No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Metamotivation: The regulation of motivation in self-control
... People who are motivated for intrinsic reasons may not need self-control so much because they use a variety of strategies that allow them to respond in accordance with situational demands (Werner & Berkman [12]). More insight into how people intentionally monitor and regulate their motivational states (meta-motivation) may improve our understanding of when and why people succeed at self-control (Fujita et al. [13]). ...
Although the focus of research for decades, there is a surprising lack of consensus on what is (and what is not) self-control. We review some of the most prominent theoretical models of self-control, including those that highlight conflicts between smaller-sooner versus larger-later rewards, “hot” emotions versus “cool” cognitions, and efficient automatic versus resource-intensive controlled processes. After discussing some of their shortcomings, we propose an alternative approach based on tenets of construal level theory (Trope et al., 2021) that integrates these disparate models while also providing novel insights. Specifically, we model self-control as a problem of regulatory scope—the range of considerations one accounts for in any decision or behavior. Self-control conflicts occur when the pursuit of specific local opportunities threatens the ability to address motivational priorities that span a broader array of time, places, individuals, and possibilities. Whereas a more contractive consideration of relevant concerns may prompt indulgence in temptation, a more expansive consideration of concerns should not only help people identify the self-control conflict but also successfully resolve it. We review empirical evidence that supports this new framework and discuss implications and new directions. This regulatory framework not only clarifies what is and what is not self-control but also provides new insights that can be leveraged to enhance self-control in all its various forms.
Researchers from social and educational psychology have typically taken distinct approaches to investigating how individuals regulate their motivational states. The metamotivational framework that we describe in this article serves to bridge these approaches by drawing on insights from the literatures on metacognition and emotion regulation. Metamotivation refers to the psychological processes involved in monitoring and exerting control over one’s motivational states. In contrast to prior approaches, which tend to concentrate on the strategies that individuals use to regulate the amount of motivation they have to pursue various goals (i.e., on motivation quantity), our metamotivational framework also focuses on how people determine which types of motivation (e.g., intrinsic vs. extrinsic, promotion vs. prevention, high- vs. low-level construal) are best suited for particular goals (i.e., on motivation quality). A central assumption of the framework is that people draw on at least three types of metamotivational knowledge when regulating the quantity and quality of their motivation: task knowledge, strategy knowledge, and self-knowledge. In this article, we provide a speculative account of how this occurs. We then review findings indicating that, on average, people have surprisingly accurate task and strategy knowledge about the adaptiveness of particular types of motivation for certain kinds of tasks (i.e., beliefs about task-motivation fit). The findings also suggest that individual differences in this knowledge may, at times, predict task performance and academic achievement. In the final section, we discuss some unexplored aspects of self-knowledge that could be the focus of new lines of metamotivational research.
Self-control—the prioritization of valued global goals over immediate local rewards—is typically conceptualized and studied as isolated decisions. Goal pursuit, however, generally requires people to make repeated self-control decisions across contexts. We adopt a higher order, strategic level of analysis of self-control and explore, for the first time, people’s preferences for abstinence (a pattern of choices in which one never indulges) versus moderation (a pattern of choices in which one indulges when doing so does not harm one’s goals or even helps promote the pursuit of those goals). To understand when and why people may opt for one over the other, the present work explores one psychological feature that may support these strategy preferences: the representation of self-control conflicts as inherent (i.e., choice options are mutually contradictory) versus situational (i.e., choice options compete for limited resources). We present eight studies in the main text and three in the online Supplemental Materials documenting that people associate inherent and situational conflict representations with abstinence and moderation, respectively. By documenting that strategy preferences may differ as a function of conflict representations, this work questions the assumption of abstinence as the primary indicator of self-control success, raises methodological and conceptual questions about how best to assess these strategy preferences, and calls for greater understanding of self-control as a recurrent decision-making process.
How do anticipated short-term costs affect the likelihood of engaging in an activity that has long-term benefits. Five studies investigated the factors that determine (a) how anticipated short-term costs elicit self-control efforts and (b) how self-control efforts eventually diminish the influence of short-term costs on behavior. The studies manipulated short-term costs (e.g., painful medical procedures) and assessed a variety of self-control strategies (e.g., self-imposed penalties for failure to undergo a test). The results show that short-term costs elicit self-control strategies for self rather than others, before rather than after behavior, when long-term benefits are important rather than unimportant and when the costs are moderate rather than extremely small or large. The results also show that the self-control efforts help people act according to their long-term interests.
Unlabelled:
Research has shown that we are endowed with a remarkable capacity to motivate ourselves in the absence of extrinsic incentives (i.e. intrinsic motivation). However, little research has been conducted to investigate whether we accurately appreciate the power of intrinsic motivation. The current research aimed to examine the metacognitive accuracy of the extent to which people can motivate themselves without performance-based extrinsic incentives. Participants were presented with a relatively long and repetitive task without extrinsic incentives, and before doing the task, they were asked to predict their motivation on completion of the task. Across seven experiments using a variety of tasks with different populations from different countries, participants were consistently engaged in the task more actively than they predicted. When participants were provided with performance-based monetary rewards, however, this bias was diminished. These results indicate that we tend to underappreciate our capability to sustain our motivation without extrinsic incentives.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11031-022-09996-5.
Self-control describes the processes by which individuals control their habits, desires, and impulses in the service of long-term goals. Research has identified important components of self-control and proposed theoretical frameworks integrating these components (e.g., Inzlicht et al., 2021; Kotabe & Hofmann, 2015). In our perspective, these frameworks, however, do not yet fully incorporate important metacognitive aspects of self-control. We therefore introduce a framework explicating the role of metacognition for self-control. This framework extends existing frameworks, primarily from the domains of self-regulated learning and problem-solving (e.g., Schraw & Moshman, 1995; Zimmerman, 2000), and integrates past and contemporary research and theorizing on self-control that involves aspects of metacognition. It considers two groups of metacognitive components, namely, (a) individual metacognitive characteristics, that is a person’s declarative, procedural, and conditional metacognitive knowledge about self-control, as well as their self-awareness (or metacognitive awareness), and (b) metacognitive regulatory processes that unfold before a self-control conflict (forethought and prevention), when a self-control conflict is identified, during a self-control conflict (regulation and monitoring), and after a self-control conflict (reflection and evaluation). The proposed framework integrates existing research and will be useful for highlighting new directions for research on the role of metacognition for self-control success and failure.
Impatience results from the belief that waiting is either too hard or not worth it. Distinguishing between these barriers informs which intervention will increase patience. Making waiting easier increases patience when people are unable to wait. Increasing the value of waiting increases patience when they lack the desire to wait.
Research on self-control has increasingly acknowledged the importance of self-regulatory strategies, with strategies in earlier stages of the developing tempting impulse thought to be more effective than strategies in later stages. However, recent research on emotion regulation has moved away from assuming that some strategies are per se and across situations more adaptive than others. Instead, strategy use that is variable to fit situational demands is considered more adaptive. In the present research, we transfer this dynamic process perspective to self-regulatory strategies in the context of persistence conflicts. We investigated eight indicators of strategy use (i.e., strategy intensity, instability, inertia, predictability, differentiation, diversity, and within- and between-strategy variability) in an experience sampling study ( N = 264 participants with 1,923 observations). We found that variability between strategies was significantly associated with self-regulatory success above and beyond mean levels of self-regulatory strategy use. Moreover, the association between trait self-control on one hand and everyday self-regulatory success and affective well-being on the other hand was partially mediated by between-strategy variability. Our results do not only show the benefits of variable strategy use for individual’s self-regulatory success but also the benefits of more strongly connecting the fields of emotion regulation and self-control research.
People’s inability to delay gratification and the tendency to discount rewards as a function of time has been used as an index of impulsivity and lack of self-control. It has been studied extensively in relation to a wide variety of negative outcomes including addiction, obesity, gambling, and so forth. However, we do not have a systematic understanding of when and why people would show a preference for immediate smaller over larger, but delayed rewards. We suggest that delay discounting is goal driven and could therefore be understood by applying the principles of goal pursuit. Across 5 studies we provide empirical evidence to support this proposal. Specifically, we show that (a) people discount a reward to a greater extent if the reward is relevant to their goals; (b) the tendency to discount the rewards as a function of delay is reduced when these goals could be attained through alternative means.
Self-determination theory (SDT) is a broad framework for understanding factors that facilitate or undermine intrinsic motivation, autonomous extrinsic motivation, and psychological wellness, all issues of direct relevance to educational settings. We review research from SDT showing that both intrinsic motivation and well-internalized (and thus autonomous) forms of extrinsic motivation predict an array of positive outcomes across varied educational levels and cultural contexts and are enhanced by supports for students’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Findings also show a dynamic link between teacher and student motivation, as teachers are themselves impacted and constrained by controlling mandates, institutional pressures, and leadership styles. Ironically, despite substantial evidence for the importance of psychological need satisfactions in learning contexts, many current educational policies and practices around the globe remain anchored in traditional motivational models that fail to support students’ and teachers’ needs, a knowledge versus policy gap we should aspire to close.
Avoiding temptations has been traditionally touted as the desired way to manage self-control conflicts. Recent evidence, however, suggests that strictly avoidance- or abstinence- focused self-control strategies are neither adaptive in the long run nor practiced by people who are good at long-term pursuit. We resolve the apparent contradiction by analyzing the costs and benefits of indulgence at different self-regulatory levels. We argue that while all indulgence may be considered costly to long-term pursuit at the tactical level, some can benefit overarching goals at the strategic and/or the system levels. The overall evaluation of the adaptiveness of indulgence should thus rely on a multi-level cost-benefit analysis. We discuss how this approach helps us predict circumstances (how, who, when, what type of indulgence) under which indulgence should be considered adaptive and be readily embraced. Our analysis calls for a multi-level perspective of self-control that goes beyond observations based on single instances.
When and why do people choose a more or a less risky option? To answer this question, we propose that it is essential to examine the dynamic interrelations among three factors-the decision maker's goal (e.g., promotion vs. prevention goal), the current value state (e.g., the domain of gains vs. losses), and the choice set (i.e., perceived available options). We review previous theories that highlight the significance of each of these three factors. We then propose a motivational framework of risk preference that describes how these three factors work together motivationally to impact risk preference, illustrated by evidence from regulatory focus research. We then draw on this new motivational framework to examine the ways in which achievement motivation, need for power, and need for relational security are related to decision under risk, and discuss the broader implications of this motivational framework of risk preference. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Metamotivation research suggests that people may be able to modulate their motivational states strategically to secure desired outcomes (Scholer & Miele, 2016). To regulate one's motivational states effectively, one must at minimum understand (a) which states are more or less beneficial for a given task and (b) how to instantiate these states. In the current article, we examine to what extent people understand the self-regulatory benefits of high-level versus low-level construal (i.e., motivational orientations toward abstract and essential vs. concrete and idiosyncratic features). Seven experiments revealed that participants can distinguish tasks that entail high-level versus low-level construal. Further, participants recognized the usefulness of preparatory exercises with which to instantiate high-level versus low-level construal for task performance, and this knowledge predicted behavioral choices. This research highlights novel insights that the metamotivational approach offers to research on construal level theory and, more broadly, to the study of self-regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Motivation derived from a sense of truly valuing or enjoying one’s pursuits (“wanting to do it”)—as opposed to motivation born of external demands or other people’s expectations (“having to do it”)—is associated with goal-pursuit success and overall well-being. But what determines the quality of motivation in the first place? Many theoretical perspectives identify features of the task or situation as determinants, but have largely ignored the potential contribution of individual self-regulatory tendencies. We ask here whether individual differences in self-control may be associated with an individual’s likelihood of “wanting to” pursue current goals, operationalized as the momentary experience of autonomous motivation. We first describe an exploratory experience-sampling study that documented the association (Study 1) and prompted subsequent development of the hypothesis that trait self-control and autonomous motivation are related. A second experience sampling study replicated the effect (Study 1R) and 2 cross-sectional studies helped hone its interpretation (Studies 2 and 3). We then employed an experimental paradigm to test whether the association between trait self-control and autonomous motivation is goal-dependent. Consistent with an instrumental, self-regulatory account of the association, we found that trait self-control was related to autonomous motivation for a novel task only when an individual expected to continue working on that task (Study 4). Employing an integrative perspective, this work expands our understanding of trait self-control by identifying it as a candidate contributor to motivation quality, and, more generally, helps to integrate otherwise disparate approaches to understanding motivation.
Past research on academic success emphasizes the need to avoid pleasurable nonacademic activities. In the context of enjoying big-time collegiate sports, we examined the notion that students, especially academically successful ones, may strategically indulge in sports games to resolve the conflict with academic pursuit. After confirming that high- (vs. low-) grade point average (GPA) students indeed found game-related activities less disruptive (Npilot = 325), we proceeded to study whether strategic indulgence or single-minded avoidance was their preferred means to resolve the game–study conflict. High- (vs. low-) GPA students exhibited three features of strategic indulgence. They were more sensitive to the goodness of the opportunity to partake in collegiate sports (NStudy1 = 216), engaged in compensatory planning to study on nongame days (NSudy2 = 409), and actively engaged and enjoyed the game-related activities (Nstudy3 = 530). These results suggest that understanding strategic indulgence in tempting activities would enrich our knowledge of long-term goal pursuit.
The term intrinsic motivation refers to an activity being seen as its own end. Accordingly, we conceptualize intrinsic motivation (IM) as (perceived) means-ends fusion and define an intrinsicality continuum reflecting the degree to which such fusion is experienced. Our Means-Ends Fusion (MEF) theory assumes four major antecedents of activity-goal fusion: (1) Repeated pairing of the activity and the goal, (2) Uniqueness of the activity-goal connection, (3) Perceived similarity between the activity and its goal, and (4) temporal immediacy of goal attainment following the activity. MEF theory further identifies two major consequences of the activity-goal fusion (i.e., manifestations of intrinsic motivation): (1) Perceived instrumentality of the activity to goal attainment and consequent activity engagement; (2) goal-related affective experience of the activity. Empirical evidence for MEF theory comes from diverse fields of psychological inquiry, including animal learning, brain research, and social cognition.
Research indicates that inducing high-level construal (processing that highlights invariant, essential features) relative to low-level construal (processing that highlights idiosyncratic, peripheral features) promotes self-control (Fujita & Carnevale, 2012). In the present work, we investigate to what extent people recognize the self-control benefits of high-level construal, and explore the consequences of this knowledge. Studies 1 and 2 provide initial evidence that individuals are aware that high-level relative to low-level construal promotes self-control in the dieting domain. Studies 3 and 4 find that individual differences in this knowledge predict self-control success outcomes (i.e., body mass index) among those who are motivated by dieting goals. Examining academics as a domain of self-control, Study 5 demonstrates that those with higher knowledge of construal level's impact on self-control earned higher end-of-semester grades to the extent that they were motivated to do well academically. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record
As the science of self-control matures, the organization and integration of its key concepts becomes increasingly important. In response, we identified seven major components or "nodes" in current theories and research bearing on self-control: desire, higher order goal, desire-goal conflict, control motivation, control capacity, control effort, and enactment constraints. To unify these diverse and interdisciplinary areas of research, we formulated the interplay of these components in an integrative model of self-control. In this model, desire and an at least partly incompatible higher order goal generate desire-goal conflict, which activates control motivation. Control motivation and control capacity interactively determine potential control effort. The actual control effort invested is determined by several moderators, including desire strength, perceived skill, and competing goals. Actual control effort and desire strength compete to determine a prevailing force, which ultimately determines behavior, provided that enactment constraints do not impede it. The proposed theoretical framework is useful for highlighting several new directions for research on self-control and for classifying self-control failures and self-control interventions.
We document a shift in the value assigned to intrinsic incentives: people value these incentives more inside an activity than outside the activity (i.e., during vs. before or after pursuit). For example, people care more about the level of interest of their present work task than of past or future work tasks. We document this shift across a variety of activities (exercising, visiting a museum, and lab tasks) and using various measures, including rated importance of intrinsic incentives inside and outside pursuit, actual and planned persistence on activities that offer these incentives, and regret when choosers outside pursuit forgo intrinsic incentives that pursuers later seek. This shift in valuation occurs because intrinsic incentives improve the experience during action pursuit, and therefore, this shift is unique to intrinsic incentives. Extrinsic incentives, by contrast, are valued similarly inside and outside pursuit. (PsycINFO Database Record
Psychological science has largely neglected the role of self-control in studying aggression. Fortunately, the past half decade has witnessed a surge of research on this long-neglected topic, including two self-control-informed integrative theories of aggression. Robust experimental evidence demonstrates that self-control failures frequently predict aggression and, conversely, that bolstering self-control decreases aggression. Research on rumination also suggests that maladaptive anger regulation decreases self-control and, consequently, increases aggression. Advances from social-affective and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the neural mechanisms involved in emotion regulation and cognitive control mediate the relationship between deficient self-control and aggression.
Though human beings embody a unique ability for planned behavior, they also often act impulsively. This insight may be important for the study of self-control situations in which people are torn between their long-term goals to restrain behavior and their immediate impulses that promise hedonic fulfillment. In the present article, we outline a dual-systems perspective of impulse and self-control and suggest a framework for the prediction of self-control outcomes. This framework combines three elements that, considered jointly, may enable a more precise prediction of self-control outcomes than they do when studied in isolation: impulsive precursors of behavior, reflective precursors, and situational or dispositional boundary conditions. The theoretical and practical utility of such an approach is demonstrated by drawing on recent evidence from several domains of self-control such as eating, drinking, and sexual behavior.
© 2009 Association for Psychological Science.
Adult age differences in a variety of cognitive abilities are well documented, and many of those abilities have been found to be related to success in the workplace and in everyday life. However, increased age is seldom associated with lower levels of real-world functioning, and the reasons for this lab-life discrepancy are not well understood. This article briefly reviews research concerned with relations of age to cognition, relations of cognition to successful functioning outside the laboratory, and relations of age to measures of work performance and achievement. The final section discusses several possible explanations for why there are often little or no consequences of age-related cognitive declines in everyday functioning.
Our primary objective was to determine whether individual differences in regulatory focus (Higgins, 1998) would differentially predict the initiation and maintenance of behavioral change. We hypothesized that people high in promotion focus because they eagerly pursue new positive end-states, would be better able to initiate behavioral change, whereas people higher in prevention focus because they tend to be vigilant in avoiding losses as a means to preserve desired end-states, would be better able to maintain change.
We examined our hypotheses in longitudinal studies of smoking cessation and weight loss.
Our outcome measures were smoking status and weight.
In both interventions, promotion focus, but not prevention focus, predicted successful initiation; people higher in promotion focus had higher quit rates and lost more weight through the first 6 months of follow-up. Of participants who had initial success, prevention focus, but not promotion focus, predicted successful maintenance; people higher in prevention focus were more likely to remain smoke-free and maintain weight loss over the next year.
A fit between behavioral task and regulatory focus can facilitate the successful performance of meaningful behaviors over time.
A 2-system framework is proposed for understanding the processes that enable--and undermine--self-control or "willpower" as exemplified in the delay of gratification paradigm. A cool, cognitive "know" system and a hot, emotional "go" system are postulated. The cool system is cognitive, emotionally neutral, contemplative, flexible, integrated, coherent, spatiotemporal, slow, episodic, and strategic. It is the seat of self-regulation and self-control. The hot system is the basis of emotionality, fears as well as passions--impulsive and reflexive--initially controlled by innate releasing stimuli (and, thus, literally under "stimulus control"): it is fundamental for emotional (classical) conditioning and undermines efforts at self-control. The balance between the hot and cool systems is determined by stress, developmental level, and the individual's self-regulatory dynamics. The interactions between these systems allow explanation of findings on willpower from 3 decades of research.
Researchers across theoretical traditions have long recognized the need for people to monitor and modulate certain aspects of their subjective experiences (such as their thoughts and feelings) in response to situational challenges that interfere with the attainment of important goals. Comparatively less attention has been devoted to understanding the beliefs and mechanisms necessary to regulate motivational states—i.e., metamotivation, even though motivational states are often integral to people's subjective experiences of events. As particular types of motivational states are more adaptive in some contexts than in others, flexibly instantiating the right motivational state at the right time may be key to achieving one's goals. The current paper reviews the principles of the metamotivational approach to studying motivation regulation and briefly reviews supporting research. In addition, we highlight metamotivation research conducted in the context of self‐affirmation theory to demonstrate the generative potential of this approach for researching phenomena that have traditionally been treated as separate from self‐regulation. We conclude by discussing some of the novel questions that the metamotivational approach has prompted, both in and outside of the self‐regulatory domain.
Research on self‐control has flourished within the last two decades, with many researchers trying to answer one of the most fundamental questions regarding human behaviour—how do we successfully regulate desires in the pursuit of long‐term goals? While recent research has focused on different strategies to enhance self‐control success, we still know very little about how strategies are implemented or where the need for self‐control comes from in the first place. Drawing from parallel fields (e.g., emotion regulation, health) and other theories of self‐regulation, we propose an integrative framework that describes self‐control as a dynamic, multi‐stage process that unfolds over time. In this review, we first provide an overview of this framework, which poses three stages of regulation: the identification of the need for self‐control, the selection of strategies to regulate temptations, and the implementation of chosen strategies. These regulatory stages are then flexibly monitored over time. We then expand this framework by outlining a series of growth points to guide future research. By bridging across theories and disciplines, the present framework improves our understanding of how self‐control unfolds in everyday life.
Metamotivation research suggests that people understand the benefits of engaging in high-level versus low-level construal (i.e., orienting toward the abstract, essential versus concrete, idiosyncratic features of events) in goal-directed behavior. The current research examines the psychometric properties of one assessment of this knowledge and tests whether it predicts consequential outcomes (academic performance). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a two-factor structure, whereby knowledge of the benefits of high-level construal (i.e., high-level knowledge) and low-level construal (i.e., low-level knowledge) were distinct constructs. Participants on average evidenced beliefs about the normative benefits of high-level and low-level knowledge that accord with published research. Critically, individual differences in high-level and low-level knowledge independently predicted grades, controlling for traditional correlates of grades. These findings suggest metamotivational knowledge may be a key antecedent to goal success and lead to novel diagnostic assessments and interventions.
This study investigates the predictive power of self-control for individuals and their children using population representative data. We use the well-established Brief Self-Control Scale to demonstrate that people’s trait self-control is highly predictive of their life outcomes. Higher self-control is associated with better health, education, and employment outcomes as well as greater financial and overall well-being. Importantly, self-control often adds explanatory power in addition to more frequently studied personality traits and economic preferences. The self-control of children is correlated with that of their parents, while higher parental self-control is also linked to fewer behavioral problems among children. Our results suggest that social interventions targeting self-control may be beneficial.
For regulating emotion, it has been shown that people benefit from being flexible in their use of emotion regulation strategies. In the current study, we built on research focused on regulatory flexibility with respect to emotions to investigate flexibility in the use of self-regulatory strategies to resolve daily self-control conflicts. We investigated three components of flexibility: (1) metacognitive knowledge, (2) strategy repertoire, and (3) feedback monitoring. In a 10-day experience sampling study, 226 participants reported whether they had, within the past hour, experienced a self-control conflict of initiating an aversive activity, persisting in it, or inhibiting an unwanted impulse in response to a temptation. Results support the hypothesis that higher levels of all three components of flexibility are associated with higher levels of success in managing daily self-control conflicts, except for strategy repertoire and feedback monitoring in conflicts of persistence. Results also support the hypothesis that higher levels of trait self-control are associated with higher levels of metacognitive knowledge and feedback monitoring for conflicts of initiation, but not for conflicts of persistence and inhibition. We found no evidence of an association between trait self-control and strategy repertoire. These findings demonstrate the importance of flexible strategy use during daily self-control conflicts.
Objective
What strategies do people use to resist desires in their day‐to‐day life? How effective are these strategies? Do people use different strategies for different desires? This study addresses these questions using experience sampling to examine strategy use in daily life.
Method
Participants (N = 197, Mage = 20.4, 63% female) reported on their use of six specific strategies (situation modification, distraction, reminding self of goals, promise to give in later, reminder of why it is bad, willpower) to resist desires (4,462 desires reported over a week).
Results
Participants reported using at least one strategy 89% of the time, and more than one strategy 25% of the time. Goal reminders and promises to give in later were more likely to be used for stronger desires. People also preferred different strategies for different types of desires (e.g., eating vs. leisure vs. work, etc.).
Conclusion
In contrast to recent theoretical predictions, we find that many strategies, including inhibition, are similarly effective and that using multiple strategies is especially effective.
Adaptive functioning requires the ability to both immerse oneself in the here and now as well as to move beyond current experience. We leverage and expand construal-level theory to understand how individuals and groups regulate thoughts, feelings, and behavior to address both proximal and distal ends. To connect to distant versus proximal events in a way that meaningfully informs and guides responses in the immediate here and now, people must expand versus contract their regulatory scope. We propose that humans have evolved a number of mental and social tools that enable the modulation of regulatory scope and address the epistemic, emotive, and executive demands of regulation. Critically, across these tools, it is possible to distinguish a hierarchy that varies in abstractness. Whereas low-level tools enable contractive scope, high-level tools enable expansion. We review empirical results that support these assertions and highlight the novel insights that a regulatory-scope framework provides for understanding diverse phenomena.
Almost everyone struggles to act in their individual and collective best interests, particularly when doing so requires forgoing a more immediately enjoyable alternative. Other than exhorting decision makers to "do the right thing," what can policymakers do to reduce overeating, undersaving, procrastination, and other self-defeating behaviors that feel good now but generate larger delayed costs? In this review, we synthesize contemporary research on approaches to reducing failures of self-control. We distinguish between self-deployed and other-deployed strategies and, in addition, between situational and cognitive intervention targets. Collectively, the evidence from both psychological science and economics recommends psychologically informed policies for reducing failures of self-control.
Self-control refers to the alignment of thoughts, feelings, and actions with enduringly valued goals in the face of momentarily more alluring alternatives. In this review, we examine the role of self-control in academic achievement. We begin by defining self-control and distinguishing it from related constructs. Next, we summarize evidence that nearly all students experience conflict between academic goals that they value in the long run and nonacademic goals that they find more gratifying in the moment. We then turn to longitudinal evidence relating self-control to academic attainment, course grades, and performance on standardized achievement tests. We use the process model of self-control to illustrate how impulses are generated and regulated, emphasizing opportunities for students to deliberately strengthen impulses that are congruent with, and dampen impulses that are incongruent with, academic goals. Finally, we conclude with future directions for both science and practice.
Research on self‐regulation has largely focused on the idea of effortful self‐control, which assumes that exerting willpower will lead to greater success. However, in recent years, research has challenged this perspective and instead proposes that effortless self‐regulation is more adaptive for long‐term goal pursuit. Taking into consideration the burgeoning literature on effortless self‐regulation, here we propose that motivation—or the reasons why we pursue our goals—plays an integral role in this process. The objective of the present paper is to highlight how motivation can play a role in how self‐regulation unfolds. Specifically, we propose that pursuing goals because you want‐to (vs. have‐to) is associated with better goal attainment as a function of experiencing less temptations and obstacles. While the reason why want‐to motivation relates to experiencing fewer obstacles has yet to be thoroughly explored, here we propose some potential mechanisms drawing from recent research on self‐regulation. We also provide recommendations for future research, highlighting the importance of considering motivation in the study of self‐regulatory processes.
Adolescents are challenged to orchestrate goal-directed actions in increasingly independent and consequential ways. In doing so, it is advantageous to use information about value to select which goals to pursue and how much effort to devote to them. Here, we examine age-related changes in how individuals use value signals to orchestrate goal-directed behavior. Drawing on emerging literature on value-guided cognitive control and reinforcement learning, we demonstrate how value and task difficulty modulate the execution of goal-directed action in complex ways across development from childhood to adulthood. We propose that the scope of value-guided goal pursuit expands with age to include increasingly challenging cognitive demands, and scaffolds on the emergence of functional integration within brain networks supporting valuation, cognition, and action.
This article builds on existing models of motivation regulation in order to examine how students identify and address motivational deficits (e.g., not enough motivation or not the right type of motivation). Integrating perspectives from the achievement motivation, metacognition, and emotion regulation literatures, we propose that metamotivational processes play an essential role in students' monitoring of their motivational states. By emphasizing the ways in which students monitor not only the quantity but also the quality of their motivation, our model extends existing perspectives. We identify different components of motivation that are likely to be the target of monitoring (e.g., self-efficacy, intrinsic value), specify the metamotivational feelings (e.g., hopelessness, boredom) that signal problems with each component, and discuss how strategies are selected to address these problems. Our framework generates new questions about how students monitor (and control) their task-specific motivation.
How does motivation work? The classic answer is that people are motivated to approach pleasure and avoid pain, that they are motivated by "carrots and sticks." But to understand human motivation, it is necessary to go beyond pleasure and pain. What people want is to be effective in their life pursuits, and there are three distinct ways that people want to be effective. They want to be effective in having desired results (value), which includes having pleasure but is not limited to pleasure. They want to be effective in managing what happens (control) and in establishing what's real (truth), even if the process of managing what happens or establishing what's real is painful. These three distinct ways of wanting to be effective go beyond just wanting pleasure, but there is even more to the story of how motivation works. These ways of wanting to be effective do not function in isolation. Rather, they work together. Indeed, the ways that value, truth, and control work together is the central story of motivation. By understanding how motivation works as an organization of value, truth, and control, we can re-think basic motivational issues, such the nature of personality and culture, how the motives of others can be managed effectively, and what is "the good life".
This chapter focuses on research program, providing a description of a theoretical framework that has evolved out of metamemory research, followed by a few remarks about the methodology. Research in metamemory is initiated by the paradoxical findings that people can accurately predict their subsequent likelihood of recognizing nonrecallable items and that they can quickly and accurately decide-on the basis of no more than a cursory search through memory-that they will not retrieve particular sought after items. Those findings lead to develop a methodology based on psychophysical methods that are used to empirically investigate people's feeling of knowing. The results of the experiments convinced that for dealing with only a part of a complex metacognitive system and to account adequately for feeling-of-knowing phenomena, a larger perspective was needed. This eventuated in the present theoretical framework that emphasizes the role of control and monitoring processes. The embedding of the feeling of knowing in a richer framework helped to dissipate the paradoxical nature of the feeling of knowing. The chapter discusses that today there are many capable, active investigators and a wealth of solid empirical findings.
Many goals that people pursue are distal in that they cannot be attained in the here and now but rather must be achieved through action across varied social contexts over time. Self-control requires people to make decisions consistent with distal goals when tempted by more immediate rewards. Inspired by construal-level theory, we propose and review evidence that the way in which people subjectively represent, or construe, events systematically influences these decisions. We suggest that high-level construal (the use of cognitive abstraction to extract the essential and goal-relevant features common across a class of events), relative to low-level construal (the process of highlighting the incidental and idiosyncratic features that render a particular event unique), promotes self-control. We discuss implications for future research.
The study of “metacognition” has become vigorous in recent years, with extensive research exploring the development of children’s knowledge of effective strategies in attention, comprehension, and memory (e.g., Brown, 1980; Flavell & Wellman, 1977). In contrast, the child’s developing understanding of essential strategies for self-regulation — a core aspect of human functioning, basic to virtually all conceptions of personality — has been neglected. Perhaps this neglect reflects the fact that until recently there were few objective criteria against which one could assess the relative efficacy of various strategies for self-control. Studies of the conditions that enhance or impede successful delay of gratification in children (e.g., Miller & Karniol, 1976a, 1976b; Mischel, 1974, 1981b; Toner, 1981; Toner & Smith, 1977; Yates, Lippett, & Yates, 1981) now provide a basis for assessing the child’s developing understanding against objective criteria of efficacy.
Because avoiding obstacles to goal attainment is a favored means of prevention-focused self-regulation, the authors proposed that resisting tempting diversions from task completion would better fit a prevention focus than a promotion focus, thus affecting task enjoyment and performance. Whether deciphering encrypted messages (Study 1) or solving math problems (Study 2), when exposed to attractive distracting video clips, participants in a prevention focus reported greater task enjoyment than did participants in a promotion focus, whereas the reverse was true when the distracting clips were not presented. Indeed, prevention-focused participants enjoyed the tasks more when they had to resist temptation than when they did not. In Study 2, prevention-focused participants outperformed promotion-focused participants under distracting (but not nondistracting) conditions, and regression analyses suggested that task enjoyment mediated this effect. Different regulatory states thus appear to differentially equip people to deal with tempting diversions from goal attainment.
The notion that self-control entails effortful inhibition of impulses dominates prevailing psychological models of self-control. This article describes some of the conceptual and empirical limitations of defining self-control as the effortful inhibition of impulses. The present article instead advocates for a dual-motive conceptualization, which describes self-control as the process of advancing distal rather than proximal motivations when the two compete. Effortful impulse inhibition in this model represents only one of many means by which people promote their self-control efforts. Adopting a dual-motive approach offers new insight and proposes several new research directions. This article discusses these implications and calls for psychologists to reconsider the way self-control is currently understood.
Past research has shown that strong emotional or motivational states can cause normally restrained eaters to overeat. In this article it is argued that simple cognitive load can also disinhibit eating by restrained eaters. Two studies examined this disinhibition effect. In Study 1, restrained and unrestrained eaters were given the opportunity to consume high-calorie food while performing either a high cognitive-load or low cognitive-load task. Restrained eaters consumed more food when under high cognitive load than when under low cognitive load; unrestrained eaters showed the opposite pattern. Study 2 replicated the disinhibition effect and ruled out stress, diminished awareness of food consumption, and ironic rebound as probable mediators. Results suggest that cognitive load may disinhibit consumption by preventing restrained eaters from monitoring the dietary consequences of their eating behavior. Implications for theories of self-regulation are discussed.
The Routledge international handbook of self-control in health and well-being
- D De Ridder
- M A Adriaanse
- K Fujita
Exploring the self-regulatory challenge of compulsive social media use from a metamotivational perspective
- S Bae