Self-Control, Agency, and the Placebo Brain Stimulation

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the relationship between control beliefs and self-control. After providing an overview of the research showing how control beliefs affect self-control performance, the authors present a novel experimental procedure based on a placebo brain stimulation that aims at altering people’s belief about their own self-control. They then describe a heuristic framework that accounts for belief-related changes in self-control performance. The core idea is that beliefs should be conceptualized as metacognitive knowledge about the self and that such metacognitive knowledge is used to predict the success of self-control behavior. When people form the expectation that they can exert self-control but experience failure, they perceive a discrepancy between their expectation and the actual outcome. Under specific circumstances, the perception of such discrepancy or prediction error will motivate people to exert more effort to match their expectation, which will lead to increased self-control.