Situational Strategies for Self-Control

By Angela L. Duckworth, T. Gendler, James J. Gross. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016

558 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Exercising self-control is often difficult, whether declining a drink in order to drive home safely, passing on the chocolate cake to stay on a diet, or ignoring text messages to finish reading an important paper. But enacting self-control is not always difficult, particularly when it takes the form of proactively choosing or changing situations in ways that weaken undesirable impulses or potentiate desirable ones. Examples of situational self-control include the partygoer who chooses a seat far from where drinks are being poured, the dieter who asks the waiter not to bring around the dessert cart, and the student who goes to the library without a cell phone. Using the process model of self-control, we argue that the full range of self-control strategies can be organized by considering the timeline of the developing tempting impulse. Because impulses tend to grow stronger over time, situational self-control strategies—which can nip a tempting impulse in the bud—may be especially effective in preventing undesirable action. Ironically, we may underappreciate situational self-control for the same reason it is so effective—namely, that by manipulating our circumstances to advantage, we are often able to minimize the in-the-moment experience of intrapsychic struggle typically associated with exercising self-control.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97a233b98c0f50e1310462079fc7b8ea23595b98

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In General Decision Sciences

Citations in the corpus

Habit formation and change (2018, background): “High trait self-control may thus reﬂect a kind of situational strategy involving arranging environmental cues to promote beneﬁcial habit formation [33].”
Which Healthy Eating Nudges Work Best? A Meta-Analysis of Field Experiments (2018, background): “not looking at the food, thinking about its nutrition content) or affective strategies such as relying on willpower (Duckworth et al. 2016; Wansink and Chandon 2014).”