A recurring theme in this blog is that self-control is
hard. Tempting short-term goals often
get in our way when we want to achieve long-term goals. If you are trying to lose weight, then it is
not easy to pass up some fries to go with that lunch or a rich piece of cake to
reward yourself for a hard day. If you
need to study for an exam in order to keep up your grades, it is tempting to
take a break to watch a great movie on TV or to join your friends at a party.
One way to help you to control yourself is to set up your
environment in advance to make those temptations less tempting. If you don’t keep tempting foods at home,
then you are less likely to break down and eat something that will break your
diet. If you bring your books to the
library, you make it harder to give in to the call of the television.
When you work to create an environment that supports your
long-term goals, you are engaging in prospective
self-control. This kind of planning
for the future helps you to achieve your goals by minimizing the number of
temptations that cross your path and by helping you to prepare in advance for
those that do emerge.
A paper by Kentaro Fujita and Joseph Roberts in the November,
2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology examines one factor that may make people more likely to
engage in this advance planning.
These authors suggest that when people think about a
situation more abstractly, they may be more willing to structure their world in
ways that help them to satisfy long-term goals than when they think about a
situation concretely.
Take the example of dieting to lose weight. If you think about eating specifically, then
it gets easy to think about the wonderful tastes and sensations you may have to
give up by dieting successfully. If you
think abstractly, though, then the temptations of specific foods are not so
tempting. That may enable you to put
structures in place to help you remove those temptations in the future.
In one study, the authors used a technique to get people
thinking abstractly or concretely. In
this particular study, they started by having people think about why they might perform a number of
activities (which tends to focus people on abstract reasons) or how they might perform the activity
(which tends to focus people on specific means for achieving goals). Then, people were asked if they would
participate in a future study that would take place over three sessions. At each session, they would be given a snack
as part of their compensation for being in the study. Some of the snacks were healthy (like fruit)
and some were unhealthy (like cake). People
were also told that they could opt to select all three snacks in advance or
they could simply choose the snack they wanted in each session.
Lots of research suggests that when you make a series of
choices for yourself in advance, it is easier to maintain self-control. For one thing, making the choice in advance
makes the possible temptations feel less tempting. For another, making a whole set of choices at
once helps you to see how each of the individual selections might get in the
way of your success at the long-term goal.
In this study, people who were led to think abstractly were
more likely to opt to make all three choices at once than were the people who
were led to think concretely. So, those
who thought abstractly did more planning for the future than the ones who
thought concretely.
The authors did a second study that obtained a similar
result. In this study, they used a
different technique to get people to think abstractly (thinking about common
uses for a set of items or uses that were specific to each item in a set), and
a different means of self-control (the size of a punishment for failing to show
up for an experiment). People who were
led to think abstractly wanted to give themselves larger punishments in the
future than those who were led to think concretely.
Putting this all together, this study adds something nice to
work on how people satisfy goals. Often,
we worry about how we might handle temptations when they arise. This work suggests that if we think
abstractly when prepare ourselves to achieve our long-term goals, we may adopt
strategies that maximize our chances to succeed.
Think abstractly and maximize your chances to see the latest
blog entries as they get put up.
