Showing papers by "Roy F. Baumeister published in 2015"

Out of Control Identifying the Role of Self-Control Strength in Family Violence

Abstract: Family violence is common and brings tremendous costs to individuals, relationships, and society. Victims are vulnerable to negative outcomes across a host of dimensions, including cognitive performance, impulse control, emotion regulation, and physical health. Links between family violence and various problems have been established, yet the specific processes underlying these associations are poorly understood, resulting in the stunted development of effective interventions. This article addresses two key questions: How and why does family violence cause these myriad problems? The self-control strength model of family violence provides novel answers. The model integrates components of existing theories, extending them by pinpointing self-control strength as an explanatory and predictive factor, and can serve as a framework for interventions.

Childhood Self-Control and Unemployment Throughout the Life Span: Evidence From Two British Cohort Studies

Abstract: The capacity for self-control may underlie successful labor-force entry and job retention, particularly in times of economic uncertainty. Analyzing unemployment data from two nationally representative British cohorts (N = 16,780), we found that low self-control in childhood was associated with the emergence and persistence of unemployment across four decades. On average, a 1-SD increase in self-control was associated with a reduction in the probability of unemployment of 1.4 percentage points after adjustment for intelligence, social class, and gender. From labor-market entry to middle age, individuals with low self-control experienced 1.6 times as many months of unemployment as those with high self-control. Analysis of monthly unemployment data before and during the 1980s recession showed that individuals with low self-control experienced the greatest increases in unemployment during the recession. Our results underscore the critical role of self-control in shaping life-span trajectories of occupational success and in affecting how macroeconomic conditions affect unemployment levels in the population.

Ego Depletion in Color Priming Research: Self-Control Strength Moderates the Detrimental Effect of Red on Cognitive Test Performance

Abstract: Colors have been found to affect psychological functioning. Empirical evidence suggests that, in test situations, brief perceptions of the color red or even the word "red" printed in black ink prime implicit anxious responses and consequently impair cognitive performance. However, we propose that this red effect depends on people's momentary capacity to exert control over their prepotent responses (i.e., self-control). In three experiments (Ns = 66, 78, and 130), first participants' self-control strength was manipulated. Participants were then primed with the color or word red versus gray prior to completing an arithmetic test or an intelligence test. As expected, self-control strength moderated the red effect. While red had a detrimental effect on performance of participants with depleted self-control strength (ego depletion), it did not affect performance of participants with intact self-control strength. We discuss implications of the present findings within the current debate on the robustness of priming results.

The Making of Might-Have-Beens: Effects of Free Will Belief on Counterfactual Thinking

Abstract: Counterfactual thoughts are based on the assumption that one situation could result in multiple possible outcomes. This assumption underlies most theories of free will and contradicts deterministic views that there is only one possible outcome of any situation. Three studies tested the hypothesis that stronger belief in free will would lead to more counterfactual thinking. Experimental manipulations (Studies 1-2) and a measure (Studies 3-4) of belief in free will were linked to increased counterfactual thinking in response to autobiographical (Studies 1, 3, and 4) and hypothetical (Study 2) events. Belief in free will also predicted the kind of counterfactuals generated. Belief in free will was associated with an increase in the generation of self and upward counterfactuals, which have been shown to be particularly useful for learning. These findings fit the view that belief in free will is promoted by societies because it facilitates learning and culturally valued change.

Choking Under Social Pressure Social Monitoring Among the Lonely

Abstract: Lonely individuals may decode social cues well but have difficulty putting such skills to use precisely when they need them—in social situations. In four studies, we examined whether lonely people choke under social pressure by asking participants to complete social sensitivity tasks framed as diagnostic of social skills or nonsocial skills. Across studies, lonely participants performed worse than nonlonely participants on social sensitivity tasks framed as tests of social aptitude, but they performed just as well or better than the nonlonely when the same tasks were framed as tests of academic aptitude. Mediational analyses in Study 3 and misattribution effects in Study 4 indicate that anxiety plays an important role in this choking effect. This research suggests that lonely individuals may not need to acquire social skills to escape loneliness; instead, they must learn to cope with performance anxiety in interpersonal interactions.

Role of self-control failure in immoral and unethical actions

Abstract: Moral virtue depends on self-control to override immoral impulses, so self-control failure can impair moral action. We discuss three components of self-control and how failure of any component can affect moral behavior. Lack of clear standards and lack of commitment to standards deprives the individual of clear inner guidance. Failure to monitor one's actions, as when self-awareness is low such as due to emotion or alcohol, deprives the individual of the ability to know whether behavior conforms to moral standards. Ego depletion signifies inadequate willpower to make oneself do what is right. Evidence supports these hypotheses but more is needed.

Illusions of Learning: Irrelevant Emotions Inflate Judgments of Learning

Abstract: People use assessments of how much they have learned to choose and recommend instructors, seminars, and weekend trips. How do people assess how much they have learned? Recent theorizing has depicted emotion as a cue for learning, and so people may be misled by recent emotional states to infer that they have learned more than they actually have. Four studies showed that people associated emotion with learning and believed, often falsely, that they learned more when in an emotional than unemotional state. Factual lessons were coupled with manipulations of arbitrary, irrelevant emotional states. Participants rated that they learned more after an emotion had been induced than in emotionally neutral control conditions. These differences remained significant after controlling for actual learning as measured by objective tests, which was unaffected by emotion. This illusion of learning caused by emotion was robust with respect to changes of procedure and sample, including whether the emotion came before or after the information to be learned. Alternative explanations were ruled out, including that emotion would intensify ratings generally, that emotion would make incoming information seem particularly personally relevant, that emotion increased engagement in the research, and that illusory learning would depend on retrospective exaggeration of one’s prior ignorance. Because irrelevant emotions can increase people’s judgments that they have learned something, incidental emotional experiences could increase a person’s likelihood of deciding to take another class with a particular instructor, to sign up for another leadership seminar, or to engage in a risky (but emotion-filled) excursion. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Resource‐based interventions in the workplace: Integration, commentary, and recommendations

Abstract: We discuss this issue's six articles regarding resource-based interventions in the workplace Despite some encouraging findings, overall these articles provide weak and inconsistent support for the view that such interventions yield benefits In particular, the documented benefits are mostly confined to self-reports and lack objective evidence Future studies of such interventions might find better results by trying different research methods (as some articles have proposed) and by trying different interventions Tailoring interventions to target populations and focusing emphasis on particular resources may improve outcomes

Self-Regulatory Strength and Mindfulness

Abstract: The authors review evidence for the strength model of self-regulation (self-control), and discuss relations between mindfulness and self-regulation. The strength model of self-control suggests that exerting self-control may consume some limited resource and reduce the amount of strength available for subsequent self-control tasks. Another key feature of the strength model of self-control suggests that regular exercise can, over time, increase the strength or ability of self-control. In this way, self-control is said to resemble a muscle. Mindfulness and self-regulation appear to have some features in common. Increased mindfulness and increased self-regulatory ability both offer substantial benefits for living a healthy and successful life across several domains. Furthermore, exercises used to increase mindfulness are similar to exercises used to increase self-control. It seems likely, then, that mindfulness and self-control ability have a bidirectional relationship.

Desire and desire regulation

Abstract: A good deal of people’s waking time is, more or less directly, spent thinking about and dealing with desire. There is no question that desires are often benign, functional, and evolutionary adaptive for the individual. However, there are cases where desire stands in conflict with important (selfregulatory) goals or (moral) values. Prime examples include the exsmoker who, upon seeing other people smoke, reexperiences a strong craving for a cigarette despite her intention to never smoke again, or two colleagues at work who cannot help feeling sexually attracted to each other despite the fact that one of them has made public vows of faith on the not-so-long-ago wedding day. And sometimes, much more trivially, the time or opportunity to fulfill a certain desire is just not “right,” such as when someone feels a strong need to pee on a long bus ride and, alas, the toilet is broken. There are both individual and societal reasons for why the capacity for desire regulation is such a highly important aspect of everyday functioning. The primary questions that we seek to answer in this chapter are: What is desire? When does it become problematic? How does desire regulation work? When and why can it go wrong? And how can it be improved? To approach issues of desire regulation, we will draw both on the literature of selfcontrol and emotion regulation. The selfcontrol literature is central because desires are driving forces that sometimes need to be held in check through inhibition or overriding. Selfcontrol research has yielded a wealth of insights on how such inhibitory processes may work and when they may be disturbed. More recently, the field has begun to scrutinize anticipatory, preventive strategies through which people actively set the stage for later selfcontrol successes (Fujita, 2011; C H A P T E R 3

Conscious thoughts and the causation of behavior

Abstract: Conscious experience is a defining feature of the human condition. As far as is known, no other creature has inner experience as rich and complex as does humankind. Subjective richness does not entail causal efficacy, however. In this chapter, we examine the surprisingly contentious issue of whether conscious thoughts do in fact exert a causal influence on behavior. We conclude that they do, though perhaps not in the way that many have surmised. We then consider the issue of just how conscious thoughts cause behavior. In recent decades, expert opinion has fluctuated wildly as to whether conscious thoughts exert direct or even indirect control over behavior. Some have suggested that even if people can control behavior consciously, it would be unwise to do so, because conscious thought is prone to bias and distortion, whereas the unconscious would be wiser (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006). Some researchers have advocated making decisions on the basis of gut feelings and intuitive reactions rather than conscious thought (see Wilson, 2002). As a brief, crude, and overly simplified account of these pendulum swings, we offer the following. In the 1960s, behaviorism was in high gear and exerted strong influence throughout research psychology, and it all but forbade discussion of mental events as causes of behavior. The cognitive revolution that began then and came to dominance in the 1970s and 1980s embraced cognitive causa-tion of behavior, and many psychologists assumed that almost all human behavior was guided by conscious thoughts. Late in the 1970s, psychologists began to distinguish consciously controlled thoughts from automatic and often unconscious mental processes (e.g., Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977), and some psychologists began to record unconscious causation of behavior (e.g., Bargh, 1997). At first they assumed that unconscious causes worked by way of altering conscious thoughts, so that a causal (mediating) role for consciousness was preserved, but then, emboldened by accumulated evidence, they began to assert that consciousness had at best a dispensable role. By the late 1990s, leading thinkers were suggesting that most behavior was caused by unconscious processes (Bargh, 1997), that conscious control of behavior was illusory (Wegner, 2002), and that if conscious thoughts did intrude into the process, they generally had unhelpful, even counterproductive effects (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006). To be sure, the questions of whether and how conscious thoughts could possibly cause physical movement did not originate with social psychologists in recent decades. Thomas Huxley (1874) had put forward …

Correcting Some Misrepresentations About Gender and Sexual Economics Theory: Comment on Rudman and Fetterolf (2014)

Abstract: We were disappointed to read Rudman and Fetterolf’s (2014) misrepresentation of sexual economics theory (SET). We were also puzzled: Their empirical findings seem to support the theory, contrary to their claims to have refuted it. Rudman and Fetterolf relied on quasiparaphrase to attribute tenets to our theory. We encourage readers to read our own presentation of our theory (Baumeister & Vohs, 2004) and then read Rudman and Fetterolf’s interpretation to see for themselves. Rudman and Fetterolf’s investigation was based on a fundamental mistake: “SET’s central tenet is that women are more invested in sexual exchange than men are” (p. 1438). This interpretation is wrong: Whether men or women have a greater desire to make the exchange can be predicted by the principle of least interest. As the basis for SET, this principle holds that whoever wants the outcome more will be correspondingly more willing to sacrifice in the hopes of getting the exchange to take place (Waller & Hill, 1938/1951). Moreover, crucially, a basic lesson of economics is that exchanges take place mainly when both parties benefit (Smith, 1776/1937). According to our theory and much evidence, men want sex and women want men’s resources, and that creates the basis for a mutually beneficial exchange.... Language: en

Conquer Yourself, Conquer the World

Abstract: The article discusses the importance of self-control. Scientists have come to understand that self-control, rather than self-esteem, is foundational to dealing with personal problems and getting along with others. They also believe the willpower necessary for self-control can be depleted. Additional information is provided about the connection between self-control and addiction, and research in that area.

The long goodbye: A test of grief as a social signal

Abstract: The human grief response has perplexed researchers. Grief is costly, leading to painful and potentially deleterious symptoms. Yet, it is a human universal. We argue that grief functions as a hard-to-fake signal of underlying capacities to form strong social bonds. If so, those who grieve more intensively than others should be perceived as higher quality social partners. We tested this hypothesis in 4 studies. High grievers were rated as nicer, more loyal, and more trustworthy than low grievers. High grievers were also expected to cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma more than low grievers. Last, high grievers were chosen as a trusted social partner more than another individual who expressed sadness for lost material items, indicating that grief may be a specific display of distress that is particularly informative to potential social partners. These results support a signaling theory of grief and are discussed in that context.

Recognizing and coping with our own prejudices: fighting liberal bias without conservative input

Abstract: This commentary summarizes my struggle to overcome liberal bias without conservative input. I generally assume I am biased and constantly try to build a good-quality argument for the opposite view. Trying to dispense with one's liberal values can help, if one is willing. Frequent self-tests help. Liberal biases include race, gender, and poverty, but also dislike of business corporations and even Western civilization. Feminism is the single strongest and most powerful bias.

The Glucose Model of Mediation: Physiological Bases of Willpower as Important Explanations for Common Mediation Behavior

Abstract: Success in life requires the ability to resist urges and control behavior This ability is commonly called “willpower,” the capacity to overcome impulses and engage in conscious acts of self-control Social psychologists believe willpower is a finite resource dependent on physiological bases including glucose (from food and drink), sleep and other forms of rest, and the absence of stress In short, people who are hungry, exhausted, or highly stressed tend to have less willpower than those who are well-fed, well-rested, and relatively stress-free In addition, a person who exerts self-control (uses willpower) tends to reduce temporarily the amount of willpower remaining, so decision-making and other aspects of self-control are weakened during this depleted state Restoring willpower (and thus restoring decision-making abilities) can often be achieved by physiological replenishment, such as: ingesting glucose, sleep (and other forms of rest) and breaks from stress The physiological bases of willpower combine with the importance of deadlines to offer a compelling explanation for why so many mediations follow a predictable pattern Most significantly, the physiological bases of willpower go a long way to explaining why many mediations scheduled for a single day begin with stalwart opening positions and end with a signed settlement agreement late in the day This Article provides a physiological explanation of typical mediation behavior and shows that an awareness of physiology reveals ethical issues with current mediation practice Part I of this Article discusses the science, specifically the Strength and Glucose Models of Self-Control and their applications across studies of medicine, morality and negotiation Part II outlines the course of a typical daylong mediation and shows the extent to which common mediation behavior is well-explained by the physiology of willpower when people are operating under deadlines Part III examines the significance of the Glucose Model of Mediation by identifying ethical issues relating to willpower depletion in mediation