![]() ![]() This body of work has dominated psychological conceptions of self-control as a form of “willpower” with impulsive or suboptimal choice emerging from a failure or depletion of control resources. Fatigued or stressed choosers, for example, are often presumed to have more limited cognitive resources for self-control upon which to draw ( 10, 14– 16). These theories suggest that the motivational or affective state of a chooser influences the availability or functional integrity of these resources. Informed by findings from classic delay-of-gratification paradigms and theories of ego depletion, this account proposes that self-control relies on cognitive resources that are depleted the longer they are used. ![]() One account, emerging from the psychological literature, points to self-control as a top-down regulatory process that inhibits impulsive action in the service of long-term goals or social norms. Historically, theoretical accounts that have attempted to explain the puzzling disconnect between what we say we want and what we actually do by pointing to the existence of self-control without providing a platform for its reliable demonstration and quantification. Whether we are trying to lose weight, quit smoking, avoid drugs, exercise more, drink less, or simply focus on a cognitively demanding task, the question remains: If one truly desires a particular long-term outcome, why is it so difficult to choose in favor of that outcome all of the time? ![]() What has made self-control so elusive is determining how to convincingly and quantitatively measure it and therefore to understand why it often fails. What has fueled this debate is not a failure to understand what self-control feels like the subjective experience of resisting temptation is a universal one for humans. However, what does it mean for self-control to fail? This has been a central debate in human behavior for centuries. When his men were unable to leave the land of the lotus eaters, Homer urges us to see them as having failed in their self-control. When Odysseus tied himself to the mast of his ship so he could hear the song of the Sirens without approaching them, he deployed a precommitment mechanism that prevented a self-control failure. ![]() Our psychophysical approach allows us to index moment-to-moment self-control costs at the within-subject level, validating important theoretical work across multiple disciplines and opening avenues of self-control research in healthy and clinical populations. We find that humans will pay to avoid having to exert self-control in a way that scales with increasing levels of temptation and that these costs appear to be modulated both by motivational incentives and stress exposure. Here, we develop and validate an economic decision-making task to quantify the subjective cost of self-control by determining the monetary cost a person is willing to incur in order to eliminate the need for self-control. Yet, we still lack an empirical tool to quantify and demonstrate the cost of self-control. In a similar way, economists have argued that sophisticated choosers can adopt “precommitment strategies” that tie the hands of their future selves in order to reduce these costs. Psychologists have long argued that the use of self-control is an effortful process and, more recently, that its failure arises when the cognitive costs of self-control outweigh its perceived benefits. Since Odysseus committed to resisting the Sirens, mechanisms to limit self-control failure have been a central feature of human behavior. ![]()
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