Yet, I ask you. Have these people no shame? I write a blog on self-control! Self-control, people! I recognize that I’m optimistic, but I don’t think my expectation that students write their own darn research papers is out of line. I mean, if you’re going to read a blog about self-control, you’d like to think that you’d be inspired enough to write your own papers without cheating. I’m discouraged by students who actually use these services, but even more disgusted by people who make money by promoting unvirtuous behavior. Why don’t you suggest that students use lines from this post for their papers? (In case you’re wondering, if you do, I’ll spam your comments, too.)

For people who are checking in here, I thought I’d give another description of the research and a few cents worth of thoughts that didn’t make it into the press release. Basically, the paper reports 5 studies that show that thinking about other people with good self-control makes you better at self-control yourself. The reverse is also true, so that if you’re thinking about or hanging out with people who are bad at self-control, you get worse yourself. In my opinion, the best study in the paper reports a study where we had participants watch other participants eat cookies or carrots. The people who watched carrots did better on a self-control task that was unrelated to dieting. See below for some answers to frequently asked questions about this research.

Is this just another study that tells us that behaviors spread in social networks?

Not exactly. These studies are experiments. We used a control condition and randomly assigned people to conditions. This means we can show that social influences actually caused the behaviors we measured. Also, in our studies, we got these effects even when people were watching strangers (as in the cookie/carrot study described above). As long as the person seemed to have self-control, the participants benefited from watching them.

Research on social networks focuses more on how we tend to select people who are like us. But in this study, we manipulated the social influences people were thinking about, and therefore can make some stronger conclusions.

Is this just peer pressure?

Maybe, but probably not. Peer pressure is a very active force. Peers do things, say things, and otherwise make people think that their behaviors will affect their acceptance by the peers. In our studies, no peers were actually present and performance on the self-control tasks was only observed by the experimenters, if it was observed by anyone. My guess is that in everyday life, peer pressure and the less direct pressure we investigated in our studies would combine to influence behavior.

An important thing to consider about self-control is that whether or not a behavior requires self-control is the situation. Opening your fridge at 7 am and deciding not to drink a beer doesn’t take self-control for most people. Opening your fridge at 7 pm and deciding not to drink that same beer is a different story, especially at the end of a long day or if you have work left to be done that night. What is self-control also depends on the person. Some people love running. As in, they actually like running. Going for a Saturday morning run for these people might not take self-control where for the rest of us, running anytime takes self-control.

One important thing that Rick Hoyle and I assert about self-control is that it is always conscious. That is, we always know when we’re exerting self-control. It doesn’t happen on accident. No one accidentally turns down a cookie they really want or starts an exercise program they don’t want to do without realizing they’ve done so. This is a key characteristic that distinguishes self-control from self-regulation. In social psychology, these terms are often viewed as interchangeable. They are very similar- but they are not the same thing. Self-regulation is the general process by which we manage our identity, goals, behaviors, feelings, and thoughts. We self-regulate all the time. Most of the time we’re self-regulating, we’re not even aware that we’re doing it. But self-control on the other hand, is a different story. When is the last time you’ve exerted self-control without knowing you were doing it? It doesn’t happen! By definition, self-control is something that only comes into play when you are aware that you want to be doing something, anything, other than what you are doing. If you set a goal to lose weight, that’s self-regulation. Actually going through the acts of dieting, exercising, and drinking water when you don’t want to, that’s self-control. My research actually investigates how both self-regulation and self-control affect our behaviors, relationships and health. As best as I can, I’ll work on making this distinction make more sense.

My question for you is one I already posed in this post: When is the last time you exerted self-control? What did you want to do and what did you do instead?

I spend most of my workdays trying not to eat french fries and thinking about issues such as these. My hope with this blog is to translate some of what I and my colleagues in academia do into a usable, understandable resource for people who like to think about issues such as these and for people who want to improve their lives.

The reality is, pretty much every problem that we face as individuals, communities, and societies comes down to issues of self-control. From health problems to global economic crises, improving self-control can improve the way we live our lives and interact with each other. Please sign in, leave a comment, share your ideas, or ask questions. Let’s work together to solve the problems of the world, one french fry at a time.