Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University , Utrecht 3512 BL, The Netherlands.
Department of Philosophy, University of Murcia , Murcia 30100, Spain.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2024 Aug 26;379(1908):20230289. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2023.0289. Epub 2024 Aug 5.
The behaviour settings approach was introduced as a means to study the variability of human beings' behaviour outside the lab. More recently, it has been argued that it also provides a fruitful avenue for developing situated accounts of cognition. This article will provide a proof of concept for the latter suggestion, focusing on the science of self-control. Self-control is the ability of individuals to pursue goals they value in the face of conflicting motivations. The hypothesis we bring forward is that this ability should be understood as a set of skills by which individuals modulate their relation to their environment, more specifically the behaviour settings they inhabit. With this conception of self-control in hand, we will take a critical look at well-known experiments involving delayed gratification tasks and propose concrete suggestions on how to improve them. This will bring us to the conclusion that the behaviour settings framework might have a valuable role to play in developing a situated science of self-control. This article is part of the theme issue 'People, places, things and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the twenty-first century'.
行为情境方法被引入作为一种研究人类在实验室之外的行为变异性的手段。最近，有人认为它也为认知的情境化解释提供了一条富有成效的途径。本文将为后者的观点提供一个概念验证，重点关注自我控制科学。自我控制是指个体在面对冲突的动机时，追求自己重视的目标的能力。我们提出的假设是，应该将这种能力理解为一组技能，个体通过这些技能来调节自己与环境的关系，更具体地说，是调节他们所处的行为情境。有了这种自我控制的概念，我们将批判性地审视涉及延迟满足任务的著名实验，并就如何改进这些实验提出具体建议。这将使我们得出结论，即行为情境框架在发展情境化的自我控制科学方面可能具有重要作用。本文是“人与地点、事物和社区：二十一世纪扩展行为情境理论”主题专刊的一部分。
