Self-control and normativity: Theories in social psychology revisited

Abstract

The exercise of self-control is of great significance in people’s daily lives and in the organization of social institutions. The reasonableness of the self-control concept, however, has been challenged by recent developments in cognitive, behavioral, and neurosciences that identify human behavior as a result of complex automatic processes generated by people’s environments. Collating more data on self-control and developing new theoretical approaches is crucial to meeting this challenge. Still, this article argues that a conceptual analysis of the meaning of self-control is also needed. Reflecting on recent work in philosophy, it discusses how self-controlled behavior is characterized not only by distinct causal mechanisms, but also by fundamental normative evaluations. Four conceptualizations of self-control will be presented to highlight why the corresponding self-control failures are essentially also normative failures. Furthermore, it discusses how the normativity of self-controlled behavior can contribute to further theorizing in social psychology.

Keywords

making up one’s mind normativity philosophy of action recklessness resistibility self self-control social psychology temptation weakness of will

In their daily lives, people rely strongly on their capacity to control and regulate their own behavior. They make decisions about what to do, how to proceed, and then act accordingly. Similarly, they consider fundamental choices in their lives, such as which career to pursue as well as everyday commodities, such as where to go on a Sunday afternoon. This manifests itself in the observable behavior of people with careers such as teachers, lawyers, or tradesmen, who go to the zoo, or the public swimming pool, or whatever they decide. It seems that people think about their actions and thereby control whatever they do. Sometimes, people make judgments about a certain course of action, yet feel tempted to act contrarily. They would like to drink a second glass of wine even though they have to drive home afterwards; they want to smoke a cigarette although they know it would be better to quit; or they feel infuriated but still consider aggressive acts abhorrent and desist from impulsivity. Whenever people act according to their goals and preferences and thus overcome temptations, they are considered to exercise self-control. Equally, whenever people give in to temptations they are considered to lack self-control. In both cases, commonsensically, people are considered responsible for their behavioral successes and failures and are praised or blamed—and perhaps punished—accordingly. Generally speaking, behavioral self-control is considered to be of great social value. Its successful application safeguards the well-functioning of personal and public actions, whereas self-control failures are considered the cause of multiple miseries and problems. Self-control binds together much of our social fabric. Within social psychology, the enormous significance attributed to human self-control has triggered vast amounts of scientific work investigating its mechanisms and conditions (Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1994; Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007; Carver & Scheier, 1998; Cervone, Mor, Orom, Shadel, & Scott, 2011; Cervone, Shadel, Smith, & Fiori, 2006; Deci & Ryan, 2000, 2002; Kuhl, 2000; Kuhl & Fuhrmann, 1998; W. Mischel, 1996; W. Mischel, Cantor, & Feldman, 1996; Ryan & Deci, 2002; Ryan, Kuhl, & Deci, 1997).¹

Simultaneously, however, the very possibility and relevance of self-controlled behavior has been fundamentally challenged by recent developments in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences. These developments suggest that there is no such thing as mentally caused or consciously controlled action and that anything people do is the result of diverse and complex unconscious and automatic processes generated by various features in people’s environments (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005; Wegner, 2004; Wegner & Wheatley, 1999). Although people tend to give coherent explanations for their behaviors, well-designed experiments have been set up to show that often such rationalizations are unwarranted or that people would do better to “think unconsciously” rather than consciously. People behave rudely if and when they are primed with rudeness; they are polite if primed with politeness; those who are primed with features of old age walk slower, while those primed with features of professors or hooligans behave respectively intelligently or aggressively (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998). It has even been argued that people can be given the illusory experience of willful actions they do not actually perform (Wegner & Wheatley, 1999). Against this background, it has also been mentioned that a theory of automaticity rather than one of control or self-control provides the most adequate explanation of human behavior.

This objection goes to the heart of the concept of self-control. To meet this challenge empirically, it is necessary to generate increasingly specific data to prove this and also to establish how people carry out self-controlled actions. Similarly, it would require that the reliability of these skeptical experiments is tested. In the meantime, psychologists have focused on both aspects. While some psychologists point out the reality and relevance of self-control (Baumeister, 2012; Vohs, Baumeister, & Schmeichel, 2013), others try to replicate the priming findings by Bargh and colleagues. Interestingly, they have not succeeded in doing so (Doyen, Klein, Pichon, & Cleermans, 2012; Pashler, Coburn, & Harris, 2012). Furthermore, it has been shown that “unconscious thought” is not as effective as Dijksterhuis and others had argued (Waroquier, Marchiori, Klein, & Cleeremans, 2010). Hence, in the research community not everybody agrees or is convinced that behavior is largely induced automatically and generated independently of individual control. Additionally, there is a conceptual problem with the meaning of the very concept of self-control as presupposed by automaticity theory. In order to demonstrate this and show why the far-reaching consequences attached to automaticity theory go awry, a conceptual analysis of the meaning of self-control is required. In this context, theorizing in social psychology should benefit from the work of philosophers whose core task, after all, is to explore the meaning of complex concepts. This paper confronts the mentioned task and reflects on the meaning of self-control.

Phenomenologically, the opposition of control and automaticity may seem natural: food is digested automatically, but a cigarette has to be lit and inhaled; a car (auto-mobile) rolls automatically, whereas a carriage has to be pulled; a practiced driver changes gears and steers automatically, while a learner is attentive and thinks about every movement. Such phenomena, however, are not conclusive, that is, they do not unambiguously prove that evidence in support of automaticity, almost by definition, rules out evidence in favor of self-control. An alternative interpretation of at least one of these examples illustrates this. People who light a cigarette may either be considered as exercising control over their behavior, or to smoke in an automatic fashion that is triggered by smoking peers, addictive cravings, or suggestive billboards. Automaticity may be a sensible explanation. However, if the same people are contrasted with people who resist the temptation of smoking, one may argue that those people who light a cigarette do not control their smoking behavior. In that case, however, the argument holds without any assistance of the automaticity theory. Apparently, there is a significant difference between, for example, people who light a cigarette because they want to enjoy its taste and the relaxation it provides and people who have decided to quit but cannot withstand the temptation. Irrespective of whether the first group of people is attributed with behavioral control, the second group should not be: they fail to exercise self-control. In this sense, however, self-control is a hybrid term, referring both to causal processes and normative requirements. Claims regarding automaticity, however, are merely targeting causal processes and hence, even if true, they cannot disprove the reality and relevance of self-control in so far as this refers to normative requirements. To this end, it would be required to show that people lack self-control, rather than that they behave in an automatic fashion.

Following this line of argument, this article presents a normative account of self-control. Thus, a robust account of self-control does not depend solely on a notion of causal control; instead it should also emphasize the normative character of self-controlled types of behavior. There is an important normative difference between those who exercise self-control and those who fail to. Whether or not any of these behaviors are conducted in an automatic fashion is a totally different question. Even if it can be shown that a person who deliberately enjoys a cigarette does so automatically, unconsciously, and as a result of environmentally induced processes, the contrast to the person who would like to quit yet gives in to temptation persists. The contrast, however, does not refer to the way in which the respective behaviors have been caused; instead it refers to the normative evaluation of the very same behaviors. That is, the relevant difference does not refer to the question of whether or not the behavior has been carried out in an automatic or a (consciously) controlled fashion, but whether the person, or the self so to speak, can appreciate it and consider it justified or whether it is considered wrong and unjustified. Hence, the question of automaticity refers to a different aspect of the topic. As a consequence, and for the time being, it will be put aside. The focus of this article will be on the development of self-control as a normative and justifying notion of human behavior. Hence, it is not until the conclusion that the challenge of automaticity is put into perspective.

The argument put forward in this article is philosophical, which means that it is developing an argument rather than providing a detailed overview of the literature. However, the following discussion embarks upon the presentation and discussion of empirically based theories in social psychology that have been influential during the past decades. Subsequently, it analyzes the strength-model of self-control based on the model of a feedback-loop (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998; Baumeister & Exline, 1999; Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996; Carver & Scheier, 1998, 1999; Gailliot et al., 2007; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000), the delay of gratification paradigm as it has given rise to a capacity or strategy based model of self-control (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; H. N. Mischel & Mischel, 1983; W. Mischel et al., 1996), self-determination theory and self-regulation theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000, 2002; Kuhl & Fuhrmann, 1998), and an approach that highlights the relevance of personality science and the role of a self for self-control (Cervone et al., 2006). A careful analysis of what social psychology teaches already supports the thesis about the normative character of self-control. Reflecting on what it means to lack self-control or failure of self-regulated behavior in each of these models, the discussion aims to contribute to psychological theorizing and to facilitate correspondence between behavioral scientists and philosophers. Recently, the philosophy of mind and action has greatly profited from insights provided by social psychologists about self-control (Henden, 2008; Holton, 2003; Mele, 1987, 1995); similarly, psychologists are also likely to benefit from the work of philosophers conducted in their area of research (Baumeister, 2008; Baumeister, Mele, & Vohs, 2010).

Self-control, ego-strength, weakness of will and beyond

According to a common sense approach, self-control is required in situations of temptation and is used in order to overcome these. People are said to be tempted if they are more strongly motivated to act according to their impulses or spontaneous desires than according to what they judge best, desirable, or rational. Intuitively, self-control appears to be a matter of mental strength, whereas lack of it is attributed to a weakness of will. This basic idea dates back to an ancient philosophical legacy. In Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” for example, it says that people are self-controlled if they act with restraint in the face of temptation, whereas those who lack continence suffer from weakness of will (Aristotle, 1980). Mele has established a corresponding contemporary account of self-control according to which self-control and weakness of will (akrasia) appear “as two sides of the same coin” (Mele, 1995, p. 5). For many years in social psychology these ancient and commonsensical philosophical assumptions regarding willpower and weakness of will enjoyed the status of mysterious and unscientific human fictions. Contemporary social psychology, however, has succeeded in an empirical operationalization of these ideas (Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996; Carver & Scheier, 1998; W. Mischel et al., 1996) and has even highlighted the empirical adequacy of the concept of strength of will or mental strength (Baumeister et al., 1998; Baumeister et al., 2007; Hofmann, Förster, Baumeister, & Vohs, 2012; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000; Muraven, Baumeister, & Tice, 1999; Muraven, Tice, & Baumeister, 1998; Vohs & Heatherton, 2000).

Several experiments have proved that sequential, albeit totally different, acts of self-control lead to a diminishment of participants’ performances in later self-control tasks, whereas this does not seem to be the case if the previous task was fatiguing only. This dual-task paradigm and similar experiments have been described at length elsewhere, therefore only a brief comment is mentioned here. For example, participants were asked to squeeze a handgrip for as long as possible (self-control task 1) and hence to overcome their inclination to relax their hand muscles (Muraven et al., 1998). Afterwards they were asked to watch a disgusting movie and were asked to either suppress or enforce (self-control task 2) their emotional reaction or they did not receive any further instructions (no second self-control task). Finally, all participants of the (in total) three groups had to squeeze the same handgrip again. The results showed a significant decrease in performance in the two groups that received instructions about how to deal with their emotional reaction, yet not in the third group which received no such instructions. Since emotional control is regarded as another, yet independent, self-control task, the decrease in performance is considered to show that different kinds of self-control tasks draw on one and the same mental resource, which becomes depleted through exercises. In other words, successful exercises of self-control appear to depend on some kind of mental strength, whereas giving in to temptation and failing at self-control can be understood as expressions of mental depletion or weakness.

Weakness of will: Also a philosophical problem

From its outset, the strength model of self-control has been the target of various conceptual and empirical concerns: its scope is too limited, it is unable to include the agent’s perspective, leaves unclear the concrete nature of the highlighted mental resource, or invokes an incomplete understanding of even its key terms self and strength (Ainslie, 1996; Bandura, 1996; Block, 2006; Cervone, 2006). It goes beyond the scope of this article to discuss the empirical questions raised, which moreover have been addressed, at least partly, elsewhere in the meantime (Gailliot et al., 2007). Instead this article focuses on the meaning of the concepts entailed in the strength model. The issue of what is meant by mental strength and conversely what it means to act in a weak-willed fashion is particularly relevant in this regard. The question of what self means and how it may contribute to the understanding of self-control will be the focus for a later discussion.

Self-control tasks differ from other tasks, for example fatigue tasks, in that they require agents to experience some inner conflict between a valued long-term goal or judgment and a contravening, disliked, and short-term desire. Fatiguing tasks do not entail such a discrepancy. A self-control task counts as being passed when the goal is achieved and hence the desire is overcome. In contrast, people are said to show a failure of self-control, if their short-term desires prevail and the goal is therefore missed. Philosophers have argued that theoretically three options are available as to why a valued goal or judgment may be outplayed by an inferior desire: (a) the desire may be irresistible and the behavior compulsive;² (b) the better judgment may, at least temporarily, be abandoned and the behavior is reckless; or (c) people may intentionally and voluntarily act against their better judgment and the behavior is weak-willed (Kennett, 2001). Apparently, the strength-model of self-control best fits the last option.

However, it is exactly this understanding of behavioral failure, the intelligibility of which has been fundamentally challenged. That is, it has been argued that it is conceptually impossible for people to act intentionally and voluntarily against their better judgment. Instead, behavior that appears weak-willed can only be either a case of compulsion in which agents are involuntarily overwhelmed, or a case of recklessness, in which they unduly change or ignore their better judgment (Watson, 1977). The conceptual question, whether, and if so how, weakness of will is indeed an intelligible concept has been termed the weakness-of-will problem. This is an important question for empirically oriented social psychologists as well, because if the conceptual objection stands, empirical examples argued to point out real-world instances of weak-willed behavior can be criticized as being fundamental misinterpretations. By contrast, pointing out the conceptual intelligibility of weakness of will may at the same time support the conceptual intelligibility of the strength-model of self-control. Therefore, the weakness of will problem is presented and applied to the above-mentioned empirical experiment.

The problem emanates from two basic principles of action causation initially formulated by Davidson (1980). According to the first principle, there is a direct connection between desires and actions so that agents who prefer an action x above action y and who believe themselves free to perform either action, will intentionally do x as soon as they do either x or y intentionally. The second principle entails that there is a direct connection between better judgment and desire so that when agents judge it better to do x than y, they want to do x more than to do y.³ The weakness of will problem arises because, in such cases, a person will judge x better than y, yet do y intentionally. This, however, contradicts the basic principles of action causation. Applying these principles to the experiment described above, it should be questioned whether in the third phase when participants are asked to squeeze the handgrip again: (a) participants intentionally loosen the handgrip and (b) whether participants still care about the judgment that squeezing is better than loosening. If (a) is not provided, participants may be considered to be compelled, whereas if (b) is not provided, participants will loosen the handgrip in a reckless way. Conceptually, the crucial question is whether the answer to both of these questions can be positive at the same time. Only then is weakness of will or mental strength an intelligible concept.

Within philosophy of action, this question has triggered a vast amount of conceptual thought and several solutions have been provided (Davidson, 1980; Holton, 1999; Kennett & Smith, 1994; Smith, 2003; Stroud, 2003; Tappolet, 2003). Kennett and Smith’s (1994) suggestion is of particular relevance to the self-control quest and will be presented more thoroughly. Adding to the basic two-tiered picture of action-explanation pointed out by Davidson, they argue that not only desires, but also goals or better judgment can give rise to an action, because they also constitute a reason for the person to act accordingly. Albeit possible, they argue that a desire does not necessarily intervene in order to bring about an action. At first glance, this seems to be inconsistent with typical self-control failures in which a person, for example, may have the goal to lose weight, yet give in to the temptation of a cream cake. In such cases, desires rather than goals appear to cause the actual behavior. However, there is a significant difference between what it means to have a desire and to have a goal or form a judgment. Desires explain why someone does x (if one does x), but goals and better judgments explain and justify why someone does y (if one does y). If people want to eat a cake, their eating behavior can be explained by means of a desire. If they are saturated, their abstinence can be explained by a lack of desire. However, if people have the goal to lose weight, their restraint can be explained and justified by this goal. If they nonetheless eat a cake, their eating can still be explained by a contravening desire, yet it can no longer be justified. Therefore, although both desires and goals constitute reasons for action, there is, in terms of justifiability, a significant difference between mere motivational reasons that consist of desires and normative reasons which are constituted by a person’s goals (Kennett & Smith, 1994). Thus, a discrepancy between explanation and justification, as well as between desire and goal is possible from a conceptual point of view. As a consequence, weakness of will can be considered as an intelligible concept. At the same time, however, this is to say that it necessarily constitutes a normative failure. To have a goal or to form a judgment conceptually entails the request to act accordingly. This is what judgments are about and what goal-directedness demands. Desiring to do x more than y is no conceptual necessity, but it is a normative requirement: one should desire what one judges to be better.

For the sake of clarity, this conceptual defense of weakness of will is intended to provide a solution to a philosophical problem but not to subsequent practical problems, as well. In conclusion, it can provide a more adequate understanding of the underlying phenomenon, yet it does not allow any inferences about how to overcome real-world cases of weakness of will.

Strength, weakness, and beyond

As a consequence, the strength model of self-control entails a crucial normative element in its distinction between behavior which is and which is not self-controlled. Nonetheless, it appears to presuppose rather than explicate the normativity of self-controlled behavior. For methodological reasons, goals or better judgments are pre-given and predefined for research participants. While the relevance of this for experimental purposes should be acknowledged, it nonetheless conceals the meaning of self-control outside these specific laboratory settings. To this end, a different way of doing research might be conducive. An example in this regard might be qualitative research that would try to reveal the reasons or thoughts that research participants have for their respective behavior and that might put people’s behavior into the perspective of their normative horizon. In this sense, qualitative research approaches might go beyond the quantitative measuring of pre-defined success rates.

In the following, I will invoke an illustrative example which is constructed to emphasize three relevant preconditions that strong-willed agents fulfill. I will then explicate which questions, therefore, have to remain unasked by the strength-model, but questions which are still important to a more encompassing understanding of the concept of self-control. The remainder of this article will then explore what self-control and self-control failure mean in each of the three alternative scenarios in which one of these three preconditions is not fulfilled. Thereby, the understanding of the concept of self-control will be broadened and internal relationships between various conceptualizations will be identified. Moreover, the argument that self-controlled behavior is essentially normative will be further underpinned.

The example is as follows. Tom is an honest boy who knows and respects the laws of his country and is aware of his parents’ view of how a good son behaves. Nevertheless, he steals a CD after an extremely demanding day at school. Apparently, his desire for the CD overwhelms his better judgment, he feels tempted, and succumbs. Obviously, this scenario entails immoral and illegal behavior, however, what is important in this context is that Tom can be said to act intentionally against his better judgment and hence in a weak-willed fashion. Such an understanding of the situation, however, depends on the following three preconditions. First of all, in principle, Tom is able to achieve his goal of being honest and abide by the law. He is not a kleptomaniac; nor is he threatened or forced to steal, and nor does he fail to understand the meaning of property. Secondly, being honest continues to be a goal that he cares about even during the shoplifting. Finally, the goal of not stealing is clear, unambiguous, and not in conflict with any other equally valued goal he may also have. It is only in conflict with his desire, which, however, he values far less.

In order for the strength model of self-control to hold, it is important that each of these three preconditions is fulfilled. Whenever at least one of them is frustrated, any failure to achieve one’s goal can no longer count as being due to the agent’s weakness of will. At first glance, (a) being unable to achieve the goal, (b) failing to care about it, and (c) having conflicting goals appear as alternative reasons for how and why one may fail at self-control and act in a normatively unjustified way. For this conceptual reason, three further senses of self-control appear necessary and possible, which will be explored below (Kennett, 2001).

Psychological incapacity: Neither weak-willed nor compelled

Historically, W. Mischel’s and his colleagues’ work on the delay of gratification paradigm appears to be of particular interest regarding the question of what it may mean to be unable to achieve a goal and therefore to fail at self-control and at what one should do (H. N. Mischel & Mischel, 1983; W. Mischel & Baker, 1975; W. Mischel, Ebbesen, & Raskoff Zeiss, 1972; W. Mischel & Moore, 1973). They addressed the question of how exactly people exercise self-control. Numerous studies looked at what young children actually do when they resist temptation and wait for a greater but later reward. Children were provided with a variety of possible strategies that could help them wait for the greater reward, though they could have a smaller one immediately. It appeared, for example, that thinking about something pleasurable, rather than about the reward or looking at the image of the reward rather than the reward itself supported children best. Children in test groups who received and implemented the right instructions performed significantly better, that is, they waited longer, than those in uninformed or misinformed control-groups. As a result, self-control was considered to consist of distinct capacities and strategies which help to simplify goal-pursuit over time and in the face of other barriers. However, unless children have learned appropriate strategies and acquired relevant capacities, they can be considered unable to achieve the distant goal and hence unable to exercise successful self-control. In other words, it is a lack of capacity, rather than a weakness of will, that make the un- and misinformed children fail at self-control. In the above it has been suggested that those who for psychological reasons are unable to achieve their goals, fail in a compelled way. At this moment, however, it seems necessary to further nuance the conceptual debate. In addition to compulsion and weakness of will, a third intermediate category of self-control failure seems available which highlights what it means to fail at self-control because one is psychologically unable to achieve one’s goal, and also to show why this is a normative failure. In the following, this category will be termed psychological incapacity. It will be further explored by means of an analysis of resistible versus irresistible desires and the distinction between synchronic and diachronic self-control. In the end, this will show that, as well as why, people who fail to act in a self-controlled way, because they lack a relevant capacity, can be considered to fail in a normative sense, that is, fail to do what they should (and could) do.

Conditionally resistible desires

Traditionally, both compulsive and weak-willed agents are considered to fail at resisting a desire. The former face an irresistible desire that they cannot resist and the latter face a resistible desire that they do not resist. However, what does it mean for a desire to be irresistible? Which conditions underlie the distinction between resistibility and irresistibility? In a philosophical analysis Mele (1990) has analyzed these conditions and pointed out when and why a desire should count as irresistible. To begin with, Mele considers the distinction between resistible and irresistible desires to hold only in ordinary, but not in extraordinary, circumstances (p. 457). For the sake of argument, any further elaboration on this distinction will be waived here and it will be presupposed that the situation discussed is ordinary. Two conditions have to be fulfilled for a desire to count as irresistible, namely unconquerability and uncircumventability. A desire is unconquerable if no strategy for resisting the desire is available and it fulfills each of the following conditions: (a) agents’ awareness of it, (b) their motivation to use it, and (c) possession of the relevant capacities and skills necessary to execute it. If any of these conditions are fulfilled, desires are conquerable and hence resistible. However, even an unconquerable desire may still be circumvented. A desire is circumventable if next to the desire to do x, an alternative desire to do y is also available and the agent cannot perform both. An (unconquerable) desire to do x is circumvented, and therefore resisted, if the agent performs the alternative action y and hence not x.

These conditions of irresistibility are quite restricted. It may therefore seem as if Mele’s analysis indicates that people rarely experience irresistible desires, hardly ever act in a compulsive fashion and that the first precondition of the strength-model is generally fulfilled and self-control failures typically are cases of mental weakness. However, this conclusion is not compelling. Although Mele’s actual analysis was intended to differentiate between the two concepts of resistible and irresistible desires only, it makes it possible to distinguish an important third category. First, there are desires that are conquerable and circumventable; second, unconquerable and uncircumventable desires follow, and finally, a distinct third category of desires that are unconquerable but circumventable can be distinguished. Apparently, this category is conceptually different from the other two. Desires of this third kind may be considered conditionally resistible. This less strict meaning of irresistibility in turn is important to understand because of what it means to lack the capacity or a strategy to exercise self-control and therefore fail at achieving some distant goal.

What this means may best be explained by applying the concept of conditional resistibility to the above-presented experiments underlying the delay of gratification paradigm. Conceptual resistibility can then make distinct conceptual sense of the uninstructed control-group children in Mischel et al.’s experiments, as well as, of other agents who fail at self-control because they lack relevant skills or strategies. The following example will show this, and why the uninstructed children are neither compelled to take the smaller and earlier reward, nor that they are weak-willed when they do so. Instead, they should be considered as agents who are psychologically incapable. Actually, the various experiments in this sense showed that it has been precisely due to their lack of proper strategies and capacities that the uninformed children did not (or to a far lesser extent) overcome their desire to take the immediate but smaller reward. Nonetheless, given the conditions of irresistibility, it is now possible to recognize that these children could still be considered to be in a situation that allows them to circumvent their very desire. Moving beyond the actual experimental set-up, these children could, next to the desire for the immediate reward for example, also develop a desire to go to the toilet or go back to their waiting mother next door. Consequently, even an uninstructed or misinformed child could let the waiting time pass by and successfully resist the desire for the immediate reward. In this sense, they are significantly different from, for example, compulsive eaters, who eat as soon as food is available. Thus, weak-willed agents can conquer a desire, but fail to do so; compulsive agents fail to resist desires because they can neither conquer nor circumvent them, but psychologically incapable agents who cannot conquer less valuable desires either, still can, and should, circumvent them.

Diachronic self-control

This not only applies to experimental settings in social psychology, but may also be important for daily instances of self-control. To bring about alternative incompatible desires may be considered a suitable means for vulnerable people to resist desires, which they prefer not to act on. The distinction between synchronic and diachronic self-control can further show how this makes sense. Synchronic self-control refers to self-control in the moment and in circumstances of vulnerability whereas diachronic self-control pertains to self-control over time. For example, smokers who want to quit may be unable to say “no thanks” to cigarettes offered by their smoking friends and hence be unable to exercise synchronic self-control. Nevertheless, their smoking habits need not also prevent them from forming a second and incompatible desire, that is, not to meet these friends anymore. By exercising such diachronic self-control, they enable themselves to circumvent situations they cannot handle. Exercising diachronic self-control, if one finds oneself unable to exercise synchronic self-control, is not merely a conceptual and practical possibility, rather, it constitutes a normative requirement. The self-control failure of those who fail to achieve their goal, because they lack a suitable psychological strategy or capacity, does then not consist in not having tried hard enough. Instead, it consists in having failed to enable themselves and to put themselves in a situation in which the capacity they lack would not be required. In summary, psychological incapacity is a form of self-control failure which is conceptually distinct from weakness of will. Nonetheless, in both cases agents could and should have acted differently. While weak-willed agents should have tried harder, psychologically incapable agents should have enabled themselves. Hence, both forms of self-control failure are essentially also normative failures.

Beyond goal-functionality: Goal-setting

Despite relevant differences, there are also important commonalities between the strength and the capacity models of self-control. Both focus on goal-achievement and both postulate the availability of pre-existing goals, the contents of which are clear and valuable by definition. This supposition, however, is not without controversy. Beyond goal-achievement, it has also been argued that the determination of the kind and content of one’s goals should be part of self-control. Only people who are in control of setting their goals and whose goals are set to express who they are, or prefer to be, as a person have been argued to deserve to count as instances of self-control. Ryan and Deci (1999), for example, argue that a meaningful concept of self-control [although they invoke the term of self-determination] requires a distinct concept of a self that can add to the concept of control so that a person’s self can be considered to be the source of any goals and judgments to be achieved. The prefix self has to be invoked so that it meaningfully adds to the term control or regulation.

Goal-setting and concern for one’s goals

Equally, in an attempt to differentiate between a basic process of self-control and a more elaborate process of self-regulation, Kuhl and Fuhrmann (1998) incorporate the relevance and special meaning of the notion of self. They reserve a distinct concept for the aforementioned kinds of behavioral regulation: self-control supports goal-maintenance and is required when the achievement of goals is challenged. However, the process they term self-regulation^kf ⁴ is theorized to be fundamentally different. Rather than being a striving for the achievement of some pre-set goals, it also requires the maintenance and formation of one’s self. The self is maintained if people set and pursue goals they consider significant, intrinsically valuable, and which provide them with reasons to act and achieve said goals. Self-regulated^kf people achieve their goals because these are important to them. Continuous attention (conscious or unconscious), motivation, and arousal are important aspects of this self-maintaining kind of goal-pursuit. In principle, people who have established, for example, the goal to stop smoking can do so either in a self-controlled or a self-regulated^kf manner. However, if self-regulation^kf is the available mode of volition, the way in which, or the reason why, exactly this goal has been set, significantly influences a person’s commitment to said goal. Being committed to one’s goals involves recognizing them as states that represent what one intrinsically considers worth doing, or who one desires to be. For example, if one considers oneself a non-smoker or incorporates a stop to smoking into one’s system of values and therefore manages to quit, one has exercised self-regulation^kf. For self-regulated^kf people, something counts as a goal because they attach great importance and a special meaning to it, whilst at the same time it also expresses who they are as a person (Deci & Ryan, 1987; Ryan & Deci, 2002). As a consequence, setting a goal and pursuing it may merge into one. This, in contrast, would not be the case with basic self-control, where goals may be pressured by some outside environmental forces, and do not express real choices of these people, nor become incorporated into their systems of value.

Both Kuhl and Fuhrmann’s and Ryan and Deci’s approaches emphasize the significance of a concept of self-control that is independent of mere goal-functionality. Investigations of how people best achieve certain goals may therefore be too limited to understand what it means to exercise self-control and also when and why people should be considered to fail to do so. In addition, it is important to consider why people select and pursue which goals. For self-determined or self-regulated^kf people acting in a goal-directed way is expressive of a personal value statement.

As pointed out above, the strength-model of self-control presupposes that agents care for their goals (the second precondition). However, accounts of self-control that emphasize the significance of the self and the importance of goal-setting underline that concern or care for one’s goals is most crucially at stake. Goals are not pre-given, but their formation is part and parcel of the very exercise of self-control. Consequently, what seems most likely to characterize self-control failure in these theoretical approaches is a lack of care for one’s goals. This reversion into its negative form exceeds both the scope and the intentions of the original accounts. However, for the purpose of this article, an elaboration of what it might mean to fail to care for one’s goals will not only further the understanding of these accounts, but also highlight their normative foundation.

Recklessness

The initial characterization of what it means to be, as Ryan and Deci term it, a self-determined agent provides a useful starting point in this regard. They state that to be self-determined, “people must grasp their importance and synthesize their meaning [emphasis added] with respect to other values and motivations” (Deci & Ryan, 2000, p. 239). Consequently, it could be argued that those who fail at self-determination do not primarily fail at behaving in a goal-directed way. More fundamentally, they fail to consider their own goals and judgments as being important or meaningful.

The above-introduced philosophical concept of recklessness seems to resemble this state of mind quite closely. Reckless agents, as Watson (1977) has claimed, know what they do, but accept the negative consequences. Reckless behavior is the result of a judgment, which, also in the agent’s eyes is clearly wrong, or it occurs because agents fail to make a certain judgment, although in their opinion they have overwhelming reasons to make it and to act accordingly. The behavior of reckless agents cannot be based on the totality of reasons actually available to them (Kennett, 2001, p. 172). Nonetheless, such agents retain a basic contact with their reasons, norms, goals, or judgments. That is, they are reckless with regard to something. It is this condition that ensures that reckless agents remain within the realm of self-control, because it distinguishes them from, among others, disinterested people who do not make any relevant judgments in certain areas of life. For example, people who are not interested in soccer cannot be said to fail as supporters when they show no enthusiasm for their home team. Yet, a devoted fan who cheers neither, does seriously fail. In so far as being a fan is constitutive for who this person is, failing to cheer could be said to be a failure of self-control, that is, to aim at achieving the goals one commits oneself to.

A careful analysis of another example, presented by Zangwill (2008) in his analysis of moral indifferences, may further illuminate what exactly is entailed in the reckless kind of self-control failure. Zangwill puts forward the case of a mercenary who describes himself as a person who knows his vocation to be morally wrong but who, provided it pays well, is not concerned by this wrongness. At the same time, however, he claims to be aware of the moral depravity of his vocation, cognitively to understand the converse demands of morality and he even insists on sharing “normal” moral beliefs with other people and his pre-mercenary self. He can just no longer be bothered accordingly. The important point to consider here is whether it is possible to believe a person like him in any intelligible way. It is the specific combination of mental attitudes—sharing moral beliefs and not thinking that he should act accordingly—which characterizes the mercenary. It is the condition of recklessness that can render his behavior intelligible. However, the price to pay for this intelligibility is that his behavior is grounded in a fundamental normative failure. The mercenary is not only morally wrong, most significantly, he acts wrongly according to his own definition of goodness. His behavior cannot count as being controlled by his goals or judgments—which he shares with us—and hence is not controlled by his self. However, in contrast to weak-willed or psychologically incapable agents, the essence of the reckless agents’ failure does not consist in their failure to achieve their goals—which they also fail at—instead, it consists of their failure to grasp what it means to have a goal or to form a judgment. By definition, even if actual achievement proves difficult or impossible, a goal ought to be aimed at and count as a normative reason to try to act accordingly. This is what goals are about and this is what the mercenary, and other reckless people, fail to live up to and therefore their self-control failures are normative failures.

The self of self-control

In so far as coming to understand what is important and meaningful to one’s self, self-control is to be conceptualized as control by the self—rather than control of the self. This final section also focuses on the concept of self and elaborates further on the question of how having or being a self is part and parcel of self-controlled forms of behavior.

The strength model of self-control presupposes that people have clear and unambiguous goals (third precondition). In the following this precondition will be challenged and an understanding of self-control will be pointed out that can also apply to cases of dilemmas, that is, in situations where people have two mutually exclusive, yet equally valued goals. Again, the criterion of goal-achievement is of no avail, because from the outset it is unclear which goal should be achieved and which can be abandoned. Instead, it will be argued that people can be said to act in a self-controlled way if they overcome a dilemma so that their subsequent behavior is an expression of how they constitute themselves as persons.

Personality science and the self

Recent attempts by personality science to integrate a theory of self-regulation may be conducive in this regard. The aim is to reconcile relatively stable personality structures with the dynamic and fine-tuned process of self-regulation (Cervone et al., 2006) and thereby try to aim at providing an explanation of how “self-regulation by persons [emphasis added]” (Cervone et al., 2006, p. 335) can be achieved. The basic presumption of this theoretical approach is that in self-regulated behavior people are engaged as whole and complex beings (W. Mischel & Ayduk, 2004) rather than only, for example, their executive functions.

The Knowledge-Appraisal-Personality-Architecture model (KAPA; Cervone, 2004) intends to conceptualize the self in terms of personal and intra-individual functioning. It is believed to explain how people’s within-person personality is shaped and how that in turn may relate to self-regulated responses. People dispose of intentional mental states, like beliefs or plans that always relate to something else: a person believes that x is true or plans to do y. The intentional part of people’s mentality allows them to have goals and be goal-directed. A goal, however, may have two different references: knowledge and appraisal (Cervone, 2004, p. 187). While knowledge is considered relatively stable, appraisals are pointed out as being dynamic. Appraisals allow people to evaluate their knowledge and make judgments about themselves, the world, and their mutual relationship. People continuously appraise how significant certain situations, plans, or goals are to themselves and decide whether to cope with difficult situations or best leave the scene, and to consider whether or not it is worth making an effort. These appraisals are important aspects of who, as a person, one is or becomes. The KAPA-model wants personality psychology to understand personality both as a question of what people know about themselves and the world and of how they evaluate this knowledge. This, in turn, is considered to have repercussions for what it means to exercise self-control. Whenever people are engaged in a process of goal-achievement, they receive feedback on their progress. Yet, and in contrast to cybernetic feedback-loop theories, this feedback need not be employed in order to adjust one’s behavior for the sake of goal-achievement. Instead, it can be employed in order to adjust one’s appraisal of the respective situation. People who receive negative feedback may (re)estimate how important they evaluate a certain goal, how capable they consider themselves, or how reasonable it is to remain committed. Knowledge about oneself and the world influences such appraisals, but does not replace them (Brandstädter & Rothermund, 2002). The quest of goal-adjustment versus continued goal-achievement directly relates to possible dilemmas between the original and the potential new goal which are initially valued equally, yet also contradict each other. In this way, the KAPA-approach to self-control underscores the position of the self as the subject, rather than the object of self-control.

Actually, in such situations it is required that in order to be self-controlled, people make up their minds and make a decision as to which of the two options to choose.

Solving dilemmas and making up one’s mind

Velleman (2002) argues that whenever people face two equally valued but mutually exclusive goals, they have to make up their mind and determine who they want to be. In this sense, the two options available in dilemmas should not be understood as two alternatives for the person, but as two alternatives of the person (Bransen, 2000). Velleman’s example of a rational smoker may illustrate what this means. Rational smokers face a dilemma between wanting to quit smoking and not wanting to engage in any irrational act. To them, however, to stop smoking entails some irrationality because the benefit of smoking the last cigarette always outweighs the costs of smoking that one last cigarette. Therefore, not to have the last cigarette would require them to do something irrational. Most actual smokers who want to quit confront a clear normative horizon, in which there is a conflict between a disvalued desire to smoke and a valued goal to stop. Not so, for rational smokers. They face a genuine dilemma and are either rational in the short-term or irrational in the long-run (continue smoking), or rational in the long-run and irrational in the short-term (stop smoking). For them, both options are equally dissatisfying. In order to proceed in a self-controlled way, willpower is of no avail. Instead, in order to proceed, they will have to overcome the dilemma, make up their mind, and determine what is important to them as persons. Unlike typical smokers who may suffer from psychological and/or physiological difficulties, rational smokers mainly have to determine the normativity of the situation, make an evaluative judgment, and define who they want to be: a smoker or a non-smoker. This is entailed in making up one’s mind. Velleman makes a suggestion as to how this can be achieved. In his example, would-like-to-stop smokers start by giving themselves a new guise, as non-smokers, and they do so by stopping to think of themselves as smokers (Velleman, 2002, p. 99). Under their new self-given guise as non-smokers, it is no longer irrational for them to forego the benefits of the last cigarette. Smoking ceases to be beneficial at all, thus enabling them to change behavior rationally. From the perspective of who these persons are, this is a sensible option. This holds even though empirically, it may still appear unjustified to describe such people as non-smokers, because their cravings for nicotine may remain measurable and their friends, unaware of their decision, may continue to describe them as devoted smokers. Apart from that, these people can be considered non-smokers because of their mental state and their personal commitment and hence they can be considered to have overcome their initial dilemma. For the sake of clarity, this is not a statement about a vindicated strategy of how best to stop smoking. Actually, the philosophical argument would likewise hold in cases where people make up their mind in the sense of “thinking of oneself as a smoker who does not want to quit.” What is important to notice instead, is that by making up one’s mind people may overcome dilemmas in a way that deserves to count as self-control: they are controlled by their newly acquired self. Again, an underlying normative reflection is invoked to constitute the new self—the non-smoker. Therefore, normative evaluations allow people to act in self-controlled ways even if their goals initially appear unclear, ambiguous, or conflicting. Unlike pre-given goals that are potentially external to who someone is as a person, such decisions, evaluations, or resolutions do not assail or bind agents against their wills; they explicate who they are and what their wills consist of (Frankfurt, 2006). People who have made up their minds and constituted a self can be said to act in a self-controlled way when their behavior is justified by who they decide to be. By contrast, they fail at self-control when they act in a way that cannot be thus justified. Hence, whether any action counts as being self-controlled or as a failure of self-control depends on a normative evaluation that puts the behavior into the perspective of the person concerned.

Conclusion

This article provides a philosophical discussion of the meaning of self-control. For philosophical purposes, the availability of such an analysis of a complex concept is valuable on its own. For social psychologists, however, this is different and the quest for direct applications may arise. Therefore, the following lines will briefly point out how the above analysis bears direct relevance to psychological theorizing. Contemporary social psychology has developed a variety of conceptualizations of self-control (or self-regulation). Yet, despite important theoretical differences amongst these variations, the above analysis also demonstrates that they share one crucial element: they all make reference to the inherent normativity of self-controlled human behavior. This insight ought to be important to social psychologists because it can facilitate a proper understanding of the interrelationship of the various conceptualizations of self-control currently in use. Bearing this in mind, it should nevertheless be recognized that the current philosophical analysis also has its limits. With regard to applications in further social psychology research, I would like to suggest that the insight that self-control is essentially also a normative issue by referring to people’s reasons and understanding of themselves, may find its way into new kinds of qualitative research that investigates the views and experiences of people whose self-control is at stake. In the end, however, it will all depend on those trained in social psychology to determine how best to create new kinds of empirical research that lives up to the concept of self-control by referring not only to causal, but also normative aspects of human behavior. On this point, further reflection and research is needed.

In the above, the issue of automaticity, which is a—potential—challenge, has been left until the end. My argument is that the question of whether or not automaticity makes a difference ceases to apply as soon as normative evaluations of a person’s behavior are at stake. The above analysis has shown that, at least implicitly, each of the conceptualizations of self-control discussed makes reference to an inherent and indispensable normativity of self-controlled behavior. Therefore, they are all able to meet the challenge posed by the automaticity theory. This is not to deny that automatic aspects of human behavior are real and can very much influence human proceedings. However, this is to say that they cannot endanger the reality and significance of self-controlled forms of human behavior. Whenever one signifies a person’s behavior as being self-controlled, one thereby also draws a normative difference to non-self-controlled behavior. This, however, is not the case with regard to automatic behavior. Non-automatic behavior need not be of a different normative quality than automatic behavior. Consequently, whenever the normativity of behavior is at stake, theories of automaticity cease to apply whereas theories of self-control come to the fore. They cannot only explicate why people behave as they behave, but in addition they can help us in making sense of both the behavior of others and of ourselves.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this manuscript had been developed while the author was working for the Behavioral Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The author wants to thank Jan Bransen and Jeannette Kennett for their great support throughout the research period that let to this article. Thanks also to Daniel Cervone who encouraged me to present this philosophical work to an audience of psychologists. I also very much appreciate the work of Joan Coke who has carefully proofread the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Dorothee Horstkötter, PhD, is assistant professor at the Department of Health, Ethics and Society, CAPHRI at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. She was formerly employed by the Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research interests cover conceptual and ethical questions at the interface of social psychology/genomics/neurobiology and (disordered) human behavior. Her recent publications cover her dissertation entitled “Self-control revisited, Varieties of normative agency,” as well as articles in International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Bioethics, BioSocieties, and the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience.

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