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Counteractive Desire is an affectively charged motivation toward a certain object, person, or activity that is associated with pleasure or relief from displeasure.[4] Desires vary in strength and duration. A desire becomes a temptation, entering the area of self-control, if the behavior resulting from the desire conflicts with an individual’s values or other self-regulatory goals.[5][6] A limitation to research on desire is the issue of individuals desiring different things. New research looked at what people desire in real world settings. Over one week, 7,827 self-reports of desires were collected and indicated significant differences in desire frequency and strength, degree of conflict between desires and other goals, and the likelihood of resisting desire and success of the resistance. The most common and strongly experienced desires related to bodily needs like eating, drinking, and sleeping.[6][7] This study has many implications related to self-control and the everyday things that interfere with people’s ability to stay on task. Desires that conflict with overarching goals or values are known as temptations.[6][8] Self-control dilemmas occur when long-term goals and values clash with short-term temptations. Counteractive Self-Control Theory states that when presented with such a dilemma, we lessen the significance of the instant rewards while momentarily increasing the importance of our overall values. When asked to rate the perceived appeal of different snacks before making a decision, people valued health bars over chocolate bars. However, when asked to do the rankings after having chosen a snack, there was no significant difference of appeal. Further, when college students completed a questionnaire prior to their course registration deadline, they ranked leisure activities as less important and enjoyable than when they filled out the survey after the deadline passed. The stronger and more available the temptation is, the harsher the devaluation will be.[9][10] One of the most common self-control dilemmas involves the desire for unhealthy or unneeded food consumption versus the desire to maintain long-term health concerns. Experiment participants rated a new snack as significantly less healthy when it was described as very tasty compared to when they heard it was just slightly tasty. Without knowing anything else about a food, the mere suggestion of good taste triggers counteractive self-control and prompts us to devalue the temptation in the name of health. Further, when presented with the strong temptation of one large bowl of chips, participants both perceived the chips to be higher in calories and ate less of them than did participants who faced the weak temptation of three smaller chip bowls, even though both conditions represented the same amount of chips overall. Weak temptations are falsely perceived to be less unhealthy, so self-control is not triggered and desirable actions are more often engaged in, supporting the counteractive self-control theory.[11] Weak temptations present more of a challenge to overcome than strong temptations, because they appear less likely to compromise long-term values.[9][10] Satiation The decrease in liking of and desire for a substance following repeated consumption is known as satiation. Satiation rates when eating depend on interactions of trait self-control and healthiness of the food. After eating equal amounts of either clearly healthy (raisins and peanuts) or unhealthy (M&Ms and Skittles) snack foods, people who scored higher on trait self-control tests reported feeling significantly less desire to eat more of the unhealthy foods than they did the healthy foods. Those with low trait self-control satiated at the same pace regardless of health value. Further, when read a description emphasizing the sweet flavor of their snack, participants with higher trait self-control reported a decrease in desire faster than they did after hearing a description of the healthy benefits of their snack. Once again, those with low self-control satiated at the same rate regardless of health condition. Perceived unhealthiness of the food alone, regardless of actual health level, relates to faster satiation, but only for people with high trait self-control.[12] Construal levels Thinking that is characterized by high construals will view goals and values in a global, abstract sense, whereas low level construals emphasize concrete, definitive ideas and categorizations. Different construal levels determine our activation of self-control in response to temptations. One technique for inducing high-level construals is asking an individual a series of “why?” questions that will lead to increasingly abstracted responses, whereas low-level construals are induced by “how?” questions leading to increasingly concrete answers. When taking an Implicit Association Test, people with induced high-level construals are significantly faster at associating temptations (such as candy bars) with “bad,” and healthy choices (such as apples) with “good” than those in the low-level condition. Further, higher-level construals also show a significantly increased likelihood of choosing an apple for snack over a candy bar. Without any conscious or active self-control efforts, temptations can be dampened by merely inducing high-level construals. It is suggested that the abstraction of high-level construals reminds people of their overall, lifelong values, such as a healthy lifestyle, which deemphasizes the current tempting situation.[6][13] Human and non-human Human self-control research is typically modeled by using a token economy system. A token economy system is a behavioral program in which individuals in a group can earn tokens for a variety of desirable behaviors and can cash in the tokens for various backup reinforcers.[14] The difference in research methodologies with humans - using tokens or conditioned reinforcers versus non-humans using sub-primary forces suggested procedural artifacts as a possible suspect. One aspect of these procedural differences was the delay to the exchange period (Hyten et al. 1994).[15] Non-human subjects can and most likely would access their reinforcement immediately. The human subjects had to wait for an "exchange period" in which they could exchange their tokens for money, usually at the end of the experiment. When this was done with the non-human subjects, in the form of pigeons, they responded much like humans in that males showed much less control than females. (Jackson & Hackenberg 1996).[16] However, Logue, (1995), who is discussed more below, points out that in her study done on self-control it was male children who responded with less self-control than female children. She then states, that in adulthood, for the most part, the sexes equalize on their ability to exhibit self-control. This could imply a humans ability to exert more self-control as they mature and become aware of the consequences associated with impulsivity. This suggestion is further examined below. Most of the research in the field of self-control assumes that self-control is in general better than impulsiveness. Some developmental psychologists argue that this is normal, and people age from infants, who have no ability to think of the future, and hence no self-control or delayed gratification, to adults. As a result almost all research done on this topic is from this standpoint and very rarely is impulsiveness the more adaptive response in experimental design. More recently some in the field of developmental psychology have begun to think of self-control in a more complicated way that takes into account that sometimes impulsiveness is the more adaptive response. In their view, a normal individual should have the capacity to be either impulsive or controlled depending on which is the most adaptive. However, this is a recent shift in paradigm and there is little research conducted along these lines.[17] |
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