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Motivational psychologists are finding that it’s not just whether a person believes they have willpower. The amount of willpower a person believes they possess can influence both everyday choices and larger goal-setting. “When people say things like ‘I have no willpower with cake’ or ‘I have no willpower with social media,’ that highlights something important even though our beliefs about willpower can be fairly general and shape how we approach self-control……..Continue reading…

By : Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi

Source:Discover Magazine

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Critics:

Willpower or Counteractive self-control theory focuses on how desires interact with goals. 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. Desires differ in their intensity and longevity. A desire becomes a temptation when pursuing it would conflict with an individual’s goals.

One limitation in researching desire is that people experience a wide variety of desires, which differ in frequency, strength, and relevance to personal goals. In a large experience-sampling study, 7,827 desire reports were collected over one week, capturing variation in desire intensity, the degree of conflict with other goals, and the likelihood of resisting a desire successfully. The most common and strongly felt desires were those related to bodily needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping.

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. 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. 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.

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 consumption could be overspending on 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.

Participants in one study rated a new snack as less healthy when it was described as very tasty rather than only slightly tasty. This evaluation pattern reflects counteractive self-control, where a tempting attribute leads people to devalue that option to support a health goal. In another experiment, participants shown one large bowl of chips representing a strong temptation perceived the chips as higher in calories and ate less of them than participants given three smaller bowls containing the same total amount.

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. Weak temptations present more of a challenge to overcome than strong temptations, because they appear less likely to compromise long-term values. High-level construals involve thinking about actions and outcomes in a broad, abstract way, whereas low-level construals involve thinking about them in concrete, detailed terms.

These different construal levels influence how individuals activate self-control when facing temptations. One way researchers induce high-level construals is by asking a series of “why?” questions that prompt increasingly abstract responses; low-level construals are elicited with “how?” questions that focus on concrete details. When completing an Implicit Association Test, participants induced into high-level construals pair unhealthy temptations (such as candy bars) with “bad” and healthy options (such as apples) with “good” more quickly than low-level participants.

They are also more likely to choose an apple over a candy bar in behavioral tasks. Even without deliberate self-control, simply adopting a high-level construal can reduce the pull of temptations by shifting attention to broader goals and values, such as maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The manipulation of the environment to make some responses easier to physically execute and others more difficult illustrates this principle.

This can be physical guidance: the application of physical contact to induce an individual to go through the motions of a desired behavior. It can also be a physical prompt. Examples of this include clapping one’s hand over one’s own mouth, placing one’s hand in one’s pocket to prevent fidgeting, and using a ‘bridge’ hand position to steady a pool shot; these all represent physical methods to affect behavior.Manipulating emotional conditions can induce certain ways of responding.

One example of this can be seen in theatre. Actors often elicit tears from their own painful memories if it is necessary for the character they are playing to cry. One may read a letter or book, listen to music, or watch a movie, in order to get in the proper state of mind for a certain event or function.  Additionally, considering an activity either as “work” or as “fun” can have an effect on the difficulty of self-control.

Research has proposed that self-control performance may be influenced by glucose availability in the brain. Early studies reported that engaging in acts of self-control reduced circulating glucose, and that lower glucose levels or reduced glucose tolerance were associated with poorer performance on subsequent self-control tasks, particularly under demanding or novel conditions. These findings formed the basis of the glucose-depletion model, which proposed that self-control is metabolically costly and reliant on accessible glucose.

A competing account argues that the key factor is not total glucose supply but the allocation of glucose to effortful tasks. Under this view, the brain generally has sufficient metabolic resources, but motivational priorities determine whether glucose is directed to mechanisms supporting self-control. As of 2024, this allocation-based model has not been empirically tested. Aristotle spoke about self-control as a key value that can guide decision making and support a good life.

He contrasted self-control with the vice of akrasia which he described as acting against one’s better judgment. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discussed the significance of this value in leading a virtuous life. Similarly, Plato wrote about self-control in relation to both mental and physical pleasures. Examples of self-control as a virtue appear in Aristotle’s treatment of temperance, which involves having a well-chosen and well-regulated set of desires.

The vices associated with failures of temperance are self-indulgence (excess) and insensibility (deficiency). Deficiency or excess refers to the degree to which temperance is present. For example, a deficiency of temperance leads to overindulgence, while too much restraint can result in insensitivity or unreasonable control. Aristotle used the following analogy: the intemperate person is like a city with bad laws; the person without self-control is like a city with good laws that are not enforced…

 

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