Self-Control and Self-Regulation

Flexibility and Balance in Self-Control
Our group is involved in the Research Training Group FlexBaR. The overarching theme of this group is to investigate the concepts of flexibility and balance as characteristics of adaptive self-regulation (Friese, Bürgler, Hofmann, & Hennecke, 2024; Friese, Bürgler, Reis, Kulkarni, Hofmann, & Hennecke, in press). Our lab investigates whether and when flexibility – understood as the context-dependent application of self-control strategies – is adaptive for goal pursuit. In a different line, we examine how people balance the various goals they pursue and whether a good balance between goals is associated with better goal attainment and well-being. One project that connects several lines of work asks what constitutes a self-control failure that presumably stands in the way of goal progress in the first place, and how people make sense of their apparent and actual failures.  

Trait Self-Control
Self-control is considered a trait that is fairly stable across time. Good self-control is associated with a host of positive outcomes including good mental and physical health, stable personal relationships, and wealth. Despite being a prominent research topic in several subfields of psychology, there is no clear consensus about how trait self-control can be conceptualized. One line of work sought to develop a conceptualization of trait self-control that considers overlap with and distinctiveness from related constructs and develop a corresponding measurement instrument (Wennerhold & Friese, 2023; Wennerhold, Reis, & Friese, unpublished).

Strength Model of Self-Control
A prominent idea suggested that the exertion of self-control impairs performance in subsequent attempts at self-control (ego depletion effect). After a prolific period in which this phenomenon has received abundant attention in research and the public media, the field has been confronted with severe doubts about the robustness and replicability of much of the reported research and the sustainability of the model (Gieseler, Loschelder, & Friese, 2019). A review from our lab about the state of the field concluded that there is no conclusive evidence for the phenomenon, but neither is there conclusive evidence that the phenomenon does not exist. Both better theoretical and empirical work is needed to gain a deeper understanding of ego depletion effects (Friese, Loschelder, Gieseler, Frankenbach, & Inzlicht, 2019). Other work examined the role of mental effort as indicated by psychophysiological measures in the emergence of ego depletion effects (Gieseler, Loschelder, Job, & Friese, 2021). 

If self-control is so helpful in living a healthy, happy, and successful life, an important question is how it can be improved. Some researchers examined if regular practice of self-control can lead to changes not only in the practiced domain, but more broadly in domains that require self-control. A  meta-analysis of this literature from our lab provided mixed support for this idea and concluded that the evidence is not strong enough to be optimistic about the possibility to train self-control for a few weeks in one domain and see lasting effects in a different domain (Friese, Frankenbach, Job, & Loschelder, 2017).

The Dynamics of Self-Control
Many self-control situations are characterized by conflicts between individuals’ long-term goals and their short-term impulses. Based on dual-process and dual-system models of human behavior, we examined the interplay of three components that jointly shape self-regulatory behavior: (1) reflective precursors of behavior such as explicit attitudes and personal standards, (2) impulsive precursors of behavior such as spontaneous affective reactions toward a temptation, and (3) boundary factors that shift the weight of reflective and impulsive processes on behavior such as the willingness and the ability of the individual to exert control over behavior. A series of studies supported the assumptions that reflective precursors correspond to observed self-regulatory behavior better under conditions of high ability to control and the reverse was true for impulsive precursors of behavior (for an overview, see Hofmann, Friese, & Strack, 2009).