Self-Control and Its Discontents: A Commentary on Duckworth, Milkman, and Laibson.

Abstract

I am pleased and honored to comment on this superb review written by three researchers who have all made pioneering contributions to the literature on self-control. With different disciplinary backgrounds and separate extensive lines of research dealing with self-control, Duckworth, Laibson, and Milkman (2018) bring a diverse but overlapping range of perspectives to bear on self-control, which is, as the authors express it, an “object of fascination for philosophers, social scientists, policymakers and pundits” (p. 102). One the most important messages of the article, beginning with the first two words of the title—“beyond willpower”—is one I entirely agree with: Willpower has severe limitations as a self-control strategy. Fittingly, I’m writing this on the first day of a new year. One of the major causes of failures to carry through with the myriad resolutions that were made last night will be naivety about the limitations of the brute-force approach and ignorance of the far more effective strategies enumerated in the review. The most significant contribution of the review, in my view—by itself worth the “price of admission”—is the classification of self-control strategies that move beyond willpower. I anticipate that the distinctions highlighted in Figure 2 and Table 1, between situational and cognitive strategies on the one hand and between those that are selfand other-deployed on the other, will become a mainstay of future thinking about self-control. The distinctions are, to be sure, not always perfectly crisp, but I will not dwell on this issue because the review deals with it in detail and with candor. I found the tripartite classification of models giving rise to self-control conflicts proposed in the article less helpful, perhaps because it does not fit well into my own mental map of such models. My own perspective (cited in the article), which is closely related to the want should conflicts that Milkman and her colleagues have studied, views self-control as a conflict between affect (encompassing emotions, drives, and motivational feeling states such as pain) on the one hand and deliberation on the other. Unlike the classification of self-control strategies, however, the classification of self-control models does not end up playing a major role in the article, so it, too, will not be my focus. The focus of my commentary is not, in fact, on the substance of what the authors write, most of which I agree with, but on two assumptions that could be seen as implicit in their review and that I do disagree with. First, although I know from past discussions with the authors that this does not represent their personal perspectives, the article could leave the impression that inadequate self-control is the source of problems such as obesity and inadequate saving that, in fact, have other major causes. This perspective, in turn, naturally leads to the view, misplaced in my opinion, that such problems can best be combatted by promoting the types of self-control strategies enumerated in the review. Second, the focus on self-control as a problem of temporal myopia hides the surprisingly wide range of situations in which people perceive themselves as excessively future-minded—and marshal self-control strategies to help themselves live more for the present. The fact that self-control often involves attempts to be more focused on the present than on the future has implications both for our interpretation of self-control problems and for the types of policies that are likely to be welfare enhancing. These points have been made separately in other articles; I use the occasion of writing this commentary to bring them together in a new way.