SELF-CONTROL

A. DEFINITIONS
 Self-control is the capacity to override an impulse in order to respond
appropriately (DeWall, 2014).
 Self-control refers to the capacity for altering one’s own responses,
especially to bring them into line with standards such as ideals, values,
morals, and social expectations, and to support the pursuit of long-
term goals (Baumeister et al., 2007).
 Self-control is a deliberate, conscious, effortful subset of self-
regulation (Baumeister et al., 2007).
 The self’s capacity to override or change one’s inner responses, as well
as to interrupt undesired behavioral tendencies and to refrain from
acting on them (Tangney et al., 2004).
 The ability to overrule or control immediate urges in order to attain a
long-term goal (Carver & Scheier, 1981; De Ridder et al., 2012; Vohs &
Baumeister, 2004).
 Trait self-control is successful regulation of behavior (De Ridder et al.,
2012).
 State self-control is dealing with self-control dilemmas relies on
effortful inhibition of undesired behavioral tendencies – same
definition, but focus on failure (De Ridder et al., 2012).

B. BENEFITS
 A higher degree of self-control is, in turn, associated with better
health, educational and labor market outcomes as well as greater
financial and overall well-being (Cobb-Clark et al., 2019).
  Academic/work performance (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005; Mischel
et al., 1988).
 Satisfying relationships (Tangney et al., 2004).
 Health (De Ridder et al., 2012).
 Well-being (Cheung et al., 2014; Hofmann et al., 2013).
 Happier life (Cheung et al., 2014; Hofmann et al., 2011).
 The basic principle that all organisms need to achieve some sort of
harmony with their environment so that they can live in reasonable
security and peace and can satisfy their needs (Baumeister & Alquist,
2009).
o Increased flexibility of behavior. Instead of acting on first
impulse, the self-controlling individual can stifle that response,
which makes it possible to act differently.
o Self-control enables individuals to fit in to societies and to
navigate their way through the myriad constraints and
opportunities society presents.
o The self-control of individuals also enables social systems to
operate smoothly and serve their functions, because self-
controlling individuals obey the society’s rules and perform their
roles within it.
 Ample research has confirmed the benefits of self-control. Some of
the most impressive evidence that self-control benefits individuals was
provided by Mischel, Shoda, and Peake (1988) and Shoda, Mischel,
and Peake (1990). They followed up children who had participated in
laboratory studies of delay of gratification when they were four years
old. In these procedures, which have become widely known under the
rubric of ‘‘the marshmallow test,’’ children had to choose between an
immediate but small reward (e.g., one marshmallow) and a larger but
delayed reward (e.g., three marshmallows after 20 minutes). Self-
control is required to resist the temptation to take an immediate

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 pleasure in order to procure a better outcome in the long run.
(‘‘Better’’ in this case involves the assumption, dubious to adults but
presumably embraced by children, that three marshmallows are
preferable to one.) The participants who had shown the best self-
control at age 4 became more successful than others as adults, both
socially and academically.
 The diversity of benefits of self-control was suggested in a pair of
studies by Tangney, Baumeister, and Boone (2004). A trait measure of
self-control significantly predicted a host of positive outcomes,
including interpersonal success, school achievement, and adjustment.
That is, people scoring high on self-control were more likely than
others to report good grades in school and college. They were more
likely to report secure and satisfying relationships and less likely to
report angry aggression. They were less prone to report an assortment
of pathologies, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders,
drinking problems, and psychoticism. Their emotional stability was
better.
 Self-control is related to one important facet of relationship
maintenance: accommodation. Accommodation involves an
individual’s tendency to avoid responding destructively to the
negative behaviors of his or her partner (Rusbult, Verette, Whitney,
Slovik, & Lipkus, 1991). A series of four studies showed that
individuals’ self-reported trait self-control was consistently correlated
with three of the four aspects of accommodation (Finkel & Campbell,
2001). Individuals with higher self-control were more likely to respond
to a partner’s negative behavior by trying to talk through the problem
and were less likely to respond by avoiding the partner or ending the
relationship than individuals with lower self-control.
 To be sure, in general the benefits of self-control to society are
somewhat more difficult to document than the benefits to individuals,
but they may be quite important. An influential work by Gottfredson
and Hirschi (1990) concluded that poor self-control is the single most

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 important cause of criminality. (We assume crime is detrimental and
costly to society.) Subsequent research has confirmed strong links
between poor self-control and criminal, violent, and antisocial
behavior patterns (see Pratt & Cullen, 2000, for a review). Thus, good
self-control is vital for sustaining socially desirable, law-abiding
behavior and thus for the smooth and effective functioning of
civilization.

C. DOWNSIDES
 Being prone to low self-control is associated with problematic
behaviors and outcomes such as impulse buying (Baumeister, 2002)
and financial debt (Gathergood, 2012), maladaptive eating patterns
(Elfhag and Morey, 2008), and procrastination (Tice and Baumeister,
1997).
 Ego-depletion paradigm: self-control gets depleted after initial act of
self-control either because of low self-control resource or because of
temporary flaws in motivation and attention (Baumeister et al., 1998).
 The very nature of self-control entails overriding some impulses and
desires, and so forfeiting those satisfactions is a very real and
substantial cost. The exertion of self-control in everyday life means
that people do not eat or drink what they want, do not purchase items
they desire, do not have sex with partners they fancy, do not strike or
shoot people they despise, and in many other ways forfeit the
satisfaction of their desires.
 Exerting self-control in one sphere led to impaired capacity to regulate
one’s behavior in another, ostensibly unrelated, sphere. For example,
regulating one’s emotions while watching an upsetting video clip
caused a significant drop in a test of physical stamina (handgrip). The
implication is that a common, limited resource is used for many
different exertions of self-control. When the resource was expended
by the person in a first act of self-control, less of it remained to enable

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 the person to regulate effectively on the second task (Baumeister et
al., 1998).

D. THEORIES
 Self-control strength model suggests that self-control depends on a
limited energy resource (Baumeister et al., 1994).
o It was observed that self-control appeared vulnerable to
deterioration over time from repeated exertions, resembling a
muscle that gets tired.
o The basic approach to testing the depleted-resource hypothesis
was to have some research participants perform a first self-
control task, while others performed a comparable but neutral
task, and then all would move on to perform a second, unrelated
self-control task. If self-control consumes a limited resource,
then performing the first task should deplete the person’s
resource, leaving less available for the second task—and
therefore causing poorer performance on the second task.
 Other theories would make different predictions. For example, if self-
control mainly involved activating a cognitive schema or mental
program, then the first self-control task should prime the schema and
activate the self-control system, so performance on the second self-
control task should improve, not worsen.
 Ego depletion refers to the state of diminished resources following
exertion of self-control (Baumeister et al., 2007).

E. EXPERIMENTS
 Early laboratory evidence for depleted resources in self-regulation was
reported by Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister (1998) and Baumeister,
Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice (1998).

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 o In one study, watching an emotionally evocative film while trying
either to amplify or to stifle one’s emotional response caused
poorer performance on a subsequent test of physical (handgrip)
stamina, as compared to watching the film without trying to
control one’s emotions. (Stamina counts as a measure of self-
control because it involves resisting fatigue and overriding the
urge to quit.)
o In another study, suppressing a forbidden thought weakened
people’s ability to stifle laughter afterward.
o In another, resisting the temptation to eat chocolates and
cookies (and making oneself eat health-promoting but
unappetizing radishes instead) caused participants to give up
faster on a subsequent frustrating task, as compared to people
who had not exerted self-control.
o These studies all pointed toward the conclusion that the first
self-control task consumed and depleted some kind of
psychological resource that was therefore less available to help
performance on the second self-control task.

F. STRATEGIES
 Enacting ritualized actions can enhance subjective feelings of self-
discipline, such that rituals can be harnessed to improve behavioral
self-control (Tian et al., 2018). Ritual is a fixed episodic sequence of
actions characterized by rigidity and repetition.
 Research suggests that regular practice can improve self-control,
usually indicated by self-report measures assessed during or shortly
after the practice intervention (Job et. al., 2016).
 The cybernetic model suggests that control relies on three separate
processes: setting goals, monitoring when behavior diverges from
goals, and implementing behavior aligned with goals (Inzlicht et al.,
2014).

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 o Cybernetics is the scientific study of control (Wiener, 1948).
o It is based on the characteristics of feedback loops and is used to
model control in people, animals, and machines (Carver &
Scheier, 1981).
Cybernetic model of control

o Improving Control by Setting Better, More Self-Aligned Goals

 Goal setting can be thought of as a process that creates a
discrepancy between what one wants to be like and what
one is currently like.
 According to goal-setting theory (Locke & Latham, 2006),
which synthesizes hundreds of laboratory and field
studies, the simple act of setting a specific, challenging, yet
attainable goal leads to better self-control (Latham &
Locke, 1991) than setting a vague goal or not setting a goal
at all.
 However, not all goals are created equal. Setting goals that
are aligned with personal values will contribute to greater
self-control (Inzlicht et al., 2014).
 When goals are internally driven—that is, when they are
perceived as personally meaningful—behavior becomes
easier to control, even in the face of fatigue (Hockey &
Earle, 2006).
o Improving Control by Monitoring

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  It is paying attention to discrepancies between these goals
and current behavior.
 In particular, people should pay attention to when they
have failed to meet a goal, or when goal failure is likely.
Attention to such failures can help individuals avoid future
mistakes.
 Conflict monitoring. Neuroscience models suggest
that control is initiated by a conflict-monitoring
system localized to a brain region called the anterior
cingulate cortex and captured by an evoked brain
potential called the error-related negativity (ERN;
Gehring, Goss, Coles, Meyer, & Donchin, 1993). This
brain potential represents a quick neural response to
errors or conflict (Botvinick et al., 2001) and reflects
not only the detection of conflict, but also the
affective response to conflict (Inzlicht & Al-Khindi,
2012).
 Attention. One way to cultivate the capacity to
monitor for goal conflicts is through mindfulness
meditation, which refers to the practice of
nonjudgmentally focusing on the present moment.
 Acceptance. Self-control is improved when people
acknowledge and accept their errors. Acceptance is
refers to open and nonjudgmental ownership of
mistakes. When people consider their errors without
defense or judgment, they gain the ability to attend
to them without distraction and are able to respond
to them adaptively; acceptance, in other words,
sharpens conflict monitoring
o Improving Control by Implementing Goal-Directed Behaviors

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  Once a person sets a goal and attends to instances of self-
control conflict, the next challenge is to implement
behaviors that will reduce these conflicts. One barrier to
the implementing system is mental fatigue. Critically,
personally meaningful goals promote self-control even in
the face of fatigue (Legault, Green-Demers, & Eadie, 2009).
 Another way to strengthen the implementing system is by
forming implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999), or
behavioral plans that link anticipated situations with
specified behaviors; they specify the when, where, and
how of goal-directed behavior in advance (e.g., “When I
get home from work, I will exercise for 30 minutes”).
Implementation intentions improve control by associating
the control of one’s behavior with specific situations—
when the anticipated situation is encountered, it
automatically cues the behavior, even under conditions of
fatigue (Webb & Sheeran, 2003). The power of intentions
was demonstrated in a field study in which children
exhibited better control of their behavior when they
elaborated upon their implementation intentions
(Duckworth, Grant, Loew, Oettingen, & Gollwitzer, 2011).

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