Who Controls Whom When "I Control Myself"?

Abstract

Baumeister and Heatherton's target article on selfregulation failure reminded me of my first attempt to bake bread. My mother had told me all the ingredients but I did not know how to put them together: The result was closer to some sort of cereal pudding than to bread, but grandpa liked it it was easy to swallow. Because we are still in the childhood years of experimental research on human volition, it is a remarkable achievement to present virtually all the ingredients that seem necessary for a theory of volition and volitional impairment (self-regulation failure). Nonetheless, the authors are far from explaining how all the phenomena they cite make a theory of volition. Such a theory should be able to resolve some of the paradoxes they mention and it should answer even more basic questions they forget to ask. For example, are the authors correct in stating that eating or drinking binges are cases of successful self-control because the person thinks that eating or drinking will remedy the emotional distress or are these symptoms examples of self-regulation failure as may be more in accordance with common wisdom? Do self-regulation failures like broken diets, sexual acts one later regrets, smoking and drinking, and the most violent and impulsive crimes occur late at night if are generally fatigued late in the evening, then self-regulation should break down more at such times than at others? Or do people do these things at night they have excellent selfregulatory skills that enable them to delay these attractive activities until the evening when they can be more successfully exercised than during the day? Self-regulation research is indeed beset with theoretical ambiguities to such an extent that many scholars have yielded to the temptation of solving all problems by a simple method: proclaiming volitional concepts as unscientific and reducing them to basic, nonvolitional concepts or even banning them from scientific psychology altogether (Allport, 1980; Allport & Styles, 1989; Ryle, 1949; Skinner, 1971). Despite the many conceptual confusions and operational problems involved in this research, I am convinced that psychologists will never be able to explain complex phenomena of human behavior without concepts like volition, willpower, self-regulation, and self-control. I also believe that such concepts will again be neglected or banned by the scientific community unless we find better solutions to the theoretical and methodological problems raised by these concepts. There is much we can learn from phenomenological reflections as illustrated by approaches that have been even more systematic than Baumeister and Heatherton's (mainly phenomenological) approach (e.g., Ach, 1910; Dennett, 1984; Gollwitzer, 1990; Heckhausen, 1991, p. 175). However, there are limits of introspection when we try to model the architecture and processes underlying human behavior in general (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) and self-regulated behavior in particular. From my own research I have learned that, for resolving some of the paradoxes of volition,' we need both introspective and objective data; we need not only phenomenological, but also functional concepts that are derived from a systems-oriented design perspective (Allport & Styles, 1989; Johnson-Laird, 1983; Kuhl, 1984, 1986; Kuhl & Beckmann, 1994b; Shallice, 1988). The latter approaches search for the architecture and mechanisms underlying self-regulation. Searching for this architecture amounts to asking more and more specific questions concerning the who or what that does the regulation in self-regulation. I describe, in a nutshell, attempts to resolve some of the difficult conceptual and methodological questions left untouched in Baumeister and Heatherton's target article. At the outset of my own research program, I described volitional competence as somehow related to the ability to stick to an intention and shield it against competing action tendencies (Kuhl, 1981, 1983a; cf. Mischel & Baker, 1975; Patterson & Mischel, 1976). The first important thing I learned was that concepts like self-regulation and volition do not refer to a unitary mechanism or function. I postulated and later confirmed that self-regulatory ability can be decomposed into several mechanisms and strategies people use to maintain their goals (and their selves): They focus on information supporting their active intentions (attention control), they modify their motivation when they