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Self-Control and Overcontrol: Conceptual, Ethical, and Ideological Issues in Positive Psychology

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Abstract

In what they call their “manual of the sanities”—a positive psychology handbook describing contemporary research on strengths of character—Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman argue that “there is no true disadvantage of having too much self-control.” This claim is widely endorsed in the research literature. I argue that it is false. My argument proceeds in three parts. First, I identify conceptual confusion in the definition of self-control, specifically as it pertains to the claim that you cannot be too self-controlled. Second, I consider disadvantages to having too much self-control, several of which point to the value of acting spontaneously from time to time, in a pointedly uncontrolled way. Third, I raise worries about the social and political values embedded in the science of self-control. Self-control as it is understood in the positive psychology literature benefits some people more than others, depending, for example, on their race and their socio-economic status. I conclude by briefly outlining an empirical framework for understanding self-control in traditional virtue theoretic terms as something that admits of deficiencies and excesses.

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Notes

  1. See discussion in §2 on the difference between state and trait self-control.

  2. See, for instance, Neil Levy’s 2015 Leverhulme Lectures at the University of Oxford, described here: <http://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/latest_news/2015/2015_leverhulme_lectures>

  3. <http://philosophyandscienceofself-control.com/>

  4. I will ignore the recent replication crisis in psychological science (but see footnote #9). In doing so—in particular in ignoring Hagger and colleagues’ (in press) seemingly devastating finding of zero “ego depletion” effects in over 2000 subjects tested at 24 labs—I am giving researchers who trumpet the categorical benefits of self-control a large benefit of the doubt.

  5. This version of the scale—formally known as the Domain-Specific Impulsivity Scale for Children (DSIS-C)—is formatted for self-report. Two other versions are formatted for teacher-report and parent-report. See https://upenn.app.box.com/DSIS-C.

  6. Thanks to Eugene Chislenko for pushing me to clarify this point. I note that additional distinctions might be made here, for example, between skills and capacities, and between behavioral tendencies and dispositions.

  7. Baumeister and Alquist write, “State and trait aspects of self-control can be distinguished. The state is the current act. The trait would be the broad, dispositional tendency to exert self-control” (2009, 116).

  8. I say that the marshmallow studies only “seem” to illustrate the idea that self-control involves impulse-inhibition because, while the most commonly cited explanation of Michel’s findings focuses on the impulsivity of the children who couldn’t wait for a second marshmallow, another possibility is that the marshmallow experiment gauges the degree to which children trust the experimenter (e.g., to follow through on her promise of two marshmallows if the child waits 15 min). See, for instance, Kidd et al. (2013). Thanks to Robin Scheffler for pointing out this possibility to me.

  9. Ent and colleagues are proponents of the “strength model,” which conceptualizes self-control as analogous to a muscle (Baumeister et al. 2000; Muraven et al. 1998). In short, self-control is depletable, just like physical strength. I avoid discussion of this model of self-control, given recent replication worries, alongside recent findings that—unlike physical strength—self-control doesn’t seem to improve with repeated practice (Miles et al. 2016). Note also that Ent and colleagues’ study does not distinguish between people who avoid temptations in order not to be tempted—continent people, in Aristotelian lingo—and people who avoid temptations because they do not find them tempting—that is, temperate people. Thanks to Alex Madva for pointing out this ambiguity.

  10. <https://sites.sas.upenn.edu/duckworth/pages/research>. See footnote #30 for brief discussion of Duckworth’s related research on “grit.”

  11. See < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_special_episode>

  12. Rawn and Vohs use self-control and self-regulation synonymously. See also footnote #16 on using self-control to maintain a self-harming addiction.

  13. In describing the dangers of willpower, George Ainslie (1999, 74) borrows an example from Jon Elster to illustrate the difficulty or ranking competing long term interests: I might wish to eat cake because I like cake, wish to not eat cake because I’m vain, and wish to not not eat cake because I wish I wasn’t vain. What determines which of these is my more deeply held value may not be “how much it pays,” Ainslie argues, but how enforceable the intention is. Rules proscribing overeating seem more enforceable, for example, than rules proscribing vanity. But this doesn’t seem like a good reason to rank the desire to avoid cake over the desire to avoid vanity in the ledger of my desires.

  14. See further discussion of the value of spontaneity in §3.

  15. Although it is not clear that Arpaly’s interpretation describes the typical sufferer of anorexia nervosa. The etiology of this and other eating disorders is not clear. See Fischer & Munsch (2012). Anorexia nervosa is just one potential example of what Arpaly labels “inverse akrasia,” or acting rightly in spite of one’s all-things-considered best judgment. For another example, Arpaly offers Huckleberry Finn, who she argues deserves praise for giving in to the temptation to not turn in his friend Jim, as escaped slave. See discussion in Brownstein and Madva (2012).

  16. In “Addiction and Authorship,” Crispin Sartwell writes, “. . . addicts often suffer from an excess of will. Ask yourself what it takes to do that, say, every day. I tell you what it takes: it takes will-power. You have absolutely got to stop listening to your body; you have to overcome a thousand bodily recalcitrances and make yourself keep pouring. Ask yourself what it takes to keep doing this even while everyone around you is telling you that you need to stop, and so on. It takes a masterful will.” See < http://www.uqtr.ca/AE/vol_4/sartwell.htm>

  17. See footnotes #4 and #9 on the replication crisis in psychology. Also note: I do not offer my own definition of self-control. Hereafter, when I refer to self-control, I refer to whatever behavioral disposition(s) are captured by the self-control scale.

  18. de Ridder et al. (2012) divide many of the same kinds of outcomes into nine categories (school and work performance, eating and weight behavior, sexual behavior, addictive behavior, interpersonal functioning, affect regulation, well-being and adjustment, deviant behavior, and planning and decision making) and come to similar overall conclusions about the benefits of self-control. de Ridder and colleagues find greater variety than Tangney and colleagues in the effects of self-control across outcome domains, however (e.g., they find strong correlation with school and work performance but relatively weak correlation with eating and weight behavior).

  19. In psychological literature, “myopia” is sometimes used metaphorically to describe a kind of impulsiveness, in which one is too focused on one’s proximal goals and desires (e.g., “alcohol myopia”). “Hyperopia” is meant as the inverse; a tendency to focus too much on one’s abstract or distal goals and desires.

  20. Peterson and Seligman (2004) analogize self-control to intelligence. While one can endeavor to be intelligent in the wrong ways, and one can intelligently pursue dastardly ends, one can’t be too intelligent in itself, they argue. Both self-control and intelligence are intrinsically valuable instruments for pursuing our goals, in other words. However, I’m skeptical about this claim too, given evidence linking intelligence to worrying and rumination (Penney et al. 2015), to the blind spot bias (West et al. 2012), and to specific financial difficulties (in particular, Zagorsky (2007) finds that people with an IQ of 140 are twice as likely as those with average IQs to max out their credit cards).

  21. The value of acting spontaneously, without planning or explicit practical reasoning, arguably animates some of the world’s great ethical traditions, such as Confucian and Daoist theories of virtue (e.g., Slingerland, 2003, 2014). There is also some related empirical research, based on the “Spontaneity Assessment Inventory” (Kipper & Shemer 2006), suggesting that dispositions to act spontaneously correlate positively with measures of well-being (Friedman, 1994) and negatively with several indices (Spielberger et al., 1983; Foa et al., 2002).

  22. See <http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/09/08/ hillary_clinton_reboot_the_nyt_reports_ she_will_show_more humor_and_heart.html>

  23. I mean this in the ordinary, non-technical sense. If one thinks that all action is done for reasons, then spontaneous actions, like eating ice cream for dinner, will be done for reasons (or for good reasons, depending on the agent’s attitudes). But people often say, “I did it for no good reason” or “I just did it,” and this is the sense in which I mean that the value of spontaneously eating ice cream for dinner is tied to doing it for no good reason. Here’s a related way of expressing the thought: Kieren Setiya (2014) argues that “atelic” activities are an important part of a well-led life. Telic activities are those that you can complete, like writing an essay or walking from A to B. Atelic activities are ones that you cannot complete. Hanging out with friends, or going for a walk with no destination in mind, are atelic. You can cease doing these things, by moving on to something else, but you cannot complete these activities, in the sense of reaching a terminal point that satisfies the aim of the activity. Setiya argues that atelic activities may be an antidote to at least one form of the “midlife crisis.” That is, people who have been relatively successful at meeting their goals sometimes find themselves dissatisfied around midlife, and Setiya argues that the solution might be learning how to engage in activities that are not driven by means-ends reasoning. If Setiya is right, it seems that people with high trait self-control may be particularly prone to midlife crises and particularly poorly suited to overcome them by engaging in atelic activities. Such people are liable to treat atelic activities as accomplishments or goals. Recall that every definition of self-control considered in §2 involves striving toward valued ends and goals. Hyperopic people like me might be prone to think of taking walks and hanging out with friends as another item to check off the list. But the very point about atelic activities is that you can’t check them off the list. Their value is in being unfinished. Unfinishable. This isn’t exactly the same idea as acting spontaneously—in principle, one could plan to act in atelic ways—but it seems to me there is a family resemblance between these ideas. I suspect that people with too much self-control are liable to struggle to engage in or appreciate atelic activities.

  24. I find it intuitive that people with high trait self-control are liable to be less spontaneous. But this appears to be supported empirically too. As measured by an Implicit Association Test and an Affective Misattribution Procedure, spontaneous impulses predict behavior much better for people with low trait self-control than with high trait self-control (Friese & Hofmann, 2009).

  25. Thanks to Jason D'Cruz for helping me to see this point.

  26. Of course, it is possible, in principle, that the causal arrow goes in the other direction too.

  27. See also Bulley et al. (2016).

  28. I doubt this to be uniquely true of self-control. Other traits, such as being witty or intelligent, may be differentially beneficial to individuals depending on the environment in which they live. Being perceived as “smart” can be a liability in some contexts, for example. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for helping me to see this point.

    See footnote #20 for related discussion about the benefits and consequences of intelligence.

  29. This thought was partially inspired by this blog post: <http://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stanford-marshmallow-prison-experiment>

  30. Another construct advanced by positive psychologists, which bears resemblance to trait self-control, is “grit.” Duckworth and colleagues define grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” (2007, 1087). Grit is operationalized as comprising two lower-order features: perseverance of effort and consistency of effort. Much of the popular embrace of research on self-control has been extended to research on grit. It is notable, then, that, according to a large-scale meta-analysis, “grit as currently measured is simply a repackaging of conscientiousness or one of the facets of conscientiousness” (Credé et al. 2017). The size of the correlation between grit scores and overall conscientiousness is ρ = .84 (Credé et al. 2017). For broad critical discussion of research on grit, see Engber (2016).

  31. In making this point, I am not endorsing a Freudian conception of the mind.

  32. As Timothy Snyder (2012) writes in a review of Pinker (2012), “some of the very traits that maintain social order, such as the habit of obedience to authority, also make total wars and policies of mass killing possible.” Pinker claims that violence has declined dramatically over time and that the chief psychological virtue associated with this decline is self-control. But as Snyder aptly points out, “Mastery of self was not the Nazis’ problem; self-control was in fact a major element of the SS ethos, as preached by Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. Even Adolf Hitler practiced his emotive speeches. Lack of self-control was also not the problem for Joseph Stalin’s executioners, or for Stalin and Stalinists generally. Individual Soviet NKVD men killed hundreds of people, one by one, in a single day; this can hardly be done without self-control of a very high order.”

  33. Perhaps it would have taken self-control for her to stand up to the teacher? This ambiguity mirrors the discussion in §2 about Blossom. Future research should consider means for interpreting cases like these. For example, perhaps certain physiological correlates could be identified with self-control and thereafter used to distinguish cases of self-control failure from cases of self-control success (with negative outcomes) Also, a point of information: my daughter’s grandmother would have surely preferred a skull and crossbones over a boring flower picture.

  34. Thanks to Alex Madva for this suggestion.

  35. This idea has been developed in response to research on implicit bias in particular. See, for instance, Haslanger (2015).

  36. See <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/the-profound-emptiness-of-resilience.html?_r=0>. See footnote #30 for brief discussion of research on “grit” (which I take to be more or less synonymous with research on “resilience”).

  37. My aim is not to defend Block’s model of self-control per se, but I think its framework has much to offer.

  38. Block and colleagues’ model also strikes me as more evolutionarily plausible than the theories of self-control in vogue today. For example, consider Pinker’s (1997) account of anger as a signaling device. In a competitive environment, it is a liability to be known as the person who can always control her feelings and act reasonably. Better to be known as the person who, when transgressed against, is disposed to lose control and sacrifice anything in the pursuit of revenge. Strong emotions like anger act like doomsday machines, as depicted in the classic film Dr. Strangelove. They signal a willingness to go to irrational ends to protect oneself. This isn’t an argument for the value of losing control now, as compared to losing control in the environment of early human evolution. Rather it is an argument that modeling self-control as having excesses and deficiencies is more naturalistically plausible than modeling self-control as a virtue with no excesses. Thanks to David Pereplyotchik for this suggestion.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Eugene Chislenko, Jason D’Cruz, Alex Madva, Eric Mandelbaum, Eliot Michaelson, Jennifer Morton, Laurie Paul, David Pereplyotchik, Carissa Véliz, and Eric Vogelstein for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to audiences at the 2015 and 2017 Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association and to members of the William Paterson University Department of Philosophy.

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    Michael Brownstein

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  1. Michael Brownstein
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Brownstein, M. Self-Control and Overcontrol: Conceptual, Ethical, and Ideological Issues in Positive Psychology. Rev.Phil.Psych. 9, 585–606 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0390-7

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