This is such an honest and generous piece, Micky. I’ve been circling a similar conclusion for years, from a different angle, namely that what we call “self-control” (or even “emotion regulation”) may really be a measure of access: to stable relationships, to reliable co-regulators, to predictable environments, to organizational scaffolding. From where I sit, the most “self-controlled” people are those who’ve constructed environments—especially social ones—that require less self-control. Bravo on this.
I think of it as a skill problem more than a will power problem. So effective time management for example is a skill you can learn. It's hard at first, like anything you learn, but get's easier as you do it more. I see your point though--it starts to look a little like hair splitting--where does the "will" to learn the skill come from? Still, an effective emotion regulator tends to use their emotion regulation capabilities strategically. That is, they regulate their emotions in service to fashioning a life that demands less emotion regulation from them.
This is insteresting and makes me think again of my point about religion above. A lot of Christianity spaces that I have been involved in stress the importance of surrounding oneself with "Godly" people, listening to praise music etc. I can see how this quickly becomes a cult but it also helps build accountability if you surround yourself with a supportive community.
I would be interested to see how effective "finding God" is compared to therapy.
Has there been any research on this as it relates to religious folks? I have been a staunch atheist for my entire life, but have started to drift to Christianity. In that world, there are tons of people who have experienced transformative life changes. (And yes, I realize that is completely anecdotal.) However, I wonder if self-control supported by a community might lead to much higher happiness among the religious.
There is research on self-control in religious communities showing they generally have more trait self-control. Could be because they share habits and customs with each other that promote better behaviors.
Interesting. There are a lot of spaces where people share their testimonies, and most of these are incredibly traumatic (serious abuse, addiction, death of children). My guess is that most of these people are very low in trait self control. A lot of academics would be taken aback by their views but if you look past those there is a ton of gratitude (to God of course), rebuking of negative self talk (don't let Satan get into your head), and acceptance (God and his followers accept you). I don't study psychology (but am a STEM prof at an R1) so I am fairly ignorant of this.
All three of those things correlate with trait self-control. People stick to habits better when they can forgive themselves and don't ruminate on failure. Having a "higher purpose" makes goal achievement easier to follow when you're stressed.
It may appear “puritan” to those with high trait self control, but I don’t think it is; sure, some become rigidly righteous (puritanical), but they are the ones who “slip” and fall because they forget what brought them there.
This sadly corresponds to my impressions as a college teacher over more than thirty years. The students who have their acts together on graduation day are those who had their acts together on orientation day, four years earlier. The students who start out as screw-ups (habitually arriving late, misreading the syllabus, forgetting the assignments, forgetting their pens) rarely develop better habits over time. The heartbreaking thing is that many students in the latter group sincerely, even desperately wish to change. They attend the seminars on building better habits; they earnestly ask me for help, and I give them articles by people like Cal Newport and Oliver Burkeman and Walter Mischel. But these things almost never seem to do much good. I hope you'll keep exploring these questions, Michael. It will be interesting to see what you come up with.
I think, to Inzlichts point, it's not just self-control thats been abused by pop psychology but also things like focus and attention. There are a lot of piecemeal suggestions in these books and articles that rarely touch on how individuals need to learn to view themselves
"more to do with a fundamental shift in what they actually desire"
Free will is not an emergent property unequally distributed among individuals. There's no such thing. There is only a mass of convergent variables, some evolved, others environmental, which, when taken together, look, in aggregate, like more or less good or bad luck at any given moment - as viewed through the convergent variables of other conscious observers - from their moment in time.
Have to return to this--it's on my mind, especially after finishing "The fable of state self-control." I happen to possess a set of traits our culture would like to call ADHD. So did my dad, and so do my sister, my brother, my niece, and one of my daughters. It is now clear to me that therapy, meditation, disciplined attempts to somehow shift or change my personality...none of these things work for me. What does? An executive coach I meet with once per week. She has become a real source of conscientiousness. When we don't meet, I can sustain my new found skills for a while--it isn't like a light switch. But my life is way better when I have somebody to depend on in this way. This story isn't very satisfying, perhaps, and it can hardly register as a recommendation since an executive coach is really expensive and is not covered by insurance or any kind of institutional accommodation policy. But "the fable" leaves the what to do question hanging a little, and I thought this might be an interesting personal response. I haven't been able to find much success by trying to change myself. But I have found some success in changing my situation.
Your story is super interesting, Jim. I also agree with you that the paper leaves more questions and answers, and the question themselves are unsettling. Sometimes I can’t help but be nihilistic about the possibility of change, but then i *do* believe that change is possible, but very, very hard; and we don’t really know what the ingredients are yet. But I think even if we don’t know, we need to stress how really really hard it is. So I think the current narrative of just do this one trick to get on track is dangerous because the people who are conscientious already find the trick useful (even though they didn’t need it) and those who are not conscientious blame themselves when the trick eventually fails for them.
I've noticed trait-state conflation 16 years ago when looking into mindfulness!
mindfulness trait is gold. 0.54 correlated with well-being (eh, 0.2 after controlling for N. don't laugh).
but we don't have much decent studies about:
1. state mindfulness.
2. artificially inducing state mindfulness via meditation. ok. I've seen ~ studies of meditation with active controls.
I guess that you know. but another study showing that high trait self control people exert less self control effort was published like 8+ years ago with a similar theory as yours here
Doing your future self favors by eliminating temptation/choice altogether, is the key to delayed gratification. Rather than fighting with my desire to eat cookies at 3am, I don't bring cookies into the house in the first place. He said the morning after eating cookies at 3am. I gotta give all the extras away the next time I bake.
Sheer willpower inevitably leads to decision fatigue/paralysis.
A big theme in Sapolsky‘s Determined is how intolerable it is for people who are high in grit to just tell others to be more like them. Our grit level is just as much determined by factors beyond our control as any of our other traits. You might as well tell someone to grow a few inches.
I really appreciate the candor and thoughtfulness of this, Mickey.
The distinction you draw between effortful "state" self-control and "trait" self-control that is experienced as comparatively effortless reminds me a lot of Aristotle's distinction between "continence" (enkrateia) and virtue (aretê). Enkrateia is in-the-moment self-mastery, allowing a person to summon the strength required to resist pleasure and anger in order to act according to reason. In contrast, the person with aretê no longer requires in-the-moment self-mastery because they take pleasure in the right things, the things that conduce to their own flourishing. Cultivating aretê is extremely difficult, and hard work alone isn't sufficient. It requires a person to have felicitous circumstances, upbringing, and friends. This last part is a strain of Aristotle that many today find off-putting. We want to believe that those who put in enough effort and apply the right formula will meet with success. But Aristotle thinks that this is unrealistic. And maybe he's right.
I'll definitely be referencing this excellent piece!
As far as labels go (which is both far and not far at all), I stole one from my friend who has long been retired from a career in social work. I feel that "Self-management" better captures the process in question, and it abandons the hindsight, rhetorical rounding inherent in "self-control."
I also like to think of "Real(™️) Effort" as being relative to "Heuristical Freefall," the analog being "proper acceleration" relative to "gravitational freefall." In readily intuited cases, we know that hyperactive children and restless adults must exert effort to sit still. Conversely, a depressed adult may require enormous effort just to get out of bed, while potentially providing some inertia that might cascade with sequential barrier reframing ("one step at a time") and conquering.
Even in a more complicated case, we can nevertheless intuit how a "workaholic" can become so by following their "path of least effort/resistance." Laborious, physical effort can function as an escape from a chaotic and unforgiving home life, trading on what is familiar vs. what feels foreign, and what results in respectful treatment versus "thanklessness." Heuristical freefall would then be "burying one's head in work," with inertia provided both by the increasing familiarity/foreign divergence, and with anxious prospection of burned bridges, and rationalizations that they might "be better off without me."
Flat-footed attempts at self-control are unsurprisingly doomed to long-term failure if they don't create a sufficient cascade of change in some environment, be it internal narrative or external situation. States of reflection, ambivalence and dissonance may specialize in types of change on offer. Dissonance is hard to wrangle, but might be more likely to "stick" as an ongoing path of least resistance depending on how it resolves. Ambivalence might be bad at changing anything, but may provide a meaningful, nonperformative social signal when expressed. Reflection might provide us with a swiss-army knife for reframing. Even if such tools barely change the calculus of which paths our dissonances might follow, they may nevertheless provide real leverage at communal and species scales, especially if we figure out better ways to mutually calibrate and acclimate.
I think one takeaway I have from this is that we are better served - for better or worse - with solutions like lifelong Ozempic to maintain weight loss than deluding ourselves into thinking we will keep it off with careful eating and exercise. So my thoughts go to: what are Ozempic-esque solutions that we can implement that address our other problems?
Thanks for the thought provoking piece! I am wrestling with one question though.
From my understanding, your saying that the (now incorrect) idea that *conscientious/gritty/self-controlled* people exerted more momentary self-control led us to attribute some moral superiority to these people. But now that we know that momentary self-control isn't actually related to trait-self control, we can see that the high trait self-control people didn't deserve any extra moral praise—in reality, they just don't find it hard to avoid cookies, or go to the gym, or whatever. As a result, we can more readily attribute their achievements to some combination of genes and the environment.
But, does any of this really have any bearing on how we should think about these people? If trait self-control did lead to momentary self-control (like we used to think), these people's ability to exert will power would still ultimately be the result of their trait self control (which you attribute to genes and the environment).
One can argue whether the high self-control people deserve moral praise, but I guess I don't totally see why the link between trait and momentary self control is relevant.
This is a good point! No one should be praised for winning or losing a lottery. But, now we're inching really close to the millenia-old debate about the existence of free will, where I am on less solid ground! But you're point stands: we are not responsible for ouur personality.
Aside from all the em dashes, your past peddling wasn't nearly as bad as the pop psychologist who made their entire identity about one facet of self-improvement.
Your piece on the mechanisms of self-control is probably the most important one on this subject. It's the first time I've seen a psychologist really give credence to the fact that all of the states and traits we experience are not isolated but interrelated with one another.
You lost me at Roberts being brilliant.
I thought you’d like that
This is such an honest and generous piece, Micky. I’ve been circling a similar conclusion for years, from a different angle, namely that what we call “self-control” (or even “emotion regulation”) may really be a measure of access: to stable relationships, to reliable co-regulators, to predictable environments, to organizational scaffolding. From where I sit, the most “self-controlled” people are those who’ve constructed environments—especially social ones—that require less self-control. Bravo on this.
But how does one disentangle cause and effect?
I think of it as a skill problem more than a will power problem. So effective time management for example is a skill you can learn. It's hard at first, like anything you learn, but get's easier as you do it more. I see your point though--it starts to look a little like hair splitting--where does the "will" to learn the skill come from? Still, an effective emotion regulator tends to use their emotion regulation capabilities strategically. That is, they regulate their emotions in service to fashioning a life that demands less emotion regulation from them.
This is insteresting and makes me think again of my point about religion above. A lot of Christianity spaces that I have been involved in stress the importance of surrounding oneself with "Godly" people, listening to praise music etc. I can see how this quickly becomes a cult but it also helps build accountability if you surround yourself with a supportive community.
I would be interested to see how effective "finding God" is compared to therapy.
Has there been any research on this as it relates to religious folks? I have been a staunch atheist for my entire life, but have started to drift to Christianity. In that world, there are tons of people who have experienced transformative life changes. (And yes, I realize that is completely anecdotal.) However, I wonder if self-control supported by a community might lead to much higher happiness among the religious.
There is research on self-control in religious communities showing they generally have more trait self-control. Could be because they share habits and customs with each other that promote better behaviors.
Interesting. There are a lot of spaces where people share their testimonies, and most of these are incredibly traumatic (serious abuse, addiction, death of children). My guess is that most of these people are very low in trait self control. A lot of academics would be taken aback by their views but if you look past those there is a ton of gratitude (to God of course), rebuking of negative self talk (don't let Satan get into your head), and acceptance (God and his followers accept you). I don't study psychology (but am a STEM prof at an R1) so I am fairly ignorant of this.
All three of those things correlate with trait self-control. People stick to habits better when they can forgive themselves and don't ruminate on failure. Having a "higher purpose" makes goal achievement easier to follow when you're stressed.
But the real reason is likely more puritan values
It may appear “puritan” to those with high trait self control, but I don’t think it is; sure, some become rigidly righteous (puritanical), but they are the ones who “slip” and fall because they forget what brought them there.
This sadly corresponds to my impressions as a college teacher over more than thirty years. The students who have their acts together on graduation day are those who had their acts together on orientation day, four years earlier. The students who start out as screw-ups (habitually arriving late, misreading the syllabus, forgetting the assignments, forgetting their pens) rarely develop better habits over time. The heartbreaking thing is that many students in the latter group sincerely, even desperately wish to change. They attend the seminars on building better habits; they earnestly ask me for help, and I give them articles by people like Cal Newport and Oliver Burkeman and Walter Mischel. But these things almost never seem to do much good. I hope you'll keep exploring these questions, Michael. It will be interesting to see what you come up with.
I think, to Inzlichts point, it's not just self-control thats been abused by pop psychology but also things like focus and attention. There are a lot of piecemeal suggestions in these books and articles that rarely touch on how individuals need to learn to view themselves
Applaud you Michael.
"more to do with a fundamental shift in what they actually desire"
Free will is not an emergent property unequally distributed among individuals. There's no such thing. There is only a mass of convergent variables, some evolved, others environmental, which, when taken together, look, in aggregate, like more or less good or bad luck at any given moment - as viewed through the convergent variables of other conscious observers - from their moment in time.
Have to return to this--it's on my mind, especially after finishing "The fable of state self-control." I happen to possess a set of traits our culture would like to call ADHD. So did my dad, and so do my sister, my brother, my niece, and one of my daughters. It is now clear to me that therapy, meditation, disciplined attempts to somehow shift or change my personality...none of these things work for me. What does? An executive coach I meet with once per week. She has become a real source of conscientiousness. When we don't meet, I can sustain my new found skills for a while--it isn't like a light switch. But my life is way better when I have somebody to depend on in this way. This story isn't very satisfying, perhaps, and it can hardly register as a recommendation since an executive coach is really expensive and is not covered by insurance or any kind of institutional accommodation policy. But "the fable" leaves the what to do question hanging a little, and I thought this might be an interesting personal response. I haven't been able to find much success by trying to change myself. But I have found some success in changing my situation.
Your story is super interesting, Jim. I also agree with you that the paper leaves more questions and answers, and the question themselves are unsettling. Sometimes I can’t help but be nihilistic about the possibility of change, but then i *do* believe that change is possible, but very, very hard; and we don’t really know what the ingredients are yet. But I think even if we don’t know, we need to stress how really really hard it is. So I think the current narrative of just do this one trick to get on track is dangerous because the people who are conscientious already find the trick useful (even though they didn’t need it) and those who are not conscientious blame themselves when the trick eventually fails for them.
I've noticed trait-state conflation 16 years ago when looking into mindfulness!
mindfulness trait is gold. 0.54 correlated with well-being (eh, 0.2 after controlling for N. don't laugh).
but we don't have much decent studies about:
1. state mindfulness.
2. artificially inducing state mindfulness via meditation. ok. I've seen ~ studies of meditation with active controls.
I guess that you know. but another study showing that high trait self control people exert less self control effort was published like 8+ years ago with a similar theory as yours here
Doing your future self favors by eliminating temptation/choice altogether, is the key to delayed gratification. Rather than fighting with my desire to eat cookies at 3am, I don't bring cookies into the house in the first place. He said the morning after eating cookies at 3am. I gotta give all the extras away the next time I bake.
Sheer willpower inevitably leads to decision fatigue/paralysis.
A big theme in Sapolsky‘s Determined is how intolerable it is for people who are high in grit to just tell others to be more like them. Our grit level is just as much determined by factors beyond our control as any of our other traits. You might as well tell someone to grow a few inches.
I really appreciate the candor and thoughtfulness of this, Mickey.
The distinction you draw between effortful "state" self-control and "trait" self-control that is experienced as comparatively effortless reminds me a lot of Aristotle's distinction between "continence" (enkrateia) and virtue (aretê). Enkrateia is in-the-moment self-mastery, allowing a person to summon the strength required to resist pleasure and anger in order to act according to reason. In contrast, the person with aretê no longer requires in-the-moment self-mastery because they take pleasure in the right things, the things that conduce to their own flourishing. Cultivating aretê is extremely difficult, and hard work alone isn't sufficient. It requires a person to have felicitous circumstances, upbringing, and friends. This last part is a strain of Aristotle that many today find off-putting. We want to believe that those who put in enough effort and apply the right formula will meet with success. But Aristotle thinks that this is unrealistic. And maybe he's right.
I'll definitely be referencing this excellent piece!
As far as labels go (which is both far and not far at all), I stole one from my friend who has long been retired from a career in social work. I feel that "Self-management" better captures the process in question, and it abandons the hindsight, rhetorical rounding inherent in "self-control."
I also like to think of "Real(™️) Effort" as being relative to "Heuristical Freefall," the analog being "proper acceleration" relative to "gravitational freefall." In readily intuited cases, we know that hyperactive children and restless adults must exert effort to sit still. Conversely, a depressed adult may require enormous effort just to get out of bed, while potentially providing some inertia that might cascade with sequential barrier reframing ("one step at a time") and conquering.
Even in a more complicated case, we can nevertheless intuit how a "workaholic" can become so by following their "path of least effort/resistance." Laborious, physical effort can function as an escape from a chaotic and unforgiving home life, trading on what is familiar vs. what feels foreign, and what results in respectful treatment versus "thanklessness." Heuristical freefall would then be "burying one's head in work," with inertia provided both by the increasing familiarity/foreign divergence, and with anxious prospection of burned bridges, and rationalizations that they might "be better off without me."
Flat-footed attempts at self-control are unsurprisingly doomed to long-term failure if they don't create a sufficient cascade of change in some environment, be it internal narrative or external situation. States of reflection, ambivalence and dissonance may specialize in types of change on offer. Dissonance is hard to wrangle, but might be more likely to "stick" as an ongoing path of least resistance depending on how it resolves. Ambivalence might be bad at changing anything, but may provide a meaningful, nonperformative social signal when expressed. Reflection might provide us with a swiss-army knife for reframing. Even if such tools barely change the calculus of which paths our dissonances might follow, they may nevertheless provide real leverage at communal and species scales, especially if we figure out better ways to mutually calibrate and acclimate.
I think one takeaway I have from this is that we are better served - for better or worse - with solutions like lifelong Ozempic to maintain weight loss than deluding ourselves into thinking we will keep it off with careful eating and exercise. So my thoughts go to: what are Ozempic-esque solutions that we can implement that address our other problems?
Thanks for the thought provoking piece! I am wrestling with one question though.
From my understanding, your saying that the (now incorrect) idea that *conscientious/gritty/self-controlled* people exerted more momentary self-control led us to attribute some moral superiority to these people. But now that we know that momentary self-control isn't actually related to trait-self control, we can see that the high trait self-control people didn't deserve any extra moral praise—in reality, they just don't find it hard to avoid cookies, or go to the gym, or whatever. As a result, we can more readily attribute their achievements to some combination of genes and the environment.
But, does any of this really have any bearing on how we should think about these people? If trait self-control did lead to momentary self-control (like we used to think), these people's ability to exert will power would still ultimately be the result of their trait self control (which you attribute to genes and the environment).
One can argue whether the high self-control people deserve moral praise, but I guess I don't totally see why the link between trait and momentary self control is relevant.
This is a good point! No one should be praised for winning or losing a lottery. But, now we're inching really close to the millenia-old debate about the existence of free will, where I am on less solid ground! But you're point stands: we are not responsible for ouur personality.
What a relief
Now I can goof off with a clear conscience
And don't lecture me about it
It's my destiny
)
So much of this rang true - excellent :)
I guess you now have a new scaffold to work from - a better starting point
Aside from all the em dashes, your past peddling wasn't nearly as bad as the pop psychologist who made their entire identity about one facet of self-improvement.
Your piece on the mechanisms of self-control is probably the most important one on this subject. It's the first time I've seen a psychologist really give credence to the fact that all of the states and traits we experience are not isolated but interrelated with one another.
You saying I use em-dashes too much?! lol I try to mix them up with the occasional semi-colon too. Thanks for the kind words, Reed.
I’m scarred from my rampant chatgpt usage