Regulatory Accessibility and Social Influences on State Self-Control

Abstract

The current work examined how social factors influence self-control. Current conceptions of state self-control treat it largely as a function of regulatory capacity. The authors propose that state self-control might also be influenced by social factors because of regulatory accessibility. Studies 1 through 4 provide evidence that individuals’ state self-control is influenced by the trait and state self-control of salient others such that thinking of others with good trait or state self-control leads to increases in state self-control and thinking of others with bad trait or state self-control leads to decreases in state self-control. Study 5 provides evidence that the salience of significant others influences both regulatory accessibility and state self-control. Combined, these studies suggest that the effects of social influences on state self-control occur through multiple mechanisms.

The regulatory easy street: Self-regulation below the self-control threshold does not consume regulatory resources

“…Thus, we focused primarily on the amount of time in minutes participants spent working on the RAT items ( M = 7.26, SD = 4.15). Persistence on difficult RAT items has been successfully used as a measure of self-control (vanDellen & Hoyle, 2010) and is similar to other common measurements of self-control such as persistence on difficult puzzles (Baumeister et al, 1998). …”

Goal interdependence

“…Performance on achievement tasks such as math tests would seem to be a prototypical example of an independent goal pursuit. And yet, many studies have shown that even this performance is routinely shaped by interpersonal phenomena [5,6,7]. Female engineers completing a math test performed worse when they had just interacted with a man who behaved in a dominant and/or sexually interested fashion [8].…”

Regret Causes Ego-Depletion and Finding Benefits in the Regrettable Events Alleviates Ego-Depletion

“…Using a voluntary (Experiment 1) and an involuntary task (Experiment 2) to test the effect of regret, the cumulative results would strengthen the effect's generalizability. In previous studies, the Stroop task has been used as a response inhibition task, and inhibition is widely considered to require executive control (e.g., Inzlicht & Gutsell, 2007;Muraven et al, 2006;Job et al, 2010;van Dellen & Hoyle, 2010). Therefore, ego-depletion should result in longer reaction time on the Stroop task.…”