The Journal of Forensic Practice

Self-control, fluctuating willpower, and forensic practice

Roy F. Baumeister
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Roy F. Baumeister, (2013),"Self-control, fluctuating willpower, and forensic practice", The Journal of Forensic Practice, Vol.
15 Iss 2 pp. 85 - 96
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 Invited Paper
Self-control, fluctuating willpower,
and forensic practice
Roy F. Baumeister
Roy F. Baumeister is
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Professor of Psychology at
the Psychology
Department, Florida State
University, Tallahassee,
Florida, USA.
DOI 10.1108/14636641311322278
Abstract
Purpose – This article aims to explain the relevance of new findings about self-control and willpower for
antisocial behaviour and forensic practice.
Design/methodology/approach – The relevance of the phenomena is covered first, followed by an
exposition of how self-control works.
Findings – The basic ingredients for effective self-control are standards, monitoring, and willpower.
Willpower fluctuates as a function of demands on it (including decision making) and bodily states
(including food and rest). Self-control and willpower can be increased, even in adults.
Practical implications – Antisocial and criminal behaviour is often mediated by failures of self-control.
Remediation and prevention can benefit by applying a correct understanding of how self-control
functions.
Originality/value – Understanding of self-control has advanced greatly in recent years and is highly
relevant to forensic practice. Clients can learn to gain control over their actions.
Keywords Self-control, Self-regulation, Ego depletion, Criminals, Willpower, Glucose, Self assessment,
Self development, Will
Paper type Conceptual paper
Basic research psychologists such as myself plumb the depths and margins of human nature,
driven by an abstract curiosity about how people think, act, and feel. In contrast, most forensic
psychologists are concerned with highly practical and pressing matters in dealing with
law-breakers, convicted prisoners, their victims, and the prospects for ameliorating and
rehabilitating human misbehaviour. This article explores what an academic research program
motivated by general curiosity can offer to those dealing with the grim realities of the criminal
world.
Specifically, my colleagues and I have spent more than two decades conducting laboratory
research into the processes of self-control and self-regulation, which is to say how people
manage their actions in relation to moral, social, and legal standards of proper behaviour. The
hard-won insights from several hundred laboratory experiments can potentially offer a useful
perspective for theorists and practitioners who deal with society’s miscreants and the
problems and disruptions they cause.
In a nutshell, our work indicates that people’s ability to control themselves and their
behaviour so as to conform to external standards (rules, moral values, laws, ideals, social
norms and expectations) depends on a limited and fluctuating resource. The folk notion of
willpower, although crude and deficient, has some degree of validity. Behaving in a
legally and morally correct fashion depends to a significant degree on how this resource is
used. Its lapses contribute to antisocial and criminal behaviour. Understanding how
VOL. 15 NO. 2 2013, pp. 85-96, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 2050-8794 j JOURNAL OF FORENSIC PRACTICE j PAGE 85
 self-control operates and what causes it to succeed or fail may be useful in facilitating
forensic practice and effective intervention.
Some simplistic and moralistic perspectives have asserted that misbehaviour flows from
inherent character flaws indicative of deficient self-control. To be sure, character flaws may
indeed contribute to misbehaviour. Alongside such possible effects, however, the work by
myself and colleagues has suggested that an individual’s capacity to control themselves
fluctuates extensively as a function of external demands, of seemingly irrelevant or tangential
other activities, and of the body’s inner processes (Baumeister et al., 2007). Understanding
these relationships may help practitioners deal more effectively with offenders, their victims,
and their social circles.

Self-control, society, and the law

Scarcely two decades ago, two criminologists published a book with the audacious title
A General Theory of Crime (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990). Most social scientists assume that
crime is a highly complicated, multidetermined phenomenon, and so the assertion that it
could be reduced to a single theory – let alone a single variable, as the book offered – raised
eyebrows. What would it be: poverty, inequality, relative deprivation, an aggressive instinct?
Their bold message was that low self-control was the key to criminality. Despite the skepticism
and resistance their title elicited, many readers found they had made a strong case. They
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pointed to facts such as these:

B Most criminals do not specialise in one sort of misdeed but are arrested repeatedly for
different sorts of crimes, suggesting a general failure to obey the law.
B Criminals exceed law-abiding citizens in legal behaviours that suggest poor self-control,
such as involvement in unplanned pregnancies, erratic work histories and absenteeism,
and smoking tobacco, as well as in behaviours such as traffic accidents. This suggests
that low self-control pervades the criminal’s lifestyle.
B Children of single parents are vastly over represented in prison and offender
populations (relative to their proportion of the population), probably because single
parents cannot maintain discipline and instill self-control as well as two-parent
households.
The view that self-control is the fundamental issue for a general theory of criminality has
stimulated a wealth of research (see Pratt and Cullen, 2000 for review). Whilst Gottfredson
and Hirschi (1990) may have slightly overstated their case, their core hypothesis and
insights are correct. Subsequent work has confirmed that deficient self-control is a vital and
powerful key to understanding criminal and other antisocial behaviour. If they overreached, it
was mainly in the implication that deficient self-control could offer a complete explanation.
Forensic psychologists may profit by understanding the contribution of poor self-control to
criminality, but that focus should not blind them to the relevance and importance of other
variables.
As various writers have observed, no laws are needed to prohibit people from eating stones or
putting their hands in the fire. Laws prohibit people from doing things they may be strongly
inclined to do but that undermine the prospects for peaceful and cooperative coexistence. In
Freud’s (1930) view, the human psyche is ill suited to living under such restrictions and
requirements, and so rather extensive and costly inner changes were required to render the
human beast capable of a civilized lifestyle. In the decades since Freud’s death, a different
view has gradually emerged. People appear to be biologically prepared to learn the
restrictions of culture and to adapt to them, not least because becoming a member of a
cultural society is the innate aspiration of humankind (Baumeister, 2005). Humans do not have
to be forced to accept civilization, with its laws and morals. Instead, we are innately inclined to
do this, though we may often struggle to bring our other natural inclinations into alignment with
the requirements of culture.
Put another (slightly oversimplified) way, people are naturally inclined to understand and
obey laws. Human beings are animals and, as such, have all the selfish and potentially

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 antisocial impulses that other animals may have, but humans also have some propensity and
desire to be accepted into social groups – and obeying the group’s rules is often a
prerequisite to acceptance into it.
Nature (via evolution through natural selection) therefore endowed humans with the
motivation and capacity to conform their actions to the rules and norms of the social
environment. Self-control is a central and fundamental part of this. When push comes to
shove, individual humans face a choice between doing what they impulsively or selfishly want
to do for their immediate personal gain and doing what society regards as proper and correct
(and which will, in the long if not the short run, bring benefits to the self in the form of social
acceptance, respect, and other rewards). Inner mechanisms such as self-control enable the
person to overcome selfish impulses in order to act in ways that society approves.
Violence highlights the crux of the conflict. People resort to violence to get their way in
interpersonal conflicts. Usually they know that society does not approve of violence as
an interpersonal strategy. Self-control is therefore vital to enable individuals to resist violent
impulses.
In short, violence starts when self-control stops. Crucially, self-control is not a constant feature
of individual character but a variable capability that depends on a fluctuating inner resource.
Criminal and violent actions are not limited to persons who utterly lack the wherewithal to
behave properly. Instead, such antisocial actions may be performed by almost anyone during
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what is colloquially known as a ‘‘moment of weakness,’’ which in more precise, scientific terms
is a vulnerable moment during which the impulses to misbehave are especially strong and
which happen to arise just when the individual’s capacity to override such impulses is
especially weak.

Basics of willpower: how self-control functions

This section is intended as a brief overview of how human self-control operates. Readers
interested in more thorough and detailed explanations of self-regulation processes are
referred to the fuller and more extensive expositions elsewhere (for condensed scholarly
overview, see Baumeister et al., 2007 or Baumeister, 2012; for extended discussion, see Vohs
and Baumeister, 2011a; for in-depth coverage for nonscientific readers, possibly including
forensic clients, see Baumeister and Tierney, 2011).

Three aspects of self-control

Self-control is comprised of three processes:
1. Commitment to standards.
2. Monitoring the target behaviour.
3. Capacity to change (willpower).
The first involves commitment to goals, values, and other standards. In forensic practice, the
standards presumably consist of legal, socially acceptable behaviour. The laws apply to
everyone. The main source of variation is therefore personal commitment to live up to these
standards. Some people may know what is legal and appropriate but simply not care.
Alternatively, people may know what is legally mandated but be personally more invested in
alternative standards, such as their own conception of what is morally right. Among others,
Pinker (2011) has summarised evidence that many violent crimes are committed not from a
disregard of morality but in order to enforce morality, such as when individuals think that how
others have treated them is immoral and therefore warrants violent response in order to
restore justice. Someone who beats or indeed shoots a spouse because of a perceived
deficit in marital loyalty (e.g. flirting or copulating with someone else) violates the law but may
believe that he or she is acting so as to uphold moral justice regardless of what the laws can
do, possibly even in a perception that the laws fail to deliver morally requisite justice.
More broadly, when people contend with conflicting standards of what is right or appropriate,
self-regulation is often compromised. Such cases may range from children whose two parents

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 espouse different sets of rules, to adults who feel that the rules and practices of the
legal system fail to deliver moral justice. Both conflicting standards and inadequate
personal commitment to standards undermine self-control by undermining one key
ingredient: a clear goal. It is difficult to change oneself effectively in multiple, incompatible
directions.
The second ingredient is monitoring. It is difficult to regulate something without keeping
track of it. Just as dieters count the calories in the foods they eat and aspiring athletes record
how many laps they swim, miles/kilometers they run, or pounds/kilometers they lift, people
aspiring to improve their behaviour according to moral, legal, or personal standards will
benefit from careful records and will suffer or fail if such information is not available. Lack of
monitoring renders self-control difficult if not impossible – rather like trying to obey traffic
speed limits in a car that does not have a working speedometer.
Alcohol intoxication contributes to a great deal of crime and other misbehaviour. One highly
relevant effect of alcohol intoxication is that is diminishes awareness of one’s own actions
(Hull, 1981), making people less able or less inclined to keep track of what they are doing.
An early survey of research on self-regulation concluded that alcohol undermined self-
control in nearly every domain (Baumeister et al., 1994): intoxicated people violate personal
standards and guidelines for behaviour in one sphere after another. Compared to sober
persons, intoxicated persons are more aggressive and violent, are more prone to sexual
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misbehaviour, spend more money, eat more food (and more unhealthy food), boast more,
smoke more, and on and on.
A meta-analytic review of the research literature confirmed beyond doubt that alcohol
intoxication intensifies aggression (Bushman and Cooper, 1990). Some readers may infer that
alcohol stimulates aggressive tendencies, but that is probably wrong. After all, the great
majority of persons who consume alcohol, even to the point of intoxication, commit no violent or
criminal actions. Instead, the implication is that alcohol weakens the restraints that normally
prevent aggressive impulses from translating into aggressive behaviour (Steele and Southwick,
1985). People who drink in the absence of aggressive provocation generally do not become
aggressive. However, if the person is provoked, alcohol intoxication reduces inner restraints,
making an aggressive response more likely, and intensifying the level of its violence.
The third process comprising self-control involves the marshaling of energy to bring about the
change or curtailing of inappropriate behaviour. This process has been a central concern of
research in my laboratory over recent decades. Our early experiments showed that after
people exerted self-control in one context, their self-control in a subsequent and different
context was impaired, suggesting that some energy or other resource had become depleted
by the first task and was therefore not (or less) available for the second (Baumeister et al.,
1998; Muraven et al., 1998). By now, such ‘‘ego depletion’’ effects have been
replicated in many laboratories, using a wealth of assorted procedures, and confirmed by
meta-analysis (Hagger et al., 2010). The implication is that when people expend their
willpower on one task or in one context, they have less left over for the next challenge that
comes along.
The view of self-control as dependent on a limited supply of energy is highly relevant to
forensic practice. Sitting quietly in a home or office, individuals may well espouse socially
approved values and renounce or eschew violence. Likewise, people with drug or alcohol
problems may sincerely and earnestly assert that they intend not to succumb to such illicit
temptations. Such a person may even be quite sure of being able to resist a hypothetical
impulse to commit violence or abuse drugs. But a person’s willpower fluctuates across days
and weeks. A temptation or impulse that seemed easy to resist when one was well rested and
in full command of self-regulatory capabilities might loom much more ominously when one has
already depleted one’s willpower coping with personal stresses, interpersonal conflicts,
money problems, or other hassles.
To put this in perspective, even the most hardened criminal does not violate the law at every
opportunity. Abiding the law requires restraining antisocial impulses at all times and under all
circumstances, and the difference between a model citizen and a dangerous criminal may

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 be a matter of only a few instances. Willpower fluctuates, and it takes only a rare and
occasional moment of weakness to allow violent impulses to translate into outright criminal
behaviour. Some time ago I surveyed the research literature on violent, criminal, and
oppressive behaviour, with the goal of addressing the classic philosophical question of
‘‘Why is there evil?’’ (Baumeister, 1997). About a year into the project, after I had assembled
a daunting list of all the factors that promote aggression and violence, I realised that an
equally valid question was ‘‘Why isn’t there more violence than there is?’’ Self-control is a
major answer to that question. Many people experience provocations and aggressive
impulses, but mostly they restrain them. Violence occurs on perhaps a very few occasions,
when the person’s inner resources for restraining those impulses are inadequate.
There is ample evidence from controlled laboratory experiments that impairments in
self-control, including a temporarily depletion of willpower, can give rise to antisocial
behaviour. Research participants show increased aggression if they have depleted their
willpower in prior acts of self-control that are unrelated to the aggression opportunity
(DeWall et al., 2007). Indeed, the depleted state has been shown to cause increases in
hurtful physical treatment of relationship partners even among university student research
participants who have no history of partner abuse (Finkel et al., 2009). If a small depletion in
willpower can cause non-offender college students to increase their level of intimate
partner violence, the parallel potential for abuse among more at-risk populations may be
substantial.
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A major theme of research on self-control is that all acts of self-control draw on a common
resource. Some persons imagine that they have different stores of willpower for different
tasks. They may think, for example, that they have ample willpower for getting to work on
time and remaining true to their romantic partners but lack willpower for resisting the allure of
tasty desserts or for keeping a tidy desk. These views are hard to reconcile with the current
knowledge about self-control. Instead, it seems that each person has one stock of willpower
that can be allocated among different tasks, challenges, and obligations.
Moreover, as already indicated, the person’s available quantity of willpower is not a constant
but instead fluctuates across the day. A recent study tracked how well people can restrain
their urges and desires over the course of a week (Hofmann et al., 2012 a, b). As each day
wore on, the more the person had resisted various desires (successfully or unsuccessfully),
the less successful the person was at resisting whatever desire arose next. Thus, as people
expended their willpower restraining some desires and inclinations, they ended up with less
willpower left over to resist other impulses.

Mind and body

When my lab group first started producing the experimental findings that exerting self-control
led to poorer self-control on subsequent, even unrelated tasks, we described them in terms of
depleted energy resources. This was largely metaphorical. Subsequent work has begun to
suggest that willpower is far more than a metaphor. Physiological evidence suggests that the
body’s energy supply is in fact depleted, thereby undermining the body’s capacity to support
further acts of self-control.
Glucose is a chemical that is carried in the bloodstream. It contains the energy that the human
body and brain use for their diverse activities. Brain cells function by means of
neurotransmitters (the chemicals in the synapses that communicate information between
neurons). Neurotransmitters are made from glucose. Our findings suggest that glucose is an
important part of self-control processes (Gailliot et al., 2007). After people exert self-control,
the levels of glucose in their bloodstream drop. In turn, low levels of blood glucose lead to
relatively poor self-control. Moreover, when people come into the state of ego depletion as a
result of initial exertion of self-control, the effects can be reduced or eliminated if glucose
levels are restored to normal, such as by having the person consume food or drink that
contains energy-giving nutrients.
The link between self-control and blood glucose adds an important and revealing
dimension to understanding the vicissitudes of self-control, with multiple implications for

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 forensic practice. Among other things, it means that some behaviour issues may be linked
to what people eat. Rojas and Sanchi (1941) found that recently arrested juvenile
delinquents had, on average, abnormally low levels of blood glucose. The misbehaviour
that got them into trouble (and therefore arrested) may well have been shaped by low
blood glucose leading to impaired self-control. Subsequent work has provided plenty more
evidence linking glucose deficiencies to criminal behaviour (for review, see Gailliot and
Baumeister, 2007).
General dietary practices may therefore help or hurt self-control. In a memoir of life in a violent
youth gang, Shakur and Scott (1994) observed that gang members seemed to become
increasingly edgy, irritable, and aggressive as they spent extended periods with the gang. He
thought this correlated with the rather poor eating habits that prevailed. When engrossed in
gang activities, the young toughs did not habitually break for a healthy dinner with lean meat
and green vegetables, but would instead typically settle for greasy fast food at erratic hours.
The junk food and inconsistent eating schedule can distort the body’s metabolism and
possibly produce problematic fluctuations in blood glucose.
More systematic data come from several prison studies, which have found that replacing
standard prison fare with healthier food or even just augmenting it with vitamin supplements
has sometimes produced dramatic reductions in violence and misbehaviour among the
prison populations (Gesch et al., 2002). A prospective study in Finland was able to predict
recidivism with remarkable accuracy based on the glucose metabolizing capacity of
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prisoners who were about to be released after completing their sentences (Virkkunen et al.,
1989).
Glucose may also contribute to the effects of alcohol on crime. Alcohol intoxication entails a
lowering of blood glucose levels, possibly because alcohol replaces glucose in the
bloodstream. The pervasively poor self-control of intoxicated persons, including their
propensity for aggressive and criminal behaviour, may stem partly from the lack of glucose
for fueling effective self-control. If people combine alcohol with skipping meals or eating
unhealthy food, they may be at particular risk for engaging in antisocial behaviour.
Glucose is not just fuel for the brain’s self-control activities. It is part of the body’s basic energy
supply, and many organs use it. That means that when some bodily functions start to draw
more glucose than usual, self-control may suffer. The immune system, for example, is a highly
variable user of glucose. It may consume relatively little for weeks on end and then, when the
person has been exposed to germs and the immune system springs into action to fight off the
illness or work toward recovery, it may start to consume relatively large amounts. Self-control
may abruptly deteriorate simply because someone is nursing a cold. In fact, the immune
system may start to pull glucose away from other functions (including self-control) long before
the person even realises that he or she has been exposed to illness and may be about to
become sick.
The premenstrual syndrome (PMS) has been linked to a panoply of misbehaviours in
women, including criminal activities, aggression, and impulsive substance abuse. In the
popular stereotype, the body’s premenstrual processes give rise to dangerous impulses, but
a more plausible alternative explanation is that PMS reflects a failure of self-control caused
by glucose deficiencies (Gailliot et al., 2010). During the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle,
the female body diverts considerable glucose into its reproductive preparations. Many
women increase their food intake during these days, but the increase is usually not sufficient
to offset the increase in inner demand, and so the PMS sufferer is effectively operating with
less than the usual amount of glucose available for self-control. The diversity of behavioural
effects of PMS is difficult to reconcile with the notion that PMS causes particular antisocial
impulses to emerge, and instead it suggests that the primary effect is a broad weakening of
inner restraints.

Beyond self-control
Just as glucose and/or willpower are used for physical processes beyond self-control, they
are also vital in other psychological processes. First and foremost, decision making appears

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 to depend on the same resource used for self-control. Making decisions can cause ego
depletion, which is the essence of so-called decision fatigue (Baumeister and Tierney,
2011). After people make choices or decisions, their self-control is impaired (Vohs et al.,
2008). Conversely, after people exert self-control, their decision-making can be
compromised (Pocheptsova et al., 2009). Depleted persons may avoid or postpone tough
decisions. They may be less likely than others to compromise (because compromise is an
intellectually more difficult sort of decision, requiring trading off opposed or conflicting
criteria, as compared to simply adopting an extreme position (Simonson, 1989). They tend to
make impulsive, short-sighted decisions (Wang et al., 2010; Vohs and Faber, 2007). Under
depletion, the decision process may succumb to irrational biases. There is also evidence
that some of these deteriorations in decision quality are mediated by drops in blood
glucose (Masicampo and Baumeister, 2008; McMahon and Scheel, 2010; Wang and
Dvorak, 2010).
The evidence linking ego depletion to poor decision making is potentially quite relevant to
forensic practice. Many violent and criminal actions stem from unwise decisions. In
particular, several of the patterns of change in decision making that are associated with ego
depletion are also ones that can be conducive to criminal behaviour. These include
impulsive decisions done without adequate reflection, favoring short-term over long-term
benefits, irrational bias, and refusal to compromise (Pocheptsova et al., 2009). Improving the
way people manage their willpower and blood glucose could well contribute to better
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decisions and hence less criminal and antisocial behaviour.

Initiative and active rather than passive responding may also depend on glucose and
willpower. Several studies have shown, for example, that during the state of ego depletion
caused by prior exertion of self-control, people become more passive than usual and less
prone to take independent action to solve problems (Vohs and Baumeister, 2011). The
implications of this for forensic practice may be mixed, because many crimes may take
initiative. But interventions aimed at getting people to take control of their lives in a positive way
may be thwarted by the fact that frequent depletion of willpower can leave people prone to
backslide and relapse. Moreover, a general passivity toward one’s life may leave the person at
the mercy of uncontrolled, stressful, or aversive developments. A resulting increase in crises
may sap willpower further and could conceivably increase the person’s interest in promising
short-term solutions, including criminal activity. For example, a person with poor self-control
may fail to manage money effectively, leading to periodic crises of debt, bad credit, and other
fiscal emergencies, and some individuals may find illegal methods for getting money quickly
(e.g. robbery, drug sales, prostitution) appealing, or at least more appealing than the legal
ways of making money.
Stress appears to have a reciprocal relationship with self-control. There is some
evidence that stressful events weaken self-control, possibly through several different
causal pathways. Even just coming to perceive one’s life as highly stressful has been shown
to cause an impairment of performance on laboratory tests of self-control (Crescioni et al.,
2011). Conversely, people who score high on trait self-control have been found to
experience less stress on a day-to-day basis, suggesting that effective control helps
keep life moving forward in positive ways and reduce one’s vulnerability to stressful
outcomes and developments (Hofmann et al., 2012 a, b). Good self-control is often
manifest in developing habits and routines that keep at least some sources of stress to
minimum (De Ridder et al., n.d.). The implication is that people whose lives contain many
sources of unexpected problems will find their decision making and self-control may lead to a
poorly managed life with relatively high rate of problems – which in turn will drain more
willpower as the person attempts to cope with these crises.
Of course, even good self-control may fail when the antisocial impulses are strong. Whether
the person obeys the law and acts in socially desirable ways depends on the inner battle
between impulse and restraint. Crime and violence can result from either weak restraints or
strong impulses. When both are present – such as when a man with poor or depleted
self-control feels strong violent impulses, perhaps in connection with the perception of having
been treated disrespectfully – the odds of antisocial action are especially high. To complicate

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 matters further, there is some evidence that the state of ego depletion causes persons to feel
impulses, desires, and emotions more intensely than usual (Vohs et al., 2012). In other words,
weakened restraint may ironically and unfortunately cause antisocial impulses to be felt
especially strongly.
One point of this section is that issues of self-control may be hidden factors that cause or
mediate a great deal of antisocial behaviour. It is hardly a novel observation to suggest that
many criminals live unstable lives marked by unstable relationships, erratic employment,
and relatively frequent eruptions of unforeseen problems and difficulties. Gottfredson and
Hirschi (1990) suggested that low self-control may contribute to this pattern of problematic
life. Subsequent research, including my own, has continued to find new ways that
self-control issues may create and exacerbate problems. Problems and stresses weaken
self-control. Chronic or frequent ego depletion may contribute to poor decision making and
failure to restrain antisocial impulses. Everyday stresses may have a more negative
impact on someone whose self-control has been depleted and/or whose self-control was
poor to begin with. All of this could create a downward spiral in which poor self-control
creates problems and stresses, which in turn drain resources and weaken self-control
further.

Improving self-control
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Intelligence and self-control are perhaps the two outstanding traits that psychological
research has shown to be addressed to a broad range of positive outcomes in life (Jensen,
1998; Moffitt et al., 2011). Not surprisingly, criminals have been shown to be relatively low
on both intelligence and self-control. Reliable methods for producing permanent
improvements in intelligence have largely eluded researchers, despite many attempts
and some seemingly promising starts. Therefore, it is especially welcome news that self-
control can be improved.
To summarize briefly, any sort of regular exercise at overriding impulses or changing habits
may improve self-control in a domain-general manner (for more thorough summaries, see
Baumeister et al., 2006; Baumeister and Tierney, 2011). For research, to produce the most
clear-cut results, the usual practice has been to select highly arbitrary exercises that only
practice self-control without producing other benefits to life. For example, people might be
instructed to conform to some arbitrary speech rules such as saying only ‘‘yes’’ and ‘‘no’’
instead of alternate versions (e.g. yeah, nope), speaking in complete sentences, refraining
from cursing, and the like. Right-handed people might be instructed to use their left hands
for various everyday activities such as drinking from a cup, brushing teeth, opening doors,
and using a computer mouse.
Meaningless tasks may be useful for testing scientific hypotheses, but for practical benefit
meaningful tasks may be more useful, not least because the person is more motivated and
more likely to sustain effort because of enjoying the benefits. Indeed, in my view some of the
best and strongest evidence for increasing self-control comes from the Australian studies by
Oaten and Cheng (2006a, b,c), who used self-control exercises related to a specific
behaviour problem in the person’s life. Thus, their participants worked on improving their
management of money, or their study skills (for students), or their physical exercise.
Participants typically continued in the program for a long time and continued to do their
exercises, because these directly produced positive changes in their lives (e.g. more
success at saving money, better marks on exams). Meanwhile, they showed improved
performance at tasks completely unrelated to what they were practicing. They did well on
laboratory tests of visual tracking (requiring control of attention) despite distracting stimuli
such as a comedy video playing on a television screen within their sight and hearing. They
also reported improvements in behaviours unrelated to their exercises, such as keeping up
with household chores.
For forensic practice, it may therefore be useful to encourage individuals to start by making
small improvements in their lives. Rather than directly or immediately tackling a difficult,
conflict-filled problem such as a drug dependency, it may help to start by having the person

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PAGE 92 JOURNAL OF FORENSIC PRACTICE VOL. 15 NO. 2 2013
 make simpler, even mundane improvements. Implementing these changes will build the
person’s capacity for change, thereby giving the person more strength with which eventually to
address the central and severe problems. The strategy is not unlike the crime control
approach adopted by some cities of having police ‘‘crack down’’ on minor crimes such as
vandalism. The discipline stemming from adjusting to these relatively easy and minor changes
can translate into improved ability to control the more dangerous and illegal impulses when they
arise.

Concluding remarks
Low self-control is an important contributor to violence and antisocial behaviour,
as Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) proposed two decades ago. Since then, a great deal
of research has contributed to a much better and fuller understanding of how self-control
works. Forensic psychologists can apply these principles to understand links between trait
self-control, fluctuating strength of self-control, poor decisions, body chemistry and
metabolic processes, interpersonal relationships, and stress. Indeed, even the clients may
benefit directly from reading general-audience overviews of this work (Baumeister and
Tierney, 2011; Baumeister, n.d.) so as to gain some insight into the common patterns by
which people lose control over their actions and lives.
Low self-control may be one recipe for trouble in life, but low self-control is not incurable.
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People can improve their self-control in multiple ways, and these effects are likely to reduce
stress, crime, and recidivism. Modern society has not adequately recognised the value of
promoting self-control in children and young adults, but a more widespread embrace of the
value of promoting that trait would yield benefits for both individuals themselves and for
society at large.

Implications for practice

B Effective control requires commitment to specific standards, careful monitoring of target

behaviour, and willpower to implement changes.
B Alcohol contributes to antisocial behaviour partly by impairing self-control, including reduction of
self-monitoring.
B Willpower is not a stable aspect of character but a fluctuating capability based on energy that
waxes and wanes.
B Good intentions are undermined when temporarily low willpower undermines self-control.
B After exerting self-control or making decisions, willpower is temporarily depleted, leaving the
person vulnerable to self-control failure. Stress also depletes willpower.
B Willpower is linked to blood glucose levels. Poor diet, alcohol, irregular eating, and other factors
reduce the capacity for self-control by impairing the fuel supply.
B PMS and associated misbehaviour may occur because of low glucose levels due to increased
metabolic demands of reproductive system at that time.
B Depleted willpower causes poor decision making.
B Self-control and willpower can be improved, even in adults, by exercise, just as physical muscles
are strengthened.

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 Further reading
Dhar, R. and Simonson, I. (2003), ‘‘The effect of forced choice on choice’’, Journal of Marketing
Research, Vol. 40, pp. 146-160.
Vohs, K.D. and Baumeister, R.F. (2010), ‘‘Active initiative requires self-control resources’’, Manuscript
submitted for publication.

Corresponding author
Roy F. Baumeister can be contacted at: baumeister@psy.fsu.edu
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