Self-Regulation and Self-Control

Selected works of Roy F. Baumeister

Roy Baumeister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781032476346
• eBook ISBN: 9781351707749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces—extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions.

In this volume, Roy F. Baumeister reflects on his distinguished career as an eminent scholar in the field of self-control and self-regulation, as well as belonging, rejection, free will, and consciousness. Offering a unique perspective on both the program of research in ego-depletion as one of social psychology's most widely successful theories, and its position in the changing landscape of the scientific field, the book charts Baumeister's development as one of the pioneers of study into self-control.

Featuring a newly written introductory piece in which the author offers a unique insight into the initial findings that led to an eventual theory of ego-depletion, this collection will give readers a vital understanding of how the hugely influential theory of ego depletion first came to be developed, and is essential reading for students and researchers in self-control and self-regulation.

1Ego depletion

Is the active self a limited resource?

Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne M. Tice,¹ Case Western Reserve University

Many crucial functions of the self involve volition: making choices and decisions, taking responsibility, initiating and inhibiting behavior and making plans of action and carrying out those plans. The self exerts control over itself and over the external world. To be sure, not all human behavior involves planful or deliberate control by the self, and, in fact, recent work has shown that a great deal of human behavior is influenced by automatic or nonconscious processes (see Bargh, 1994, 1997). But undoubtedly some portion involves deliberate, conscious, controlled responses by the self, and that portion may be disproportionately important to the long-term health, happiness, and success of the individual. Even if it were shown that 95% of behavior consisted of lawful, predictable responses to situational stimuli by automatic processes, psychology could not afford to ignore the remaining 5%. As an analogy, cars are probably driven straight ahead at least 95% of the time, but ignoring the other 5% (such as by building cars without steering wheels) would seriously compromise the car’s ability to reach most destinations. By the same token, the relatively few active, controlling choices by the self greatly increase the self’s chances of achieving its goals. And if those few ‘‘steering” choices by the self are important, then so is whatever internal structure of the self is responsible for it.

In the present investigation we were concerned with this controlling aspect of the self. Specifically, we tested hypotheses of ego depletion, as a way of learning about the self’s executive function. The core idea behind ego depletion is that the self’s acts of volition draw on some limited resource, akin to strength or energy and that, therefore, one act of volition will have a detrimental impact on subsequent volition. We sought to show that a preliminary act of self-control in the form of resisting temptation (Experiment 1) or a preliminary act of choice and responsibility (Experiment 2) would undermine self-regulation in a subsequent, unrelated domain, namely persistence at a difficult and frustrating task. We then sought to verify that the effects of ego depletion are indeed maladaptive and detrimental to performance (Experiment 3). Last, we undertook to show that ego depletion resulting from acts of self-control would interfere with subsequent decision making by making people more passive (Experiment 4).

Our research strategy was to look at effects that would carry over across wide gaps of seeming irrelevance. If resisting the temptation to eat chocolate can leave a person prone to give up faster on a difficult, frustrating puzzle, that would suggest that those two very different acts of self-control draw on the same limited resource, And if making a choice about whether to make a speech contrary to one’s opinions were to have the same effect, it would suggest that that very same resource is also the one used in general for deliberate, responsible decision making. That resource would presumably be one of the most important features of the self.

Executive function

The term agency has been used by various writers to refer to the self’s exertion of volition, but this term has misleading connotations; An agent is quintessentially someone who acts on behalf of someone else, whereas the phenomenon under discussion involves the self acting autonomously on its own behalf. The term executive function has been used in various contexts to refer to this aspect of self and hence may be preferable (e.g., Epstein, 1973; see Baumeister, 1998). Meanwhile, we use the term ego depletion to refer to a temporary reduction in the self’s capacity or willingness to engage in volitional action (including controlling the environment, controlling the self, making choices, and initiating action) caused by prior exercise of volition.

The psychological theory that volition is one of the self’s crucial functions can be traced back at least to Freud (1923/1961a, 1933/1961b), who described the ego as the part of the psyche that must deal with the reality of the external world by mediating between conflicting inner and outer pressures. In his scheme, for example, a Victorian gentleman standing on the street might feel urged by his id to head for the brothel and by his superego to go to church, but it is ultimately left up to his ego to start his feet walking in one direction or the other. Freud also seems to have believed that the ego needed to use some energy in making such a decision.

Recent research has convincingly illuminated the self’s nearly relentless quest for control (Brehm, 1966; Burger, 1989; DeCharms, 1968; Deci & Ryan, 1991, 1995; Langer, 1975; Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982; Taylor, 1983, 1989; White, 1959). It is also known that when the self feels highly responsible (accountable) for its actions, its cognitive and behavioral processes change (Cooper & Scher, 1994; Linder, Cooper, & Jones, 1967; Tetlock, 1983, 1985; Tetlock & Boettger, 1989). Active responses also have more powerful effects on the self and its subsequent responses than do passive ones (Allison & Messick, 1988; Cioffi & Garner, 1996; Fazio, Sherman, & Herr, 1982). The processes by which the self monitors itself in order to approach standards of desired behavior have also been studied (Carver & Scheier, 1981; Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Wegner, 1994; Wegner & Pennebaker, 1993).

Despite these efforts, it is hard to dispute that understanding of the executive function remains far more vague and rudimentary than other aspects of self-theory. Researchers investigating cognitive representations of self have made enormous progress in recent decades (for reviews, see Banaji & Prentice, 1994; Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Likewise, there has been considerable progress on interpersonal aspects of selfhood (e.g., Leary, 1995; Leary & Kowalski, 1990; Schlenker, 1980; Tesser, 1988). In comparison, understanding of the self’s executive function lags behind at a fairly primitive level.

Ego depletion

The notion that volition depends on the self’s expenditure of some limited resource was anticipated by Freud (1923/1961a, 1933/1961b). He thought the ego needed to have some form of energy to accomplish its tasks and to resist the energetic promptings of id and superego. Freud was fond of the analogy of horse and rider, because as he said the rider (analogous to the ego) is generally in charge of steering but is sometimes unable to prevent the horse from going where it wants to go. Freud was rather vague and inconsistent about where the ego’s energy came from, but he recognized the conceptual value of postulating that the ego operated on an energy model.

Several modern research findings suggest that some form of energy or strength may be involved in acts of volition. Most of these have been concerned with self-regulation. Indeed, Mischel (1996) has recently proposed that the colloquial notion of will-power be revived for self-regulation theory, and a literature review by Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice (1994) concluded that much evidence about self-regulatory failure fits a model of strength depletion.

An important early study by Glass, Singer, and Friedman (1969) found that participants exposed to unpredictable noise stress subsequently showed decrements in frustration tolerance, as measured by persistence on unsolvable problems.² Glass et al. concluded that adapting to unpredictable stress involves a ‘‘psychic cost,” which implies an expenditure or depletion of some valuable resource. They left the nature of this resource to future research, which has not made much further progress.

Additional evidence for a strength model was provided by Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister (1998), whose research strategy influenced the present investigation. Muraven et al. sought to show that consecutive exertions of self-regulation were characterized by deteriorating performance, even though the exertions involved seemingly unrelated spheres. In one study, they showed that trying not to think about a white bear (a thought-control task borrowed from Wegner, 1989; Wegner, Schneider, Carter, & White, 1987) caused people to give up more quickly on a subsequent anagram task. In another study, an affect-regulation exercise caused subsequent decrements in endurance at squeezing a handgrip. These findings suggest that exertions of self-control do carry a psychic cost and deplete some scarce resource.

To integrate these scattered findings and implications, we suggest the following. One important part of the self is a limited resource that is used for all acts of volition, such as controlled (as opposed to automatic) processing, active (as opposed to passive) choice, initiating behavior, and overriding responses. Because much of self-regulation involves resisting temptation and hence overriding motivated responses, this self-resource must be able to affect behavior in the same fashion that motivation does. Motivations can be strong or weak, and stronger impulses are presumably more difficult to restrain; therefore, the executive function of the self presumably also operates in a strong or weak fashion, which implies that it has a dimension of strength. An exertion of this strength in self-control draws on this strength and temporarily exhausts it (Muraven et al., 1998), but it also presumably recovers after a period of rest. Other acts of volition should have similar effects, and that is the hypothesis of the present investigation.

Experiment 1

Experiment l provided evidence for ego depletion by examining consecutive acts of self-control. The study was originally designed to test competing hypotheses about the nature of self-control, also known as self-regulation. Clearly the control over self is one of the most important and adaptive applications of the self’s executive function. Research on monitoring processes and feedback loops has illuminated the cognitive structure that processes relevant information (e.g., Carver & Scheier, 1981; Wegner, 1994), but the actual process by which an organism alters its own responses or subjective states is far less well understood. At least three different models of the nature of self-regulation can be proposed. Moreover, these three models make quite different predictions about the effectiveness of self-control immediately after an exertion of self-control in some unrelated sphere. Experiment 1 provided a test of these three competing predictions by requiring participants to engage in two seemingly unrelated acts of self-control.

One model views self-regulation as essentially a skill. In this model, people gradually develop the skill to regulate themselves over long periods of time. On any given occasion, however, skill remains roughly constant across repeated trials (except for small and gradual learning effects), so there should be little or no change in effectiveness of self-control on two successive exertions within a short time.

Another model portrays self-regulation as essentially a knowledge structure. In this view, self-control operates like a master schema that makes use of information about how to alter one’s own responses or states. On the basis of this model, an initial act of self-regulation should prime the schema, thereby facilitating subsequent self-control. Another version of this view would be that the self-regulatory system is normally in a standby or depowered mode until it is pressed into action by one act of self-control. Once activated, the system would remain in operation (‘‘on”) for a time, making further acts of self-control easier. A third model states that self-regulation resembles energy. In this view, acts of self-regulation involve some kind of exertion that expends energy and therefore depletes the supply available. Unless the supply is very large, initial acts of self-regulation should deplete it, thereby impairing subsequent self-control.

Thus, the three models respectively predict no change, an increase, or a decrease in effectiveness of self-control following an initial act of self-control. Other models are possible, such as the possibility that self-regulation involves a collection of domain-specific but unrelated knowledge structures, so that an initial act of self-control should prime and therefore facilitate self-control in the same sphere but produce no change in other, unrelated spheres. Still, these three models provide sufficiently conflicting predictions about the sequence of unrelated acts of self-control to make it worth conducting an initial test.

In the present research, we used impulse control, which to many people is the classic or paradigmatic form of self-control. More precisely, we manipulated self-control by instructing some hungry individuals to eat only radishes while they were faced with the tempting sight and aroma of chocolate. Thus, they had to resist the temptation to perform one action while making themselves perform a similar but much less desirable action. We then sought to measure self-control in an unrelated sphere, by persistence at a frustrating puzzle-solving task. A series of frustrating failures may ofte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource?
• 2 Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative
• 3 Strength model of self-regulation as limited resource: Assessment, controversies, update
• 4 The physiology of willpower: Linking blood glucose to self-control
• 5 High self-control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success
• 6 Taking stock of self-control: A meta-analysis of how trait self-control relates to a wide range of behaviors
• 7 What people desire, feel conflicted about, and try to resist in everyday life
• 8 Emotional distress regulation takes precedence over impulse control: If you feel bad, do it!
• 9 Longitudinal study of procrastination, performance, stress, and health: The costs and benefits of dawdling
• 10 Intellectual performance and ego depletion: Role of the self in logical reasoning and other information processing
• 11 How leaders self-regulate their task performance: Evidence that power promotes diligence, depletion, and disdain
• Index