ABSTRACT
Since Odysseus committed to resisting the Sirens, mechanisms to limit self-control failure have been a central feature of human behavior. Psychologists have long argued that the use of self-control is an effortful process and, more recently, that its failure arises when the cognitive costs of self-control outweigh its perceived benefits. In a similar way, economists have argued that sophisticated choosers can adopt “pre-commitment strategies” that that tie the hands of their future selves in order to reduce these costs. Yet, we still lack an empirical tool to quantify and demonstrate the cost of self-control. Here, we develop and validate a novel economic decision-making task to quantify the subjective cost of self-control by determining the monetary cost a person is willing to incur in order to eliminate the need for self-control. We find that humans will pay to avoid having to exert self-control in a way that scales with increasing levels of temptation and that these costs are modulated both by motivational incentives and stress exposure. Our psychophysical approach allows us to index moment-to-moment self-control costs at the within-subject level, validating important theoretical work across multiple disciplines and opening new avenues of self-control research in healthy and clinical populations.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The failure to use self-control is a fundamental problem that humans face in daily life. Recent work suggests that these ‘failures’ might be better understood as a rational decision-making process that weighs the benefits of exercising self-control against its attendant cognitive costs. However, we still know little about how to measure these costs or how they change under different circumstances. Across five independent studies, we find that self-control costs can be measured in humans through monetary willingness to pay to avoid temptation and further, that these costs are sensitive to motivational incentives, stress exposure and variability in temptation intensity. Our findings open new avenues of research into computational models of self-control that inform psychological, economic and health-policy research.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
