University of Virginia, Corcoran Department of Philosophy, United States of America.
Rutgers University, Department of Philosophy, United States of America.
Cognition. 2022 Aug;225:105154. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105154. Epub 2022 May 25.
Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have reached the consensus that one can use two different kinds of regulation to achieve self-control. Synchronic regulation uses willpower to resist current temptation. Diachronic regulation implements a plan to avoid future temptation. Yet this consensus may rest on contaminated intuitions. Specifically, agents typically use willpower (synchronic regulation) to achieve their plans to avoid temptation (diachronic regulation). So even if cases of diachronic regulation seem to involve self-control, this may be because they are contaminated by synchronic regulation. We therefore developed a novel multifactorial method to disentangle synchronic and diachronic regulation. Using this method, we find that ordinary usage assumes that only synchronic--not diachronic--regulation counts as self-control. We find this pattern across four experiments involving different kinds of temptation, as well as a paradigmatic case of diachronic regulation based on the classic story of Odysseus and the Sirens. Our final experiment finds that self-control in a diachronic case depends on whether the agent uses synchronic regulation at two moments: when she (1) initiates and (2) follows-through on a plan to resist temptation. Taken together, our results strongly suggest that synchronic regulation is the sole difference maker in the folk concept of self-control.
哲学家、心理学家和经济学家已经达成共识，即人们可以使用两种不同的调节方式来实现自我控制。同步调节使用意志力来抵制当前的诱惑。历时性调节则执行一个计划来避免未来的诱惑。然而，这种共识可能基于受污染的直觉。具体来说，代理人通常使用意志力（同步调节）来实现他们避免诱惑的计划（历时性调节）。因此，即使历时性调节的情况似乎涉及自我控制，这也可能是因为它们受到了同步调节的污染。因此，我们开发了一种新的多因素方法来区分同步和历时性调节。使用这种方法，我们发现，普通用法假设只有同步调节（而不是历时性调节）才被视为自我控制。我们在涉及不同类型诱惑的四个实验中以及基于奥德修斯和塞壬经典故事的历时性调节的典型案例中都发现了这种模式。我们的最后一个实验发现，历时性情况下的自我控制取决于代理人在两个时刻是否使用了同步调节：当她（1）发起和（2）执行抵制诱惑的计划时。综上所述，我们的研究结果强烈表明，同步调节是民间自我控制概念中唯一的区别因素。
