Beyond Willpower: Cognitive Strategies for Self-Control
SELF-CONTROL FAILURES CONTRIBUTE to a range of outcomes in our society, from educational achievement and retirement savings to the obesity epidemic. Not surprisingly, people with greater self-control fare better in terms of health, wealth and many other dimensions of human flourishing. Unfortunately, temptations — rewards that provide short-term gratification but impede people from long-term goals — are ever more abundant today, thanks to convenience stores, one-click shopping, social media, 24/7 streaming, and other newfound vices.
In a recent paper, we synthesized the research on approaches to reducing failures of self-control, organizing them as approaches that are either cognitive or situational in nature. In this article we will summarize some of the key cognitive strategies for improving self-control. We will categorize these strategies under two headings: interventions that are self-deployed and interventions that are other-deployed — i.e. by policymakers or organizations.
Self-Deployed Cognitive Interventions
The following suite of cognitive interventions enable people to change the way they think, making long-term choices more appealing or actionable and short-term temptations less so.
GOAL SETTING. Goals are mental representations of what we hope to accomplish. Across dozens of studies, setting specific, difficult goals has been shown to help people achieve higher performance than exhortations to ‘do your best’. Goal setting is effective in part because goals direct our attention and energy towards a desired behaviour. In addition, failing to achieve the reference point set by the goal feels like a loss, and as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky taught us long ago, losses loom larger than gains in our minds, creating enhanced motivation for us to persist.
The research indicates that it can be helpful to break far-off goals into smaller, more proximate sub-goals. Accomplishing these sub-goals
