance. The most common and strongly experienced desires are those related to bodily needs like eating, drinking, and sleeping.[15][16]
Self-control dilemmas occur when long-term goals clash with short-term outcomes. Counteractive Self-Control Theory states that when presented with such a dilemma, we lessen the significance of the instant rewards while momentarily increasing the importance of our overall values.[17] When asked to rate the perceived appeal of different snacks before making a decision, people valued health bars over chocolate bars. However, when asked to do the rankings after having chosen a snack, there was no significant difference of appeal.[18] Further, when college students completed a questionnaire prior to their course registration deadline, they ranked leisure activities as less important and enjoyable than when they filled out the survey after the deadline passed. The stronger and more available the temptation is, the harsher the devaluation will be.[19]
One of the most common self-control dilemmas involves the desire for unhealthy or unneeded food consumption versus the desire to maintain long-term health. An indication of unneeded food could also be over-expenditure on certain types of consumption such as eating away from home. Not knowing how much to spend, or overspending one's budget on eating out, can be a symptom of a lack of self-control.[20]
Experiment participants rated a new snack as significantly less healthy when it was described as very tasty compared to when they heard it was just slightly tasty. Without knowing anything else about a food, the mere suggestion of good taste triggered counteractive self-control and prompted them to devalue the temptation in the name of health. Further, when presented with the strong temptation of one large bowl of chips, participants both perceived the chips to be higher in calories and ate less of them than did participants who faced the weak temptation of three smaller chip bowls, even though both conditions represented the same amount of chips overall.
Weak temptations are falsely perceived to be less unhealthy, so self-control is not triggered and desirable actions are more often engaged in; this supports the counteractive self-control theory.[21] Weak temptations present more of a challenge to overcome than strong temptations, because they appear less likely to compromise long-term values.[18][19]
Satiation[edit]
The decrease in an individual's liking of and desire for a substance following repeated consumption of that substance is known as satiation. Satiation rates when eating depend on interactions of trait self-control and healthiness of the food. After eating equal amounts of either clearly healthy (raisins and peanuts) or unhealthy (M&Ms and Skittles) snack foods, people who scored higher on trait self-control tests reported feeling significantly less desire to eat more of the unhealthy foods than they did the healthy foods. Those with low trait self-control satiated at the same pace regardless of health value.
Further, when reading a description emphasizing the sweet flavor of their snack, participants with higher trait self-control reported a decrease in desire faster than they did after hearing a description of the healthy benefits of their snack. Once again, those with low self-control satiated at the same rate regardless of the description. Perceived unhealthiness of the food alone, regardless of actual health level, relates to faster satiation, but only for people with high trait self-control.[22]
Construal levels[edit]
Thinking that is characterized by high construals, whenever individuals "are obliged to infer additional details of content, context, or meaning in the actions and outcomes that unfold around them",[23] will view goals and values in a global, abstract sense, whereas low-level construals emphasize concrete, definitive ideas and categorizations. Different construal levels determine our activation of self-control in response to temptations.
One technique for inducing high-level construals is asking an individual a series of "why?" questions that lead to increasingly abstracted responses, whereas low-level construals are induced by "how?" questions leading to increasingly concrete answers. When taking an Implicit Association Test, people with induced high-level construals are significantly faster at associating temptations (such as candy bars) with "bad", and healthy choices (such as apples) with "good" than those in the low-level condition. Those with induced higher-level construals also show a significantly increased likelihood of choosing an apple for snack over a candy bar. In a person who is not exercising any conscious or active self-control efforts, temptations can be dampened by merely inducing high-level construals in them. Abstraction of high-level construals may remind people of their large-scale values, such as a healthy lifestyle, which deemphasizes the current tempting situation.[15][24]
Human and non-human[edit]
Positive correlation between linguistic capability and self-control has been inferred from experiments with common chimpanzees.[25]
Human self-control research is typically modeled by using a token economy system: a behavioral program in which individuals in a group can earn tokens for a variety of desirable behaviors and can cash in the tokens for various backup, positive reinforcers.[26]: 305 The difference in research methodologies with humans using tokens or conditioned reinforcers versus non-humans using sub-primary forces suggested procedural artifacts as a possible suspect. One procedural difference was in the delay in the exchange period:[27] Non-human subjects can and most likely would access their reinforcement immediately; human subjects had to wait for an "exchange period" in which they could exchange their tokens for money, usually at the end of the experiment. When this was done with non-human subjects (pigeons), they responded much like humans in that males showed much less control than females.[28]
Logue,[29] who is discussed more below, points out that in her study on self-control it was boys who responded with less self-control than girls. She says that in adulthood, for the most part, the sexes equalize on their ability to exhibit self-control. This could imply a human's ability to exert more self-control as they mature and become aware of the consequences associated with impulsivity. This suggestion is further examined below.
Most of the research in the field of self-control assumes that self-control is, in general, better than impulsiveness. As a result, almost all research done on this topic is from this standpoint; very rarely is impulsiveness the more adaptive response in experimental design.
Some in the field of developmental psychology think of self-control in a way that takes into account that sometimes impulsiveness is the more adaptive response. In their view, a normal individual should have the capacity to be either impulsive or controlled depending on which is the most adaptive. However, there is comparatively less research conducted along these lines.[29]
Self-control has been theorized to be a measurable variable in humans, although there are many different tests and means of measuring it.[30] In the worst circumstances people with the most self-control and resilience have the best chance of defying the odds they are faced with, such as poverty, bad schooling, unsafe communities, etc. Those at a disadvantage but with high self-control go on to higher education, professional jobs, and psychosocial outcomes, although there is conflicting evidence on health impacts later in adulthood.[31][32]
The psychological phenomenon known as "John Henryism" posits that when goal-oriented, success-minded people strive ceaselessly in the absence of adequate support and resources, they can—like the eponymous 19th-century folk hero who fell dead of an aneurysm after besting a steam-powered drill in a railroad-spike-driving competition—work themselves to death (or toward it). In the 1980s, socio-epidemiologist Sherman James found that black Americans in North Carolina suffered disproportionately from heart disease and strokes. He suggested "John Henryism" as the cause of this phenomenon.[33]
Alternatives[edit]
Using compassion, gratitude, and healthy pride to create positive emotional motivation can be less stressful, less vulnerable to rationalization, and more likely to succeed than the traditional strategy of using logic and willpower to suppress behavior that resonates emotionally.[34]
Philosopher Immanuel Kant, at the beginning of one of his main works, "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals", mentions the term "Selbstbeherrschung"—self-control—in a way such that it does not play a key role in his account of virtue. He argues instead that qualities such as self-control and moderation of affect and passions are mistakenly taken to be absolutely good (G 4: 394).[35] In his apology of a solid universal morality, he also saw compassion as a weak and misguided sentiment: "Such benevolence is called soft-heartedness and should not occur at all among human beings", he said of it. In distancing from his previous positions on the matter of self-control, he points out that such qualities can have only instrumental value: they can promote the good will and make its work easier, but they can also have bad effects. In a distinction between moral and self-control, Kant mentions the example of the cruel Roman Dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix: despite his maxims being morally incorrect, Sulla had self-control because he steadfastly followed those maxims (A 7: 293). Sulla lacks the two levels of moral self-control that are constitutive of virtue (our ability to adopt moral maxims, abstracted from sense impressions; and our ability to follow these maxims). His lack of virtue is primarily explained by his failure to compel himself to adopt moral maxims. According to Kant, self-control is merely a kind of instrument for following already-adopted maxims. As a result, even when closer attention is paid to self-control, its role in adopting morally correct maxims remains neglected in Kant's secondary literature.[36]
The "marshmallow test"[edit]
In the 1960s, Walter Mischel tested four-year-old children for self-control via the "marshmallow test": the children were each given a marshmallow and told that they can eat it anytime they want, but if they waited 15 minutes, they would receive another marshmallow. Follow-up studies showed that the results correlated well with these children's success levels in later life in the form of greater academic achievement.[62]
A strategy used in the marshmallow test was to focus on "hot" or "cool" features of an object. The children were encouraged to think about the marshmallow's "cool features" such as its shape and texture, possibly comparing it to a cotton ball or a cloud. The "hot features" of the marshmallow would be its sweet, sticky tastiness. These hot features make it more difficult to delay gratification. By focusing on the cool features, the mind is adverted from the appealing aspects of the marshmallow, and self-control is more plausible.[63]
Years later Mischel reached out to the participants of his study, who were then in their 40s. He found that those who showed less self-control by taking the single marshmallow in the initial study were more likely to develop problems with relationships, stress, and drug abuse later in life. Mischel carried out the experiment again with the same participants in order to see which parts of the brain were active during the process of self-control. The participants received MRI scans to show brain activity. The results showed that those who exhibited lower levels of self-control had higher brain activity in the ventral striatum, the area that deals with positive rewards.[64]
Self-control is negatively correlated with sociotropy[65] which in turn is correlated with depression.[66]