NOTES

1. Jack Block, Personality as an Affect-Processing System: Toward an Integrative Theory (Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002), pp. 195, 8-9. Or, as a different psychologist puts it, “One person’s lack of self-control is another person’s impetus for a positive life change” (Laura A. King, “Who Is Regulating What and Why?”, Psychological Inquiry, vol. 7, 1996, p. 58).
2. “Our belief [is] that there is no true disadvantage of having too much self-control,” Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman wrote in their book Character Strengths and Virtues (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 515. June Tangney, Roy Baumeister, and Angie Luzio Boone similarly declared that “self-control is beneficial and adaptive in a linear fashion. We found no evidence that any psychological problems are linked to high self-control” (“High Self-Control Predicts Good Adjustment, Less Pathology, Better Grades, and Interpersonal Success,” Journal of Personality, vol. 72, 2004, p. 296). This conclusion – based on questionnaire responses by a group of undergraduates -- turns out to be a trifle misleading, if not disingenuous. First, it’s supported by the fact that Tangney and her colleagues found an inverse relationship between self-control and negative emotions. Other research, however, has found that there’s also an inverse relationship between self-control and positive emotions. (See, for example, Darya L. Zabelina et al., “The Psychological Tradeoffs of Self-Control,” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 43, 2007: 463-73.) Even if highly self-controlled people aren’t always unhappy, they’re also not particularly happy; their emotional life in general tends to be muted. Second, the self-control questionnaire used by Tangney and her colleagues “includes items reflective of an appropriate level of control and [of] undercontrol, but not overcontrol. It is therefore not surprising that the correlates of the scale do not indicate maladaptive consequences associated with very high levels of control” (Tera D. Letzring et al., “Ego-control and Ego-resiliency,” Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 39, 2005, p. 3). In other words, the clean bill of health they award to self-control was virtually predetermined by the design of their study. At the very end of their article, Tangney et al. concede that some people may be rigidly overcontrolled but then immediately try to define the problem out of existence: “Such overcontrolled individuals may be said to lack the ability to control their self-control” (p. 314).
3. The first sentence is from Joseph F. Rogus, “Promoting Self-Discipline: A Comprehensive Approach,” Theory Into Practice, vol. 24, 1985, p. 271. The second is from http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Self-Discipline, a web page of the Curriculum, Technology, and Education Reform program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rogus’s article appeared in a special issue of the journal Theory Into Practice devoted entirely to the topic of self-discipline. Although it featured contributions by a wide range of educational theorists, including some with a distinctly humanistic orientation, none questioned the importance of self-discipline.
4. Letzring et al., p. 3.
5. Scott J. Dickman, “Functional and Dysfunctional Impulsivity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 58, 1990, p. 95.
6. Zabelina et al.
7. Daniel A. Weinberger and Gary E. Schwartz, “Distress and Restraint as Superordinate Dimensions of Self-Reported Adjustment,” Journal of Personality, vol. 58, 1990: 381-417.
8. David C. Funder, “On the Pros and Cons of Delay of Gratification,” Psychological Inquiry, vol. 9, 1998, p. 211. The studies to which he alludes are, respectively, Jonathan Shedler and Jack Block, “Adolescent Drug Use and Psychological Health,” American Psychologist, vol. 45, 1990: 612-30; and Jack H. Block, Per E. Gjerde, and Jeanne H. Block, “Personality Antecedents of Depressive Tendencies in 18-year-olds,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 60, 1991: 726-38.
9. For example, see Christine Halse, Anne Honey, and Desiree Boughtwood, “The Paradox of Virtue: (Re)thinking Deviance, Anorexia, and Schooling,” Gender and Education, vol. 19, 2007: 219–235.
10. This may explain why the data generally fail to show any academic benefit to assigning homework – which most students detest – particularly in elementary or middle school. (See Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth [Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006] and an article based on that book in the September 2006 issue of Kappan.) Remarkably, most people assume that students will somehow benefit from performing tasks they can’t wait to be done with, as though their attitudes and goals were irrelevant to the outcome.
11. David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles (New York: Basic, 1965), p. 34.
12. Ibid., p. 44.
13. Funder, p. 211.
14. Regarding the way that “disinhibition [is] occasionally manifested by some overcontrolled personalities,” see Block, p. 187.
15. Janet Polivy, “The Effects of Behavioral Inhibition,” Psychological Inquiry, vol. 9, 1998, p. 183. She adds: “This is not to say that one should never inhibit one’s natural response, as, for example, when anger makes one want to hurt another, or addiction makes one crave a cigarette” (ibid.). Rather, it means one should weigh the benefits and costs of inhibition in each circumstance – a moderate position that contrasts sharply with our society’s tendency to endorse self-discipline across the board.
16. Funder, p. 211. Walter Mischel, who conducted the so-called “marshmallow” experiments (see sidebar), put it this way: The inability to delay gratification may be a problem, but “the other extreme – excessive delay of gratification – also has its personal costs and can be disadvantageous. . . .Whether one should or should not delay gratification or ‘exercise the will’ in any particular choice is often anything but self-evident” (“From Good Intentions to Willpower,” in The Psychology of Action: Linking Cognition and Motivation to Behavior, ed. by Peter M. Gollwitzer and John A. Bargh [New York: Guilford, 1996], p. 198).
17. See, for example, King, op. cit.; and Alina Tugend, “Winners Never Quit? Well, Yes, They Do,” New York Times,August 16, 2008, p. B5, for data that challenge an unqualified endorsement of perseverance such as is offered by psychologist Angela Duckworth and her colleagues: “As educators and parents we should encourage children to work not only with intensity but also with stamina.” That advice follows their report that perseverance contributed to higher grades and better performance at a spelling bee (Angela L. Duckworth et al., “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 92, 2007; quotation on p. 1100). But such statistical associations mostly point up the limitations of these outcome measures as well as of grit itself, a concept that ignores motivational factors (that is, why people persevere), thus conflating genuine passion for a task with a desperate need to prove one’s competence, an inability to change course when appropriate, and so on.
18. Block, p. 130.
19. See, for example, my book Punished by Rewards, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); and Edward L. Deci et al., “A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 125, 1999: 627-68.
20. Richard M. Ryan, Scott Rigby, and Kristi King, “Two Types of Religious Internalization and Their Relations to Religious Orientations and Mental Health,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 65, 1993, p. 587. This basic distinction has been explicated and refined in many other writings by Ryan, Deci, Robert J. Vallerand, James P. Connell, Richard Koestner, Luc Pelletier, and others. Most recently, it has been invoked in response to Roy Baumeister’s claim that the capacity for self-control is “like a muscle,” requiring energy and subject to being depleted – such that if you resist one sort of temptation, you’ll have, at least temporarily, less capacity to resist another. The problem with this theory is its failure to distinguish “between self-regulation (i.e., autonomous regulation) and self-control (i.e., controlled regulation).” Ego depletion may indeed take place with the latter, but the former actually “maintains or enhances energy or vitality” (Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “From Ego Depletion to Vitality,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, vol. 2, 2008, pp. 709, 711).
21. References available upon request.
22. See, for example, Richard M. Ryan, James P. Connell, and Edward L. Deci, “A Motivational Analysis of Self-determination and Self-regulation in Education,” in Research on Motivation in Education, vol. 2, ed. by Carole Ames and Russell Ames (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985); and Richard M. Ryan and Jerome Stiller, “The Social Contexts of Internalization: Parent and Teacher Influences on Autonomy, Motivation, and Learning,” Advances in Motivation and Achievement, vol. 7, 1991: 115-49. The quotation is from the latter, p. 143.
23. David Brooks, “The Art of Growing Up,” New York Times, June 6, 2008, p. A23.
24. See Alfie Kohn, “How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education,” Phi Delta Kappan, February 1997: 429-39.
25. One educator based his defense of the need for self-discipline on “our natural egoism [that threatens to] lead us into ‘a condition of warre one against another’” – as though Thomas Hobbes’s dismal view of our species was universally accepted. This was followed by the astonishing assertion that “social class differences appear to be largely a function of the ability to defer gratification” and the recommendation that we “connect the lower social classes to the middle classes who may provide role models for self-discipline” (Louis Goldman, “Mind, Character, and the Deferral of Gratification,” Educational Forum, vol. 60, 1996, pp. 136, 137, 139). Notice that this article was published in 1996, not 1896.
26. To whatever extent internalization or self-discipline is desired, this gentler approach -- specifically, supporting children’s autonomy and minimizing adult control – has consistently been shown to be more effective. (I reviewed some of the evidence in Unconditional Parenting [New York: Atria, 2005], especially chap. 3.) Ironically, many of the same traditionalists who defend the value of self-control also promote a more authoritarian approach to parenting or teaching. In any case, my central point here is that we need to reconsider the goal, not merely the method.
27. “The older generation has complained about the lack of self-control among the younger generation for decades, if not centuries. The older generation of Vikings no doubt complained that the younger generation were getting soft and did not rape and pillage with the same dedication as in years gone by” (C. Peter Herman, “Thoughts of a Veteran of Self-Regulation Failure,” Psychological Inquiry, vol. 7, 1996, p. 46). The following rant, for example, is widely attributed to the Greek poet Hesiod, who lived about 2700 years ago: “When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint.” Likewise, grade inflation, another manifestation of allegedly lower standards, was denounced at Harvard University in 1894, shortly after letter grades were introduced there.
28. George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 2^nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
29. For a discussion of the relationship between obedience and self-control, see Block, esp. pp. 195-96.
30. I’m thinking specifically of Roy Baumeister and his collaborator June Tangney, as well as Martin Seligman and Angela Duckworth, and, in a different academic neighborhood, criminologists Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, who argued that crime is simply due a lack of self-control on the part of criminals. (For a critique of that theory, see the essay by Gilbert Geis and other chapters in Out of Control: Assessing the General Theory of Crime, edited by Erich Goode [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008].)
31. I discussed the Fundamental Attribution Error in an article about academic cheating, which is typically construed as a reflection of moral failure (one often attributed to a lack of self-control), even though researchers have found that it is a predictable response to certain educational environments. See “Who’s Cheating Whom?”, Phi Delta Kappan, October 2007: 89-97.
32. Per-Olof H. Wikström and Kyle Treiber, “The Role of Self-Control in Crime Causation,” European Journal of Criminology, vol. 4, 2007, pp. 243, 251. Regarding delay of gratification, see Walter Mischel et al., “Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 21, 1972: 204-18.
33. For example, see CBS News, “Meet ‘Generation Plastic,’” May 17, 2007, available at www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/17/eveningnews/main2821916.shtml.
34. See Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York: New Press, 2005).
35. See Alfie Kohn, “Students Don’t ‘Work,’ They Learn: Our Use of Workplace Metaphors May Compromise the Essence of Schooling,” Education Week, September 3, 1997: 60, 43.
36. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic, 1976), p. 39. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the conservative National Review published an essay strongly supporting homework because it teaches “personal responsibility and self-discipline. Homework is practice for life” (John D. Gartner, “Training for Life,” January 22, 2001). But what aspect of life? The point evidently is not to train children to make meaningful decisions, or become part of a democratic society, or learn to think critically. Rather, what’s being prescribed are lessons in doing whatever one is told.
37. For example, see David Brooks, “Marshmallows and Public Policy,” New York Times, May 7, 2006, p. A13.
38. Mischel, p. 212.
39. A “remarkably consistent finding” in delay-of-gratification studies, at least those designed so that waiting yields a bigger reward, is that “most children and adolescents do manage to delay.” In one such experiment, “83 out of the 104 subjects delayed the maximum number of times” (David C. Funder and Jack Block, “The Role of Ego-Control, Ego-Resiliency, and IQ in Delay of Gratification in Adolescence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 57, 1989, p. 1048). This suggests either that complaints about the hedonism and self-indulgence of contemporary youth may be exaggerated or that these studies of self-control are so contrived that all of their findings are of dubious relevance to the real world.
40. Mischel, p. 209.
41. Ibid., p. 212. See also Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Philip K. Peake, “The Nature of Adolescent Competencies Predicted by Preschool Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 54, 1988, p. 694.
42. Mischel, p. 211.
43. Ibid., p. 214. This finding is interesting in light of the fact that other writers have treated self-discipline and intelligence as very different characteristics. (See, for example, the title of the first article in note 45, below.)
44. Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Philip K. Peake, “Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-Regulatory Competencies from Preschool Delay of Gratification,” Developmental Psychology, vol. 26, 1990, p. 985. They add that the ability to put up with delay so one can make that choice is valuable, but of course this is different from arguing that the exercise of self-control in itself is beneficial.
45. Angela L. Duckworth and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents,” Psychological Science, vol. 16, 2005: 939-44; and Angela Lee Duckworth and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Self-Discipline Gives Girls the Edge,” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 98, 2006: 198-208.
46. I’ve reviewed the evidence on grades in Punished by Rewards (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993) and The Schools Our Children Deserve (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
47. Consider one of the studies that Duckworth and Seligman cite to prove that self-discipline predicts academic performance (that is, high grades). It found that such performance “seemed as much a function of attention to details and the rules of the academic game as it was of intellectual talent.” High-achieving students “were not particularly interested in ideas or in cultural or aesthetic pursuits. Moreover, they were not particularly tolerant or empathic; however, they did seem stable, pragmatic, and task-oriented, and lived in harmony with the rules and conventions of society. Finally, relative to students in general, these superior achievers seemed somewhat stodgy and unoriginal” (Robert Hogan and Daniel S. Weiss, “Personality Correlates of Superior Academic Achievement,” Journal of Counseling Psychology, vol. 21, 1974, p. 148).

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