Tag: self-control

I would LOVE to write the following blog posts:

• Playing with Puppies Improves Learning!
• A Glass of Expensive Red Wine Each Day Makes You a Better Teacher
• Research shows: Reading a Good Book on your Couch is the Best Way to Plan Lessons

In other words: if I can say that “research supports a REALLY popular idea,” I make everyone happy.

Alas, my job is often to say the opposite. As in:

Here’s a really popular idea — an idea that sounds like common sense. And: this popular idea probably is not true.

So:

• No, Learning Styles are not a thing (athough it’s a popular theory, and seems really plausible)
• No, handwriting probably isn’t better than typing (although it’s a really popular claim, and — again — seems plausible)
• No, as far as I know, “brain foods” don’t exist (although … you know the rest)

Today I want to explore another “probably not true” idea — one that’s important, and a little bit tricky to understand. Here goes…

Self-Control, and Self-Control

Psychology researchers spend lots of time thinking about “self-control.” Sadly, this compound word has at least two different meanings.

• Meaning #1: Let’s say you’re the kind of person who — naturally, without really thinking about it, most of the time — resists the tempting thing and does what you ought to do.

We could say that “self-control” is a consistent personality trait you have.

• Meaning #2: Perhaps you’re standing in front of a plate of donuts. You say to yourself: “I’m SO HUNGRY, and the chocolate-y deliciousness looks amazing. BUT, I’m trying to get in shape, so I’ll take the fruit cup instead…”

We could say that you’re exhibiting “self-control” as a short-term behavior; you’re in a sort of state of self-control.

To distinguish between these two definitions, scholars write about

• Personality TRAIT self-control, and
• Short-term STATE self-control.

Although those two descriptors rhyme, they describe different kinds of self-control. One (“trait”) is a stable, ongoing, often unthinking self-control. The other (“state”) is short-term, contingent, self aware self-control.

We have at least three reasons to care about trait vs. state self-control.

1. TRAIT self-control correlates with all sorts of good outcomes. People with high trait self-control live longer, get better grades, and earn more money. They floss more regularly and probably are nicer to dogs. (I think I made up that last one, but it could be true.)
2. It just seems obvious: TRAIT self-control is (probably) just lots-n-lots of STATE self-control moments all strung together. As Michael Inzlicht and Brent W. Roberts write:
   • Conventional wisdom has it that people high in trait self-control reap all these benefits because they engage in more state self-control.
3. For this reason, we have an obvious, common sense path to follow. If we train students to develop moment-by-moment STATE self-control, the result will be stable TRAIT self-control. “Grit,” anyone? All that gritty training means that students will get the benefits listed above: grades and jobs and cavity-free teeth and the love of dogs.

But WAIT JUST A MINUTE…

What if that popular, commonsense hypothesis just isn’t true?

How Can That Be?

No, really: how could that commonsense hypothesis not be true? It’s just OBVIOUS that trait self-control results from moment-by-moment states of self-control. I mean: isn’t it?

In the brief (highly readable) article linked above, Inzlicht and Roberts give us plenty of reasons to doubt that conclusion.

1. People who score high on tests of trait self-control don’t spend much of their day exercising self-control. (See, for instance, this study.)
2. Over longer periods of time (months and years), training in state self-control doesn’t result in all those predicted positive outcomes. People go back to their initial patterns.
   • That is: I might be able to avoid donuts long enough to fit into my wedding suit — but in the months after my wedding, I’m likely to put those pounds back on again.

Inzlicht and Roberts share our puzzlement at this odd set of outcomes. (Their article literally includes the subheading: “What the hell is going on here?”)

They speculate, for instance, that the wording has got us confused. Just because we use the compound word “self-control” for both Trait X and State X, our labels don’t necessarily mean that the same mental process is happening below the label.

They propose this thought experiment: imagine that we had decided to use the word “planfulness” instead of “trait self-control.” Because the words are different, we might not end up so surprised that “planfulness” doesn’t result from “state self-control.”

Whatever the reason for our mistake, we should be prepared to acknowledge that our commonsense belief — “training students in state self-control enhances their trait self-control” — probably isn’t true.

Why The Distinction Matters

If we were confident that state-self-control training leads to trait self-control, then we should (almost certainly) take the time to enact that training. So Many Benefits!

But — at least so far — we shouldn’t be confident that frequent bouts of short-term (state) self-control ultimately train up long-term (trait) self-control.

If we mostly want to create trait self-control…well…we just don’t yet know how to do that. And we shouldn’t fool ourselves that that state self-control gets the job done.

(Research, in fact, offers this substantial benefit: it often gives us helpful correctives precisely to stop us from fooling ourselves.)

Now, we should also admit that we want students to practice short-term state self-control because that too is useful. State self-control:

• gets homework done (when students want to be doing something else), and
• helps students focus in class (ditto), and
• keeps students off Tik Tok (when they really want to be on Tik Tok).

And so forth. So I don’t think we give up on self-control all together.

But when we hear someone claim that “grit” can be trained…I think we should ask for good evidence that this claim is true.

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Inzlicht, M., & Roberts, B. W. (2024). The fable of state self-control. Current Opinion in Psychology, 101848.

Few psychology studies have created a bigger stir than Walter Mishel’s research into marshmallows.

Okay, he was really doing research into self-control.

But the marshmallow images were adorable: all those cute children desperately trying not to eat one marshmallow right now, so that they’d get two marshmallows in fifteen minutes.

Mishel’s studies got so much attention because they suggested that self-control correlates with SO MANY good things: high grades, better jobs, better health, etc.

And, they suggested that self-control is relatively stable. Some studies suggested that the marshmallow test, given at to a child at age five, could offer insights into their lives decades later.

Now, this research pool includes lots of complexity.

If, for instance, you saw Dr. Mishel at our 2015 conference in Boston, you know that trustworthiness matters.

Children waited for the 2nd marshmallow more often if they had reason to believe that the experimenter would actually follow through on their commitments. (Smart kids!)

So, do other factors matter?

The Power of Culture

A research team in Japan, led by Kaichi Yanaoka, wondered if cultural factors might shape self control.

So, for instance, in Japan waiting for food gets cultural priority — much more so than in the United States (where Mishel did his research).

But, Japanese culture does not emphasize waiting to open gifts as much as families in the US often do.

For instance, as Yanaoka explains in this study, Japanese parents often leave gifts for their children, with no cultural expectation that the children should wait to open them.

So, do these cultural differences shape performance on the marshmallow test?

Hypothesis. Data.

Based on these cultural norms, team Yanaoka hypothesized that children from the US would be better at waiting to open gifts, but worse at waiting to eat marshmallows, than their Japanese counterparts.

Because research requires precision, this study includes LOTS of details. (For instance, the researchers checked to be sure that the Japanese children had eaten marshmallows before, so they knew what temptation they were resisting.)

But the overall design was quite simple. In the US and Japan, children waited either to eat marshmallows, or to open gifts. Researchers followed a simple script:

Now it’s gift time! You have a choice for your gift today. You can either have this one gift to open right now, or if you wait for me to get more gifts from the other room, you can have two gifts to open instead. […]

Stay right there in that chair and I’ll leave this right here, and if you haven’t opened it […] before I get back, you can two to open instead.

Of course, for the children getting marshmallows, the script said “marshmallow” and “eat” rather than “gift” and “open.”

So, what did the researchers find?

Sure enough, cultural expectations shape self control.

In this case, Japanese children waited for the second marshmallow (median time: 15 minutes) much longer than US children (median time: 3.66 minutes).

But, US children waited to open the gift (median wait time: 14.54 minutes) longer than Japanese children (median time: 4.62 minutes).

When you look at the graphs, you’ll be impressed by the precise degree to which cultural expectations reverse wait times.

The Big Picture

So, what do we do with this information?

I think Yanaoka’s study offers us a specific reminder, and a general reminder.

Specifically, this study lets us know that self-control is NOT one monolithic, unchangeable thing.

Self-control varies across people and cultures. Yes, self-control matters; but, performance on one test — even a test with marshmallows — doesn’t tell us everything we need to know.

Generally, this study reminds us that culture always matters.

So, teachers should indeed welcome advice that experts offer us about — say — adolescence. But, that advice always includes cultural constraints. Adolescence, after all, differs in Denver, Kyoto, Sao Paolo, Reykjavik, and Gaborone.

So too cultural norms around stress. And feedback. And appropriate relationships between adults and students. Yes, and self-control.

No advice — not even research-based advice — gives us absolute guidance across all cultural norms.

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Yanaoka, K., Michaelson, L. E., Guild, R. M., Dostart, G., Yonehiro, J., Saito, S., & Munakata, Y. (2022). Cultures crossing: the power of habit in delaying gratification. Psychological Science, 33(7), 1172-1181.

When teachers seek out guidance to improve our teaching, we can turn to psychology and neuroscience research for inspiration.

When we just want to accomplish — at last!! — our New Year’s resolutions, can we find help here as well?

Turns out: we can!

Building Virtuous Habits

Several years ago, Charles Duhigg wrote a wonderful book called The Power of Habit.

We often think of habits as mere routines that dull our lives. But, if we can create good habits, we can be much more productive — in whatever way we define productive.

Duhigg created a handy flow chart to help explain the habit-building process: cues, rewards, and routines. There’s LOTS of science behind the recommendations, and you should look at his book if you want to know more.

If you just want to jump-start your new-year’s habit right away, you can check out that flow chart here.

The Self-Control Reservoir

To achieve our new year’s resolutions, we need to use self-control. So: what’s the best way to do that?

The first step, of course, is to understand: what kind of thing is self-control?

Back in the day, psychologists thought it was a personality trait. Some people are basically patient; some impatient. Some are basically conscientious. Others, not so much.

So, psychologists thought of self-control that way.

Over the years, Roy Baumeister has persuaded many folks to rethink that approach. In his view, self-control is more of a reservoir.

That is: I start with a certain amount of self-control. When I start using it — say, by resisting a second helping of cake — I drain my reservoir a bit.

If my host keeps offering me cake, and I keep saying “no thank you,” I drain it further and further. At some point, if the reservoir gets low enough, I won’t be able to maintain self-control.

Either I’ll accept that second slice, or I’ll say something rude about the badgering. After all, it took lots of self-control to maintain my temper.

We probably all start with somewhat different reservoirs of self-control. But, whatever reservoir we’ve got, it drains as we resist temptation. And then refills when temptation goes away.

Maintaining the Reservoir

If self-control is a reservoir, then we need to use it sparingly.

As Baumeister explains in his book Willpower, our typical New Year’s Resolution strategy runs directly counter to this understanding.

If I’ve got five resolutions, and I commit to all of them at once, I’m likely to drain the reservoir too much and too fast.

Instead, I should prioritize. I’ll pick the most important of the five, and use a bit of my self-control reservoir to building this new virtuous habit. (See Duhigg above.)

Only after I’ve created that new habit should I get to work on the second resolution. And, once that has become habit, I’ll turn my attention to the third.

By 1) spreading out this self-control effort, and 2) consciously building virtuous habits, I’ve got a much better chance of meeting my goals for this year.

And: no, thank you, no more cake for me.

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I should say that, as is so often the case, the research cited by Duhigg and Baumeister does include some controversies. Not everyone is persuaded. For the time being, however, I think these theories hold up well, and are the best we’ve got.

Whenever we put a lot of effort into a project, we really want to believe that it helped.

For that reason, we might somehow overlook the signs that our efforts fell short. Or, we might exaggerate skimpy data to suggest that we succeeded.

To overcome these all-too-human tendencies, we need well designed research to gather and analyze data. The only way to demonstrate success is to look hard for failure.

Taking It Up a Notch

To look especially hard for failure, we might look at two different kinds of evidence.

For example: does self-control training work?

To answer this question, let’s start by having 11-year-olds go through a self-control training program. At the same time, we’ll identify a control group that doesn’t get the training.

We can see if the training worked in two different ways.

First: several years later, have those children (now 25 years old!) provide information about their lives. Have they completed high school? College? Do they have a job? Have they been arrested? Do they frequently get in fights?

We can also have their parents fill out similar surveys. Oh, and we’ll have the control group fill out surveys as well.

Are the children who got self-control training likelier to have more education and a job? Less likely to harm themselves and others? If yes, those differences suggests that they used those self-control strategies well.

Second: we can look at their brains.

In particular, we have decades of research showing the importance of a particular brain region for self control.

Roughly speaking, we want self-control regions of the brain — the prefrontal cortex (PFC) — to communicate well with the emotional drivers of human behavior. Better PFC communication means better self-control.

That brain region is in the middle (medial) part of the underside (ventral) of the PFC. So, we call it the ventromedial prefrontal cortex: vm-PFC. (Important note: neuroscience is fantastically complicated. This summary is a very streamlined version of a wildly intricate web of brain connectivity.)

So, after we survey the students who went through self-control training, we can have them hang out in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) gizmo.

Our hypothesis: trained students should have better vm-PFC connectivity between the PFC and brain regions that process emotions.

Today’s Research

A team of 14 researchers have in fact done all that.

An organization in rural Georgia called “Strong African American Families” wanted to improve the prospects of children living in poverty. They developed a program that included training for parents, and for their 11-year-old children.

Parents learned about “emotional support, [and] high levels of monitoring and control.”

The children “focused on forming goals for the future and making plans to attain them.” They also learned about strategies to use when encountering racism.

14 years later (!!), the researchers gathered both kinds of data described above. That is: the children (now 25) filled out surveys. And the had an fMRI scan to measure vm-PFC connectivity.

Sure enough, both measures suggested that the training made a real difference.

That is: the children who had the training did better on measures of adult self-control. And, they had higher levels of vm-PFC connectivity.

Reasonable Conclusions

The program run by Strong African American Families was tailored to the circumstances of its participants. We should not, in other words, conclude that their program will work for everyone.

But: we have quite persuasive evidence that their program had the effects it intended — poor children grew up as more responsible adults than un-trained peers.

And: we have a good neurobiological explanation for the different behavior — their altered life trajectory included developmental differences in the vm-PFC.

All these findings give us hope that well designed self-control programs can indeed have the effect that we want them to. That’s not just wishful thinking.

Oscar Wilde famously said that he could resist everything but temptation.

This may be the only way that I’m a lot like Wilde. You, too, probably resemble this great Irish wit.

Misunderstanding Self-Control

Self-control seems like a straightforward concept.

In front of me is a slice of chocolate cake. Or pizza. Or the very latest tech gizmo.

I really want it. Like, a lot.

But I steel myself and, like Odysseus resisting the Sirens, I deny myself this treat. That’s self-control.

Much of the research into self-control resembles this scenario. Roy Baumeister, one of the best-known self-control researchers, often asked study participants to resist chocolate chip cookies.

If you can resist freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies…well…that’s self-control.

Clearly, if we want to helps our students with self-control, we should help them resist such temptations.

The Self-Control Paradox

Or, maybe not.

Maybe you, and me, and Oscar Wilde are all really bad at resisting temptation. Maybe that’s not how self-control works at all.

Instead, in one of the most interesting psychology studies I’ve read, several researchers come to a different conclusion.

People who successfully resist temptation don’t stare down the chocolate chip cookies and boldly exert their self-control.

Instead, they use their self-control to avoid temptation in the first place.

That’s right: effective self-control isn’t exactly self-control. Instead, people who score highest on measures of self-control use it to develop virtuous habits and avoid tempting situations.

The reason I’m good at, say, staying on my diet is NOT that I resist cupcakes.

Instead, I’m good at dieting because a) I have gotten in the habit of making a salad, and b) my lunchtime walk never approaches the pizza joint.

I never have to resist temptation, because I use self-control to avoid temptation in the first place.

Odysseus, Reconsidered

Come to think of it: Odysseus didn’t use his self-control to resist the Sirens. He was, after all, tied to the mast at the time he sailed past them.

Instead, he used his self-control to prepare for temptation. Because he knew he couldn’t resist it, he made a plan to ensure the temptation wouldn’t lead him astray.

If we want our students to improve their executive functioning, if we want them to get better at self-control, then we should not focus on resisting temptation.

Instead, we should focus on avoiding temptation.

Resistance might be futile. But: the self-control paradox suggests we can bypass resistance altogether.