Seeking self-control

Paulo Coelho wrote, “If you conquer yourself, you conquer the world.” This is true, but how easy is it to conquer or control the self? Oscar Wilde famously observed, “I can resist everything except temptation.” Gustave Flaubert agreed with Wilde’s pessimistic view of the challenge of self-control in saying, “One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.” Certainly self-control, while desirable, is a challenge and, according to new research, we look to others to make up for what we lack.

In the first experiment done by these researchers, subjects watched a video. Half of the subjects were asked to avoid reading groups of words that flashed up on the screen. This was designed to deplete their reserves of self-control, or willpower. The other half of the subjects were allowed to watch the video without being asked to exert any self-control.

Each subject then read three short stories, each story about a different office manager. One office manager exhibited high self-control, another demonstrated low self-control and the third demonstrated both high and low self-control behaviours. Subjects then rated the managers on their leadership abilities.

It emerged that the people who had their self-control depleted by the earlier task rated the office manager who showed high self-control more highly than the other two.

Then, in a second study, people were given a test to see how they scored on self-control as a personality trait. Again, it emerged that people low on self-control preferred managers who were high on self-control.

It was appearing that people seek to make up for their own deficits in self-control by having people around them with the self-control that they lack. The question the researchers wanted to answer, though, was would this translate to the real world or was it just a laboratory phenomenon?

To test this, the researchers gathered data on romantic couples. They found that people who scored low on self-control also tended to be with people who scored high on self-control. Those low self-control people also reported greater dependence on their partner.

The irony is then that even though self-control is a “self”-oriented process, it is still something that is sought and achieved in a social milieu. John Donne was right: “No man [or woman] is an island”.