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.
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2.
Power in everyday life Smith, Pamela K.; Hofmann, Wilhelm
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
09/2016, Volume:
113, Issue:
36
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
How does power manifest itself in everyday life? Using experience-sampling methodology, we investigated the prevalence, sources, and correlates of power in people’s natural environments. Participants ...experienced power-relevant situations regularly, though not frequently. High power was not restricted to a limited few: almost half of the sample reported experiencing high-power positions. Positional power and subjective feelings of power were strongly related but had unique relations with several individual difference measures and independent effects on participants’ affect, cognition, and interpersonal relations. Subjective feelings of power resulted more from within-participant situational fluctuation, such as the social roles participants held at different times, than from stable differences between people. Our data supported some theoretical predictions about power’s effects on affect, cognition, and interpersonal relations, but qualified others, particularly highlighting the role of responsibility in power’s effects. Although the power literature has focused on high power, we found stronger effects of low power than high power.
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Previous
research has shown that major life events can have short- and long-term effects
on subjective well-being (SWB). The present meta-analysis examines (a) whether
life events have different ...effects on affective and cognitive well-being and (b)
how the rate of adaptation varies across different life events. Longitudinal
data from 188 publications (313 samples, N = 65,911) were
integrated to describe the reaction and adaptation to 4 family events (marriage,
divorce, bereavement, childbirth) and 4 work events (unemployment, reemployment,
retirement, relocation/migration). The findings show that life events have very
different effects on affective and cognitive well-being and that for most events
the effects of life events on cognitive well-being are stronger and more
consistent across samples. Different life events differ in their effects on SWB,
but these effects are not a function of the alleged desirability of events. The
results are discussed with respect to their theoretical implications, and
recommendations for future studies on adaptation are given.
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Morality in everyday life Hofmann, Wilhelm; Wisneski, Daniel C.; Brandt, Mark J. ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
09/2014, Volume:
345, Issue:
6202
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The science of morality has drawn heavily on well-controlled but artificial laboratory settings. To study everyday morality, we repeatedly assessed moral or immoral acts and experiences in a large (N ...= 1252) sample using ecological momentary assessment. Moral experiences were surprisingly frequent and manifold. Liberals and conservatives emphasized somewhat different moral dimensions. Religious and nonreligious participants did not differ in the likelihood or quality of committed moral and immoral acts. Being the target of moral or immoral deeds had the strongest impact on happiness, whereas committing moral or immoral deeds had the strongest impact on sense of purpose. Analyses of daily dynamics revealed evidence for both moral contagion and moral licensing. In sum, morality science may benefit from a closer look at the antecedents, dynamics, and consequences of everyday moral experience.
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In the present study, we used experience sampling to measure desires and desire regulation in everyday life. Our analysis included data from 205 adults, who furnished a total of 7,827 reports of ...their desires over the course of a week. Across various desire domains, results revealed substantial differences in desire frequency and strength, the degree of conflict between desires and other goals, and the likelihood of resisting desire and the success of this resistance. Desires for sleep and sex were experienced most intensively, whereas desires for tobacco and alcohol had the lowest average strength, despite the fact that these substances are thought of as addictive. Desires for leisure and sleep conflicted the most with other goals, and desires for media use and work brought about the most self-control failure. In addition, we observed support for a limited-resource model of self-control employing a novel operationalization of cumulative resource depletion: The frequency and recency of engaging in prior self-control negatively predicted people's success at resisting subsequent desires on the same day.
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In response to the same moral violation, some people report experiencing anger, and others report feeling disgust. Do differences in emotional responses to moral violations reflect idiosyncratic ...differences in the communication of outrage, or do they reflect differences in motivational states? Whereas equivalence accounts suggest that anger and disgust are interchangeable expressions of condemnation, sociofunctional accounts suggest that they have distinct antecedents and consequences. We tested these accounts by investigating whether anger and disgust vary depending on the costs imposed by moral violations and whether they differentially correspond with aggressive tendencies. Results across four studies favor a sociofunctional account: When the target of a moral violation shifts from the self to another person, anger decreases, but disgust increases. Whereas anger is associated with high-cost, direct aggression, disgust is associated with less costly indirect aggression. Finally, whether the target of a moral violation is the self or another person influences direct aggression partially via anger and influences indirect aggression partially via disgust.
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It is generally assumed that impulse control plays a major role in many areas of self-regulation such as eating behavior. However, the exact mechanisms that enable the control of impulsive ...determinants such as automatic affective reactions toward tempting stimuli are not well understood. “The present research investigated the separate moderator effects of three factors of impulse control, executive attention, inhibitory control, and affect regulation on the relationship between automatic affective reactions toward candy and subsequent candy consumption.” Results showed that all three factors reduced the influence of automatic affective reactions on eating behavior, indicating improved impulse control. Implications for self-regulation research are discussed.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
The field of self‐control has witnessed an unprecedented boom, not least due to the immense implications of successful and unsuccessful self‐control for people’s lives. However, successful and ...unsuccessful self‐control can take many different forms, and many conceptual problems have been raised as to what self‐control is about and how to best study it. Integrating different literatures, we provide a general model of self‐control which distinguishes between preventive (i.e., anticipatory) and interventive (i.e., momentary) forms of self‐control. The proposed Preventive‐Interventive Model (PI‐Model) of Self‐Control combines seven basic components: preventive strategies, desire, conflict, control motivation, volition, opportunity constraints, and behavior enactment. The resulting taxonomy helps to distinguish self‐control from standard motivational processes, to define the concept of temptation, and to identify different types of self‐control failure including self‐monitoring failure, motivational self‐control failure, and volitional self‐control failure. Further, the model helps to outline five broad mechanisms through which people may be able to proactively boost self‐control success.
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A key function of morality is to regulate social behavior. Research suggests moral values may be divided into two types: binding values, which govern behavior in groups, and individualizing values, ...which promote personal rights and freedoms. Because people tend to mentally activate concepts in situations in which they may prove useful, the importance they afford moral values may vary according to whom they are with in the moment. In particular, because binding values help regulate communal behavior, people may afford these values more importance when in the presence of close (versus distant) others. Five studies test and support this hypothesis. First, we use a custom smartphone application to repeatedly record participants' (n = 1166) current social context and the importance they afforded moral values. Results show people rate moral values as more important when in the presence of close others, and this effect is stronger for binding than individualizing values-an effect that replicates in a large preregistered online sample (n = 2016). A lab study (n = 390) and two preregistered online experiments (n = 580 and n = 752) provide convergent evidence that people afford binding, but not individualizing, values more importance when in the real or imagined presence of close others. Our results suggest people selectively activate different moral values according to the demands of the situation, and show how the mere presence of others can affect moral thinking.
Theoretically, low correlations between implicit and explicit measures can be due to (a) motivational biases in explicit self reports, (b) lack of introspective access to implicitly assessed ...representations, (c) factors influencing the retrieval of information from memory, (d) method-related characteristics of the two measures, or (e) complete independence of the underlying constructs. The present study addressed these questions from a meta-analytic perspective, investigating the correlation between the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and explicit self-report measures. Based on a sample of 126 studies, the mean effect size was .24, with approximately half of the variability across correlations attributable to moderator variables. Correlations systematically increased as a function of (a) increasing spontaneity of self-reports and (b) increasing conceptual correspondence between measures. These results suggest that implicit and explicit measures are generally related but that higher order inferences and lack of conceptual correspondence can reduce the influence of automatic associations on explicit self-reports.
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