Notes on Self Control

post by David Gross (David_Gross) · 2020-11-09T21:27:57.967Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

  What is self control?
    Self control and cognitive control
  How do we lose self control, and how can we strengthen it?
    Disadvantages of self-control
  Addiction and other edge cases
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This post examines the virtue of self control. It is meant mostly as a summary of what others have learned about this virtue, rather than as me expressing my own opinions about it, though I’ve been selective about what I found interesting or credible, according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert on the topic, but as someone who wants to learn more about it. I hope it will be helpful to people who want to know more about this virtue and how to nurture it.

What is self control?

In another post, I cover the virtue of temperance [LW · GW], which involves having a well-chosen and well-regulated set of desires. Self control is related but different. When an intemperate person gives into an unwise desire, they do so because they don’t see anything wrong with it; when a person without self control does so, they do so in spite of knowing it’s wrong. Intemperance is a misuse of the will; lack of self control is a malfunction of the will. Aristotle suggested this analogy: The intemperate person is like a city with bad laws; the person without self control is like a city that has good laws on the books but that doesn’t enforce them.^[1]

Some philosophers have insisted that lack of self control does not really exist distinct from intemperance.^[2] In their view, the person without self control does not act contrary to their own temperate judgement, but they merely reveal their real intemperate judgement at the last minute, having only deceived themselves into believing that they had good temperate judgement.

While temperance mostly has to do with our desires, self-control also comes into play in how we regulate our responses to other things, such as anger. (Lack of self control in the face of fear falls under the domain of courage [LW · GW]. Sometimes people split off response to anger under a distinct virtue like “good temper [LW · GW].”)

Often, particularly in older writing on the subject, you will see the word “continence” used for this virtue, but nowadays that word has become so linked to advertising for adult diapers that it’s less common. “Willpower” is another common synonym. “Akrasia [? · GW]” (or “incontinence”) is sometimes used for the lack of self-control.

Self control and cognitive control

Cognitive control is a phenomenon studied in neuroscience and psychology (sometimes under the “executive functioning” umbrella). It is (to oversimplify) the process by which brains select which stimuli to process and which to ignore.

Chandra Sripada believes we can model self control as a temporally-extended sequence of cognitive control actions, and can then we use the insights from the study of cognitive control to improve our understanding of how self control takes place.^[3] In Sripada’s theory, the sorts of thing that challenge self control, such as emotions or cravings, present themselves in the nervous system as a series of cognitive control challenges: brief “response pulses” which, if nothing interferes, tend to evoke predictable changes in “action selection, attention, belief, evaluation, memory, and thought.”

Cognitive control mechanisms might for example inhibit the response ordinarily evoked by the pulse, or might block that response with an equal and opposite response, or might themselves evoke an incompatible response, or might make the precursors of the response pulse less salient to the pulse-producing mechanism so that the mechanism stops producing pulses. There might need to be a variety of such mechanisms to address the variety of changes a particular pulse evokes (e.g. one mechanism to address the change in beliefs, another to address the change in attention, and so forth).

Cognitive control mechanisms that are more-or-less intentional, deliberate, and conscious can in this way prevent the operation of response pulses that are more automatic, habitual, and subconscious.

The mechanisms that produce response pulses seem, from Sripada’s description, to be simpler and more primitive than those that produce cognitive control. They are triggered automatically, by what is immediately available to them, in an inflexible way: (“That word is ‘purple’!”) Cognitive control mechanisms have to be rallied into action and allocated additional resources, and they are more flexible in their operation, having access to our conscious intentions and to the context of working memory: (“But remember, we have chosen to undertake an unusual task; that word may be ‘purple’ but that word is green, so override what you were about to say.”)

Sripada concludes that:

Exercises of self-control consist of skilled sequences of cognitive control aimed at regulating the temporally-extended streams of response pulses associated with an emotion-type state [e.g. emotions, cravings, impulses], in order to prevent the emotion-type state from being effective in action.

How do we lose self control, and how can we strengthen it?

How is it that you can know the right thing to do, resolve [LW · GW] to do that thing, know that you will regret not doing that thing, and yet still screw up at the last minute by choosing something else?

Part of the problem seems to be that it is easy to resolve to resist temptation when the tempting thing is at a distance and the tempting impulse is mostly theoretical. As the tempting thing becomes nearer and the tempting impulse more vivid, the earlier resolve is not strong enough to hold the fort. This may mean that insights about near and far mode thinking [? · GW] will be important in understanding self-control: If you make your resolutions in far mode, but ultimately make your choices in near mode, they may get out of sync. This may also suggest that lack of self control is a sort of cognitive bias concerning time discounting.

A distorted self image may also be to blame: If you think of yourself as the sort of person who can easily overcome temptation (e.g. to finish off a pint of Ben & Jerry’s) when in fact you are not, and you fail to update your self image (due to shame, vanity, etc.) when you inhale that Cherry Garcia in toto, you will not take steps to improve your self control or to reduce the temptation in your environment. Better self-awareness and humility [? · GW] may come to the assistance of self-control in such a case.

Aside from incontinent lack of self-control, there is also a failure mode in which the pendulum swings too far the other way: pig-headed stubbornness, in which you stick with your resolutions even when the underlying facts change or when it turns out your resolutions were faulty. A fetish for being “decisive” can lead you to stick with bad decisions when a wiser person would have been more flexible.

In addition to prompting unwise action, lack of self-control can also lead to unwise inaction, for example procrastination [LW · GW] in which you commit to some wise course of action but then dawdle along doing something else instead, tempted by mere inertia or laziness.

Lack of self-control might be harder to fix than intemperance. With the intemperate person, you have the hope of persuading them that their desires are poorly chosen; with the incontinent person, they’ve already been persuaded but it doesn’t seem to help matters any. On the other hand, the intemperate person usually has no regrets about their unwise course of action, while the incontinent person does, so at least the incontinent person has a motive to get better.

Aristotle, who considered self control extensively in book Ⅶ of his Nicomachean Ethics, compared it with the virtue of endurance.^[4] Self-control is resisting the temptation of things that seem immediately appealing; endurance is resisting the dissuasion of things that seem immediately uncomfortable. It can be difficult to distinguish them in some cases: is the regretful alcoholic reaching for the bottle because they cannot resist the temptation of a pleasing drink, or because they cannot endure the discomfort of withdrawal?

Christians have documented the struggle with akrasia in terms of a battle between the spirit which is inclined to God and the flesh which is mired in sin.^[5] Jesus, as his crucifixion approached, felt himself recoil from his chosen task, and noticed “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”^[6] Paul, in his letter to the Romans, complained, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.… I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability.”^[7] And St. Augustine amusingly wrote in his Confessions, “As a youth I prayed, ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not right away.’ ”^[8]

Good nutrition (sufficient blood glucose in particular), sufficient sleep, and good health [LW · GW] make it easier to exercise self control. Some drugs (e.g. alcohol) make self control more difficult or at any rate less likely.

Peer pressure is notoriously erosive of self-control. For this reason, strengthening ones assertiveness and self-confidence may be an important factor in bolstering self-control. On the other hand, peers who exercise self-control can perhaps inspire you to greater self control.^[9]

Sexual arousal is so notoriously effective at diminishing self control that it seems we have evolved to implement the heuristic that it is far better to have ill-considered sex with disastrous consequences than to miss a chance to do the nasty [LW · GW].

There is some evidence that self control is a resource that can be depleted with use and that takes time to recharge.^[10] So for example if you have to use self control at task A, and then at task B, you will have a harder time than if you were just asked to use self control for task B. And yet, some evidence suggests that “it does appear possible to improve self-regulation via regular exercise…  [I]mproving self-regulation operates by increasing a general core capacity. That is, as the person performs exercises to improve self-regulation in one sphere, he or she becomes better at self-regulating in other spheres.”^[11]

Mindfulness meditation may help to replenish self control reservoirs, at least in the short term.^[12]

The Stanford marshmallow experiment found a strong correlation between self-control exhibited by young children and the quality of their later life outcomes on a variety of measures (however attempts to replicate this experiment have struggled to do so^[13]). “Impulsivity” and “poor impulse control” are subjects of psychological investigation, and some interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy have shown some promise in improving impulse control.

Strengthening the quasi-virtue of shame [LW · GW] may be a good way of making the negative consequences of incontinence more visceral so as to counter the temptation.

Rules of thumb like “don’t respond to an email while you’re angry” or “count to ten before you decide” can help give you the space you need to remember your long-term goals in the face of short-term temptations. Another example that a substance abuse counselor told me about is called “play the tape forward”—envision the far-term consequences of the short-term temptation you are contemplating giving in to, so as to make those consequences more vivid, in the hopes that they will weigh more heavily against the temptation.

You might try to anticipate a future situation in which temptation will be strongest, so that you can practice in your imagination confronting and overcoming that temptation. That way at least the temptation will lose the advantage of taking you by surprise.

It is difficult to control what you are not aware of, so in some cases it can be helpful to increase your awareness of what you are trying to control by means of deliberate monitoring (carefully documenting e.g. how much money you spend and on what, how much you eat and of what, etc. depending on what you are trying to develop control over).

One school of thought holds that self-control is less an internal skill or trait like “willpower” and more a matter of strategically adjusting one’s environment to add friction to harmful temptations in order to make them less tempting.^[14] One way to do this is, when you commit to do the right thing, to establish an automatic penalty for later doing the wrong thing: the Beeminder app is one attempt to facilitate this process. B.F. Skinner created a catalog of environmental interventions to influence self-control.^[15]

• See also: How You Can Gain Self Control Without Self Control [LW · GW] (Spencer Greenberg)

Disadvantages of self-control

Self-control has obvious advantages, but may also have some subtle disadvantages.^[16] People who are thought to exhibit extraordinary self-control may appear to others to be “robotic” and less “warm” in a way that discourages others from socializing with them.^[17] Behaving in an impulsive or even foolish way—devil may care—can also be a display of power or status. It signals that you are impervious to consequences. Someone who exhibits self-control on the other hand may thereby suggest that they feel fragile or insecure: they have to keep a tight grip. It may be a good idea for this reason to pair self-control with ostentatiously letting yourself go when the occasion for uninhibited action arises.

People with good self-control can also be more severe in judging the minor self-control related foibles in people without it.^[18]

Over time, people tend to cast a rosy glow of possibility over the dares they didn’t take and may come to regret not having indulged temptation more often. People tend to regret their near-past failures to resist temptation but also to regret their farther-past restraint.^[19] In other words: the same person will think “I wish I had worked on my term paper last weekend instead of going skiing” and, several years later, “I wish I hadn't been such a bookworm in college.”

Addiction and other edge cases

Addiction is either a particularly difficult example of lack of self-control or something that goes beyond mere lack of self control, depending on who you ask. Because the object of addiction comes packaged with strong reinforcing mechanisms (that only get stronger as dependence develops), it is hard to interrupt this with a will that lacks such enticements.

Addicts have painful insight into akrasia: solemn vows of sobriety at dawn that are broken by nightfall; a multitude of attempts to supplement self-control with techniques like “I will stop after two” or “beer and wine only this time” or what-have-you.

The first step in “Twelve-Step” programs is to admit that you are powerless over the object of addiction, that your self control has met its match. There is something of a paradox to this, in that you begin the path of controlling your addiction by surrendering and acknowledging that your will is weaker than it is. In Alcoholics Anonymous, the addict gives up on trying to conquer alcohol with self control, and moves on to other strategies (e.g. peer support, a “higher power”, the steps).

Other examples of people whose actions don’t seem to align with their well-considered decisions are people with obsessive-compulsive disorders, Tourette syndrome, and things of that nature. While these seem to be pretty far afield from the usual lack of self-control that people complain about, it’s possible that things we learn about how to treat and control such disorders might be useful in more mundane cases.

1. ^{^}

   Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Ⅶ.10

   Apparently also some disciplines use the term “synchronic self control” to refer to what I’m calling self control, and “diachronic self control” to refer to what I’m calling temperance.

2. ^{^}

   Sarah Stroud & Larisa Svirsky “Weakness of Will” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2019)

3. ^{^}

   Chandra Sripada “The atoms of self-control” Noûs 15 May 2020

4. ^{^}

   Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Ⅶ.7

5. ^{^}

   @David Hugh-Jones [LW · GW] “Self-Control Secrets of the Puritan Masters” [LW · GW] Wyclif’s Dust 24 Sept. 2022

6. ^{^}

   Matthew 26:40-43: “Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, ‘So, could you not stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ Again he went away for the second time and prayed, ‘My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.’ Again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy.”

7. ^{^}

   Romans 7:14-20: “For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.”

8. ^{^}

   Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, book Ⅷ, chapter 7

9. ^{^}

   @Psy-Kosh [LW · GW] “Self control may be contagious” [LW · GW] LessWrong 14 Jan. 2010

10. ^{^}

    R.F. Baumeister, M. Gailliot, C.N. DeWall, 7 M. Oaten “Self-Regulation and Personality” Journal of Personality (2006) pp. 1775–1779

    However: @Kaj_Sotala [LW · GW] “[link] Why Self-Control Seems (but may not be) Limited” [LW · GW] LessWrong 20 Jan. 2014

11. ^{^}

    Baumeister et al. (2006) op. cit., pp. 1779–1786

12. ^{^}

    M. Friese, C. Messner, & Y. Schaffner, “Mindfulness meditation counteracts self-control depletion” Consciousness and Cognition (June 2012)

13. ^{^}

    J.F. Sperber, et al. “Delay of gratification and adult outcomes: The Marshmallow Test does not reliably predict adult functioning” Child Development 2024

14. ^{^}

    @joaolkf [LW · GW] “[link] Lectures on Self-Control and the myth of Willpower” [LW · GW] LessWrong 13 Mar. 2015

15. ^{^}

    B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (1953), chapter ⅩⅤ

16. ^{^}

    Samantha Lapka & Franki Kung “Wish you had more self-control? You should hear the downsides” Psyche 14 March 2023

17. ^{^}

    Samantha P. Lapka, et al. “Determined yet dehumanized: People higher in self-control are seen as more robotic.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 14.2 (2023)

18. ^{^}

    Sarah C.E. Stanton & Eli J. Finkel “Too tired to take offense: When depletion promotes forgiveness” Journal of Experiemental Social Psychology (2012)

19. ^{^}

    Ran Kivetz & Anat Keinan “Repenting Hyperopia: An Analysis of Self-Control Regrets” Journal of Consumer Research 33 (2006)

20. ^{^}

    FWIW “There is substantial evidence from neuroimaging, animal work, and lesion studies that [this mechanism is] likely located in the anterior cingulate cortex…” (Sripada op. cit.)

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