Chapter 13 The Self-Regulation Perspective PDF

Chapter 13 The Self-Regulation Perspective Learning Objectives 13.1 Summarize how thinking leads to intentions, goals, and from them to behavior 13.2 Explain how self-regulation reflects a process comprising the elements involved in feedback control 13.3 Identify further themes in self-regulatio...

Chapter 13 The Self-Regulation Perspective Learning Objectives 13.1 Summarize how thinking leads to intentions, goals, and from them to behavior 13.2 Explain how self-regulation reflects a process comprising the elements involved in feedback control 13.3 Identify further themes in self-regulation 13.4 Assess self-regulatory qualities and goals 13.5 Outline how problems in behavior reflect problems in self-regulation 13.6 Outline problems and challenges related to the self-regulation perspective As Susan awakes, thoughts come to mind about the presentation she's to give this morning. While dressing, she rehearses the points she intends to make. She catches herself skipping too quickly from one point to another and makes a mental note that if she speeds up in that section she should take a deep breath and concentrate. She has planned what to wear to make the impression she wants to make, and just before leaving, she checks her appearance in the hall mirror. As she opens the door, she runs through a mental checklist of what she needs to have with her: notes for her presentation, money, purse, keys. Check to see that the door's locked. Check to be sure there's enough gas in the car. Check to see if there's time to take the scenic route to corporate headquarters. And she's off. "Good," Susan thinks. "Things are going just the way I want them to. Everything's right on track." People shift from one task to another as the day proceeds, yet there's usually coherence and continuity as well. Your days are usually planful (despite disruptions and impulsive side trips) and include many activities. How do you move so easily from one thing to another, keep it all organized, and make it all happen? These are some of the questions behind this chapter. The approach to personality discussed here is connected to several backgrounds. The most influential is ideas about naturally occurring organized systems and how they work (Ford, 1987; von Bertalanffy, 1968). There are also occasional ideas from robotics (Brooks, 2002; Dawson, 2004; Fellous & Arbib, 2005) and other discussions of artificial systems. Perhaps the easiest way to begin discussing this approach to personality, though, is to think of it as a viewpoint on aspects of motivation. Much of this chapter focuses on how people adopt, prioritize, and attain goals. These functions resemble ideas discussed in Chapter 5 as motives. It will also be useful to keep in mind the cognitive view of personality discussed in Chapter 12, because a background assumption here is that people have organized networks of memories. Now, though, the focus is on how the cognitions and memories result in behavior. 13.1: From Cognition to Behavior 13.1 Summarize how thinking leads to intentions, goals, and from them to behavior As noted in Chapter 12, the schemas people use to understand events often include information about behavior. People use this information to recognize what others are doing, and they also use it to guide the making of behavior. It helps people know what to do in scripted situations (Burroughs & Drews, 1991; Dodge, 1986). For example, the dining out script lets you understand someone else's event, but it also reminds you what to do if you are dining out---order before you're served and pay the bill before you leave. What's the relation between the information used to recognize acts and the information used to do acts? It's not clear whether one schema serves both purposes or whether there are two parallel forms---one for understanding and one for doing. However, there seems to be at least some overlap. What are called mirror neurons are active both when an action is being watched and when the same action is being done (Gallese, 2001; Rizzolatti, Fogassi, & Gallese, 2002). This suggests a strong link between thinking and doing. 13.1.1: Intentions Sometimes, a situation evokes a schema with built-in guidelines for action. Often, though, actions follow from explicit intentions. How are intentions formed? One view is that people use a kind of implicit mental algebra to create an action probability; if the probability is high enough, an intention forms to do the act (Ajzen, 1985, 1988; Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). People deciding whether to do something weigh several kinds of information (see Figure 13.1). They think about the action's likely outcome and how much they want it. For example, you might think that spending money on a Caribbean trip over spring break would result in a lot of fun, and you really want to have that fun. The outcome and its desirability merge to form an attitude about the behavior. Because it stems from your own wants, your attitude is your personal orientation to the act. Figure 13.1 Foundations of intentions. The belief that an act will produce a particular outcome and the personal desirability of the outcome merge to form an attitude (a personal orientation to the act). The belief that other people want you to do the act and the desire to go along with their wishes merge to form a subjective norm (a social orientation to the act). The attitude and the subjective norm are weighted in forming the intention. The intention then influences the behavior. A diagram of a person\'s attitude Description automatically generated The diagram shows the belief that behavior leads to outcome and a desire for outcomes combine together to form a personal attitude. The belief that others want you to do an action and the desire to what others want combine together to make subjective norm (Social). The attitude and the subjective norm together form intention and the intention eventually influences the behavior. Two other kinds of information pertain to the act's social meaning to you. First is whether people who matter to you want you to do the action. You might think about your parents, who want you to come home instead. Or you might think about your friends, who think the trip is a great idea. The other element here is how much you want to please the people you're thinking about. How much do you want to please your parents---or at least stay on their good side? How much do you want to please your friends? These elements merge to form a subjective norm about the action. The intention derives from both the attitude and the subjective norm. If both favor the behavior, you'll form a strong intention to do it. If both oppose the behavior, you'll form a strong intention not to do it. It's more complex when the attitude and subjective norm conflict. Sometimes you want to do something, but you know others want you not to. In those cases, your intention depends on which matters more: satisfying yourself or satisfying the others. 13.1.2: Goals Behind what we've said so far is the idea that behavior is directed toward goals. Schemas suggest actions to take. Forming an intention means setting up a goal to reach. The idea that experience is organized around goals has been discussed a lot in the past two decades (e.g., Austin & Vancouver, 1996; Elliott & Dweck, 1988; Freund & Baltes, 2002; Johnson, Chang, & Lord, 2006). Diverse terms have been used, but one theme runs through all of them: that people's goals energize their activities, direct their movements---even provide meaning for their lives (Baumeister, 1989). Goals vary a lot. There are overall goals and subgoals, or strategies. The path you choose to an overall goal depends on other aspects of your life. Different people use different strategies to pursue the same life goals (Langston & Cantor, 1989). For example, someone who's relatively shy will have different strategies for pursuing the goal of making friends than someone who's more outgoing. In this view, the self is made up partly of goals and the organizations among them. Indeed, there's evidence that traits derive their meaning from the goals to which they relate (Read, Jones, & Miller, 1990; Roberts & Robins, 2000). There's also evidence that, without even realizing it, people choose their friends based partly on whether those people can help them reach their own goals (Slotter & Gardner, 2011). Goals vary from person to person. Yet evidence from diverse cultures suggests that goals naturally form a two-dimensional space, in which some are compatible and some conflict (Grouzet et al., 2005). For example, spirituality is compatible with community but in conflict with hedonic pleasure (see Figure 13.2). As a person's values shift in importance over time, an increase in the importance of one value (e.g., community) is accompanied by slight increases in the importance of other values that align with it (e.g., spirituality and affiliation) (Bardi, Lee, Hormann-Towfigh, & Soutar, 2009). Figure 13.2 Circumplex formed by relationships among diverse goals, across 15 cultures. Goals vary along the dimension of intrinsic versus extrinsic and separately along the dimension of concerning the physical self versus transcending the self.  The diagram shows intrinsic versus extrinsic as one dimension and self-transcendence versus physical self as another dimension. Intersection of these two dimensions leads to various goals as follows: Self-transcendence and intrinsic: Spirituality, community Physical self and intrinsic: Affiliation, self-acceptance, hedonic pleasure Physical self and extrinsic: Popularity, financial success Self-transcendence and extrinsic: Conformity. 13.1.3: Goal Setting Many goals specify actions without any standard of excellence. The goal of going water skiing on a hot afternoon, for instance, doesn't necessarily imply a goal of excellence (though it might). Forming an intention to go to the grocery store creates a guide for behavior, but it's not very challenging. On the other hand, performance level is clearly an issue in some cases. In many activities, the goal isn't just to perform; it's to do well. For example, in taking a college course, the goal for many people isn't just to complete the course but to do well in it. Another example is business performance. The goal isn't just to survive but to thrive. One question that arises in such contexts is this: Does setting some particular level of goal influence how well you do? Yes. Setting specific high goals leads to higher performance (Locke & Latham, 1990). This is true compared to specific easy goals, and it's also true compared to the goal of "Do your best." Apparently, most people don't really hear "Do your best." Rather, they hear "Try to do reasonably well." Thus, setting this goal leads to poorer performance than setting a specific high goal. Why do higher goals lead to better performance? Three reasons. First, setting a higher goal makes you try harder. For example, you know you won't solve 50 problems in 10 minutes unless you push yourself. So you start out pushing yourself. Second, you're more persistent. A brief spurt of effort won't do; you'll have to push yourself the entire time. Third, high goals make you concentrate more, making you less susceptible to distractions. In all these respects, setting a lower goal causes people to ease back a little. The effect of setting high goals is well documented, but it has a very important limitation. In particular, if you consider a goal that's totally unrealistic, you won't adopt it and you won't try for it. If you don't adopt it, it's as if the goal doesn't exist. The key, then, is to take up a goal that's high enough to sustain strong effort but not so high that it's rejected instead of adopted. 13.1.4: Implementation Intentions and the Importance of Strategies In describing goals, we said that there typically are subgoals, or strategies related to the goals. Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues (Brandstätter, Lengfelder, & Gollwitzer, 2001; Gollwitzer, 1999; Gollwitzer & Brandstätter, 1997) have made a similar distinction between two kinds of intentions. A goal intention is the intent to reach a particular outcome. An implementation intention concerns the how, when, and where of the process. It's an intention to take specific actions when encountering specific circumstances. This linking of context to action is what was described as an if... then link in Chapter 12 (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). Some if... then links are habitual and well learned (Brandstätter & Frank, 2002). Others need to be formed consciously for specific intended paths of behavior. Implementation intentions are more concrete than goal intentions. They serve the goal intentions. They're important because they help people get started in doing the behavior, and they also help prevent goal striving from straying off course (Achtziger, Gollwitzer, & Sheeran, 2008). Sometimes people fail to fulfill goal intentions because they haven't decided how to do so. Having an implementation intention, which is concrete and specific, takes care of that. Sometimes people fail to act because they're distracted and opportunities pass by. Having an implementation intention helps them recognize the opportunity and act on it (Brandstätter et al., 2001): "If I see a chance to spend 10 minutes on this assignment, then I will focus extra hard and do so." Sometimes, people fail to act because they're tired. Having an implementation intention helps them overcome that (Webb & Sheeran, 2003). "If I feel tired, then I will take three deep breaths and renew my focus." Forming an implementation intention to do something hard (e.g., writing an assigned paper over Christmas break) greatly increases the likelihood of actually doing it (Gollwitzer & Brandstätter, 1997). Forming implementation intentions has even been shown to help people eat a healthier diet (Stadler, Oettingen, & Gollwitzer, 2010). Implementation intentions act both by making the situational cue more easily recognized and by establishing a link from cue to action (Webb & Sheeran, 2007). Even so, implementation intentions by themselves don't seem to be enough. You also have to have a strong and active goal intention (Adriaanse, Gollwitzer, De Ridder, de Wit, & ­Kroese, 2011; Sheeran, Webb, & Gollwitzer, 2005). In fact, having an implementation intention helps more if the goal fits with your broad sense of self than if it doesn't (Koestner, Lekes, Powers, & Chicoine, 2002). Focused implementation intentions have been found to be helpful in widely varying situations. They help adolescents avoid temptations to smoke (Conner & Higgins, 2010), and they help prevent unwanted pregnancies ­(Martin, Sheeran, Slade, Wright, & Dibble, 2009). They help people take the steps to regular exercise (Prestwich et al., 2012). They can help people overcome unwanted habits (Adriaanse et al., 2011). Implementation intentions create a link between a situational cue and a strategy for moving toward the goal. Other work, using the concept of possible self, also shows the importance of having such links. As described in Chapter 12, possible selves are images of the person you think you might become. They can serve as reference points for self-regulation (Hoyle & Sherrill, 2006). For a desired possible self to influence behavior, however, you have to have strategies to attain it (Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006; Oyserman, Bybee, Terry, & Hart-Johnson, 2004). If the strategies aren't already there, you need to put some effort into creating them. 13.1.5: Deliberative and Implemental Mindsets Having intentions matters, but forming intentions and following them are different things. People form and execute with different mindsets (Heckhausen & Gollwitzer, 1987). Forming a goal intention requires weighing possibilities, thinking of pros and cons, and juggling options. Doing this requires a deliberative mindset, because the person is deliberating the decision to act. The deliberative mindset is relatively open-minded, careful, and cautious, to make the best choice (Fujita, Gollwitzer, & Oettingen, 2007; Taylor & Gollwitzer, 1995). Once the intention is formed, actually doing the behavior entails a different mindset. People no longer deliberate. Now, it's all about doing. This is called an implemental mindset, because it focuses on implementing the intention to act. This mindset is optimistic. It minimizes potential problems, in the service of trying as hard as possible to carry out the action (Taylor & Gollwitzer, 1995). Generally, this mindset fosters persistence (Brandstätter & Frank, 2002). There's evidence that these two mindsets may use different areas of the brain. Lengfelder and Gollwitzer (2001) studied patients with frontal lobe damage and patients with damage in other areas of the brain. Those people with frontal damage were impaired in planning. However, if they were provided with if... then implementation intentions, they weren't impaired in acting. This finding suggests that the planning is done in the frontal cortex, and the handling of the action is done somewhere else. 13.2: Self-Regulation and Feedback Control 13.2 Explain how self-regulation reflects a process comprising the elements involved in feedback control We've discussed behavioral schemas, intentions, goals, the impact of lofty goals, and the importance of having strategies. But once a goal has been set---an intention formed---what makes sure the behavior you actually do is the one you set out to do? This question brings us to the concept of feedback control (Carver & Scheier, 1981, 1998; MacKay, 1963, 1966; Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960; Powers, 1973; Scheier & Carver, 1988; Wiener, 1948). 13.2.1: Feedback Control What's called a negative feedback loop has four parts (see Figure 13.3). The first is a value for self-regulation: a goal, standard of comparison, or reference value for behavior (all of these mean the same thing here). These values can come from many places and can exist at many levels of abstraction. For example, plans, intentions, possible selves, and strategies all are values that can be used in self-regulation. Figure 13.3 Diagram of a discrepancy-reducing feedback loop, which shows the basic processes presumed to underlie self-corrective behavioral self-regulation in both artificial and living systems. The diagram shows that goal, standard, reference value and input function (Perception of your present behavior and its effect) lead to comparator which gives the output function (Changes in your next behavior). The output disturbance affects the environment and these in combination with the output function become input for the next cycle. The second element, input, is a perception of your present behavior and its effects. This just means noting what you're doing and the effect it's having. Often this is just a flicker of awareness, sensing in a vague way what you're doing. Other times it means thinking carefully about what you've been doing over a longer period. Sometimes, people literally watch what they're doing (e.g., at dance studios). Although it's easiest to talk about input in terms of thinking, this function (as a function) doesn't require consciousness (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). Input perceptions are compared against the goal by something termed a comparator. If you're doing what you intended, if there's no discrepancy, you continue as before. If your behavior differs from what you intended, though, a final process kicks in. This process changes the behavior, adjusts it to bring it more in line with your intention. (For a subtle theoretical issue pertaining to this viewpoint, see Box 13.1.) Box 13.1 Theoretical Issue: Feedback versus Reinforcement It's long been known that people doing tasks benefit from knowing the result of their last effort (Locke & Latham, 1990; Schmidt, 1988). However, different people interpret this evidence differently. In the view under discussion, knowledge of results is feedback, which people use to adjust their behavior. It's sometimes argued, however, that feedback is a reinforcer (Kulhavy & Stock, 1989). That is a rather different view. What's the role of reward and punishment in self- regulation? Researchers whose work is discussed in this chapter don't entirely agree. Some see reward---particularly self-reward---as important. For example, Bandura (1986) holds that self-reward or self-praise after attaining a desired goal is a crucial aspect of self-regulation. On the other side, we've argued that this concept isn't needed (Carver & Scheier, 1981, 1990), that it doesn't add anything. Although self-praise may occur, it's only a reaction to an event; the event is what matters. The crucial events, in this view, are the goal attainment and the person's realization of how it happened. The concept of reinforcement comes from learning theory. In thinking about this issue here, it's of interest that learning theorists have also argued about the role of reinforcement in learning. (Tolman 1932) believed that reward---even to a laboratory rat---doesn't stamp anything in, but just provides information the animal can learn from. Specifically, the animal learns what leads to what, by experiencing the events in association with one another. Tolman said rewards and punishments aren't necessary for learning, but they draw attention to aspects of the learning situation that are particularly relevant. It's also been found that a simple social reinforcer, such as saying "Good," has more impact if you've been led to believe that the person saying "Good" does so only rarely (Babad, 1973). Presumably, this is because rare events provide more information than common events. This finding supports ­Tolman's suggestion that it may be the informational value of the reinforcer that matters, not the reinforcer itself. The word feedback is used because when you adjust the action, the change is "fed back" in the form of a new perception, which is rechecked against the reference value. This loop is also called a control system, because each event in the loop depends on the result of a previous one. Thus, each event controls what goes on in the next one. It's called a negative loop because its component processes negate, or eliminate, discrepancies between the behavior and the goal. This concept has several implications. For one, it assumes that behavior is purposeful (as do the goal concepts discussed earlier). In this view, the structure of most behavior involves trying to conform to some reference value. (We'll return to an exception later.) Life is a process of forming goals and intentions (broad and narrow ones, brief and long term ones) and adjusting behavior to match them, using feedback to tell you whether you're doing as you intended. According to this logic, self-regulation is continuous and never ending. Every change in output changes current conditions. The new condition has to be checked against the goal. Furthermore, goals are often dynamic---evolving over time. For example, think of the goal of doing well in school, or making a particular impression on someone (and maintaining it), or taking a vacation trip. You do well in school not by going to a particular end point but by doing well at many tasks over time. You take a vacation trip not by leaving and coming back but by doing activities that constitute vacationing. There's a continuous interplay between adjusting your action and moving forward to the next phase of an evolving goal.  For feedback control to occur, people need to monitor what they're currently doing. As we said about goals, the term standard here means only that it's the value being used as a guide. It doesn't necessarily mean a standard of excellence (though it can). Think of a student who's regulating behavior around the goal of making a C in a course by looking over class notes the night before the exam but not doing much more. The structure of this behavior (setting a goal, checking, and adjusting as needed) is exactly the same as that of a student who's trying to make an A. The two students are just using two different standards. 13.2.2: Self-Directed Attention and the Action of the Comparator Does human behavior follow the pattern of feedback control? It seems to. One source of evidence is studies of the effects of self-directed attention. It's been argued that when you have a goal or intention in mind, directing your attention inward engages the comparator of the loop that's managing your behavior (Carver & Scheier, 1981, 1998). Some research on self-directed attention exposes participants to things that remind them of themselves (e.g., an audience, a TV camera, or a mirror). Other studies measure the strength of people's natural tendency to be self-reflective (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975; Trapnell & Campbell, 1999). The idea that self-directed attention engages a comparator leads to two kinds of predictions. First, self-focus should increase the tendency to compare your goals with your current behavior. It's hard to study that, but here's an indirect way: Create a situation in which people can't make a mental comparison between a goal and behavior without getting some concrete information. Put people in that situation, then measure how much they seek the information. Presumably, more seeking of the information implies more comparison. In studies based on this reasoning, self-focused persons sought comparison-relevant information more than less self-focused persons (Scheier & Carver, 1983). If self-directed attention engages a comparator, behavior should be regulated more closely to the goal, and it is. As an illustration, people in one project (Carver, 1975) said they either opposed or favored using punishment as a teaching tool. Later, all had to punish someone for errors in learning. All were told to use their own judgment about how much punishment to use, but only those who were self-aware actually relied on their own opinions. Many other studies also show that self-focus leads to goal matching, ranging quite widely in the salient standards of comparison (for review, see Carver & Scheier, 1998). Research on self-awareness is not the only source of evidence on these points. Evidence from other kinds of research indicate that monitoring of goal progress and responding to discrepancies are important components in the process by which intentions lead to actions (de Bruin et al., 2012). 13.2.3: Mental Contrasting and Goal Matching Another set of studies that seem to support the feedback principle has focused more specifically on what Gabriele Oettingen calls mental contrasting of present states with desired end states (Oettingen, 2014; Oettingen & Kappes, 2009). Mental contrasting seems to engage the comparator function of the self-control loop. Thinking only about a future goal, or only about your present state, doesn't have the same effect as thinking about both of them together. Given that people are relatively confident about being able to reach the desired goal, mental contrasting energizes their behavior (Oettingen et al., 2009). The result is that people are more successful in attaining their goals. Mental contrasting also seems to help people use feedback of poor performance productively, focusing them more firmly on their goals (Kappes, Oettingen, & Pak, 2012). It has even been found to help in the self-­regulation of goal pursuit among children at risk for attention deficit problems (Gawrilow, Morgenroth, Schultz, Oettingen, & Gollwitzer, 2013). 13.2.4: Hierarchical Organization These studies all suggest that feedback processes might be involved in behavior. But how do goals and intention actually create physical action? An answer suggested by ­William Powers (1973) is that feedback loops form layers. He argued that this organization is what makes physical action possible. Others have made related arguments (e.g., Broadbent, 1977; Gallistel, 1980; Rosenbaum, 1987, 1990; Toates, 2006; Vallacher & Wegner, 1987). The notion of a feedback hierarchy assumes that there are higher-level and lower-level goals and that these high- and low-level goals relate to each other (Chulef, Read, & Walsh, 2001). You have the goal of attaining a particular possible self, but you may also have the goal of having clean clothes to wear and the goal of making it to your psychology class on time. How do these things fit together? Recall the structure of the feedback loop from Figure 13.3. Powers said that in a hierarchy, the output of a high-level loop consists of setting a goal for a lower-level loop (see Figure 13.4). High-level loops don't "behave" by creating physical actions but by providing guides to the loops below them. Only the very lowest loops create physical acts, by controlling muscle groups (Rosenbaum, 1987, 1990, 2005). Figure 13.4 Diagram of a three-level hierarchy of feedback systems. This diagram shows the "cascade" of control that flows from higher-level loops to lower-level ones. High-level loops set the goals for the loops directly below them. The levels of control illustrated here are those at the top of the hierarchy proposed by Powers (1973). The diagram shows a cross-section of the behavior of a man who is actively attempting to (1) match his self-perceptions to his idealized self, by (2) following the principle of thoughtfulness, which is being manifested (3) in the programmatic activity of buying flowers for his wife. The diagram shows ideal self-image (System concept) as the highest-level goal, goal 1. Goal 1 leads to control level C1. The output from C1 together with goal 2, which is to be thoughtful (Principle), leads to control level C2. Output of C2 together with goal 3, which is to buy flowers for Linda, leads to control level C3. The output of C3 is to carry out the program. From lowest level output input 1, input 2, and input 3 are provided to C1, C2, and C3 respectively. The levels proposed by Powers that are most relevant to personality are shown in Figure 13.4. At the top are very abstract qualities he called system concepts. An example is the broad sense of ideal self. Richard, the person whose behavior is portrayed in Figure 13.4, is trying to live up to his desired self-image. Doing this resembles the experience of self-actualization (see Chapter 11). It promotes the sense of personal wholeness and integration. You don't just go out and be your ideal self, though. Trying to attain that ideal self means trying to live in accord with the principles it incorporates. Thus, Powers called the next level principle control. Principles are broad guidelines. They specify broad qualities, which can be displayed in many ways. When they're active, principles help you decide what activities to start and what choices to make as you do them (Verplanken & Holland, 2002). Principles tend to correspond to traits, or values. When people think about their behavior in these relatively abstract terms, they tend to express those values in their actions (Torelli & Kaikati, 2009). As shown in Figure 13.4, Richard's ideal self includes a principle of thoughtfulness. This principle can be used as a guide for many kinds of action, including taking this opportunity to buy flowers. As another example, the principle of honesty would lead a person to ignore an opportunity to cheat on an exam. The principle of frugality would lead a person to choose a moderately priced restaurant over an expensive one. What defines something as a principle is its abstractness and broad applicability, not its social appropriateness. Thus, expedience is also a principle, even though it's not socially desirable. Knowing only that something is a principle doesn't even tell what direction it pulls behavior. For example, different principles lead people to support affirmative action or to oppose it (Reyna, Henry, Korfmacher, & Tucker, 2005). Just as you don't go out and be your ideal self, you don't just go out and do principles. Principles specify ­programs (or decisions within programs; see Figure 13.4). A program resembles what we called a script in Chapter 12. It specifies a general course of action but with many details left out. Enacting a program (or script) thus requires you to make choices within a larger set of possibilities. Programs are strategies. The principle of thoughtfulness led Richard to enter the program of buying flowers. This program is partly specified: Stop at the florist, pick out flowers, and pay for them. But which flowers he gets will depend on what's available; he can pay with cash or a credit card; and he may or may not have to put money into a parking meter. Two more things are worth noting about this example: Both stem from the fact that there are several ways to conform to this principle. First, Richard might have chosen another program---perhaps making Linda a special dinner or washing her car. Entering either of these programs would have conformed to the same principle. Second, matching the principle of thoughtfulness doesn't require entering a program; the principle might have come into play during a program. For example, if Linda had told Richard to buy flowers on his way home, he'd be buying flowers anyway. The thoughtfulness principle might have become salient while in the buying-flowers program, leading Richard to buy Linda's favorite flower, even though it's out of season and therefore expensive. Much of what people do in their day-to-day lives seems programlike, or scriptlike. Most of the intentions you form in an average day involve programs. Doing the laundry, going to a store or to the movies, studying for an exam, making lunch, trying to get noticed by that special person in class---all these are programs. They all have general courses of predictable acts and subgoals, but exactly what you do at a given point can vary, depending on the situation.  Much of what we do in our day-to-day lives, such as grocery shopping, has a programlike or scriptlike character. Very likely there are well-learned links between many principles and the programs to which they pertain. Connections between programs and lower levels of control are probably even stronger. For example, if you have a goal in mind concerning travel, it automatically activates information about a plausible and common way to get where you are thinking about going (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000). 13.2.5: Issues Concerning Hierarchical Organization Several questions come up when you think about hierarchies. For example, are all the levels active all the time? Not necessarily. People can go for a very long time without thinking about their ideal selves. Behavior often is guided for long periods by programs. To put it differently, lower levels may sometimes be functionally superordinate. That's probably what happens when people do the routine "maintenance" activities of life: buying groceries, washing dishes, driving to school. At such times, people may lose all sight of higher-order goals. Note also that programs inherently require decisions. That in itself may cause them to be attended to more often than other levels. It's interesting that when people describe themselves, they tend to describe things they do, rather than what they are (McGuire & McGuire, 1986). This suggests that the program level may be especially salient to people. When lower levels are functionally superordinate, it's almost as though the higher layers have been disconnected. But the disconnect isn't permanent. Goals at higher levels can be affected by things that happen while lower levels are in charge. The effect can be either good or bad. A program (buying shoes on sale) can help you match a principle (frugality), even if that's not why you're doing it (you just liked the shoes). A program can also create a problem, if it violates the principle. For example, many health-conscious people have a principle of eating low-fat foods. But if they get caught up in the action at a party (with lower levels in charge), they may eat lots of greasy junk food, which they will later regret. We said earlier that goals can be achieved in diverse ways. Any specific act can also be done in the service of diverse principles. For example, Richard in Figure 13.4 could have been buying flowers not to be thoughtful but to be manipulative---to get on Linda's good side. He would engage in the same actions, but they would be aimed at a very different higher-order goal. Another point is that people often try to match several values at once---at the same level. In some cases, the values are compatible (being frugal while being conscientious). In other cases, they're less so (being frugal while dressing well; getting good grades while having a very active social life). In these cases, matching one value creates a problem for the other (Emmons & King, 1988; Emmons, King, & Sheldon, 1993). 13.2.6: Evidence of Hierarchical Organization Is behavior organized hierarchically? Work by Robin ­Vallacher and Dan Wegner suggests that it is (Vallacher & Wegner, 1985, 1987). They began by asking how people view their actions, a process called action identification. Any action can be identified in many ways. For example, taking notes in class can be seen as "sitting in a room and making marks on paper with a pen," "taking notes in a class," "trying to do well in a course," or "getting an education." Some identities are concrete, others more abstract. How you think about your action presumably says something about the goal you're using in acting. Vallacher and Wegner (1985, 1987) suggest that people generally tend to see their actions in as high-level a way as they can. Thus, you're more likely to see your student behavior as "attending classes," "getting an education," or "listening to a lecture" than as "walking into a building, sitting down, and listening to someone talk." But if people start to struggle in regulating an act at that higher level, they retreat to a lower-level identity for the action. In terms of the last section, difficulty at a high level causes a lower level to become functionally superordinate. Using that lower-level identity, the person irons out the problem. As the problem is resolved, the person tends to drift again to a higher-level identification. For example, if you're in class taking notes and having trouble understanding the lecture, you may stop thinking of your behavior as "summarizing the points of the lecture" and start thinking of it as "writing down everything what the lecturer says." If the lecture gets easier to follow after a while, you may once again be able to start thinking of your behavior in more abstract terms. 13.2.7:  Construal Levels An interesting twist on the idea of different levels of abstraction was developed by Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman (2003, 2010). They suggested that how people construe their activities depends partly on how distant those activities are from the present moment. The farther in the future the activities are, the more abstractly they are viewed. When the action comes closer to the present, it becomes more concrete and less abstract. This reasoning is consistent with the idea that when you actually have to do something, you need to pay attention to the concrete actions involved in doing it. Essentially, the idea is this: When you have a paper due for your psych class at the end of the semester, you think "I'm going to write a paper"; but when the end of the semester is a week and a half away, you think "I'm going to locate those articles and try to fit ideas from one of them together with ideas from the other one and compose it into paragraphs that have a logical flow." More recently, Trope and Liberman (2010) expanded on this idea. They now view time-based construals as a special case of a more general principle of psychological distance. The greater the psychological distance, the more abstract the mental representation becomes. The closer the psychological distance, the more concrete and detailed the mental representation becomes. Psychological distance can be created in many ways: time, space, social distance, likelihood of occurrence, and even third-person versus first-person viewpoints (Libby, Shaeffer, & Eibach, 2009). Furthermore, the different kinds of distance are interchangeable to some degree. If you think of something as unlikely, it also seems farther away in time and space. Since how people construe their behavior (abstractly or concretely) influences the level at which they try to regulate it, these construal differences can be quite important. 13.2.8: Emotions How does the self-regulation approach to personality view emotions? Early in the history of this way of thinking, Herb Simon (1967) addressed this question. People often have several goals at the same time, but they often have to pursue them sequentially (e.g., you go to a gas station, then stop for lunch, then drive to the beach, where you study for an exam while getting some sun, and then you go home and do some laundry if there's time). The order in which you do things is partly a matter of priorities---how important each goal is to you at the time. Priorities are subject to rearrangement. Simon (1967) argued that emotions are an internal call to rearrange. Anxiety is a signal that you're not paying enough attention to personal well-being (an important goal) and you need to do so. Anger may be a signal that your autonomy (another goal that people value) needs to have a higher priority. Implicit in this analysis is that progress toward many goals is monitored outside awareness, as you focus on one goal at a time. If a problem arises for some goal, emotion pertaining to it arises. If the problem gets big enough, the emotion becomes intense enough to interrupt what you're doing. For example, look back at the goals described two paragraphs earlier. If you had decided to put off buying gas until after doing the other things, you might start to feel anxious about maybe being stranded at the beach with an empty gas tank. If the anxiety got strong enough, you'd change your mind (reprioritize) and stop for the gas sooner. Simon's theory fits the idea that emotions are produced by a system that monitors "how well things are going" toward attaining goals (Carver & Scheier, 1990, 1998). When things are going well, you feel good. When things are going really well, you feel joy, even ecstasy. When things are going poorly, on the other hand, negative feelings arise: frustration, anxiety, sadness. If you're actually losing ground, the negative feelings intensify. In all these cases, the emotion is a subjective readout of how well you're doing regarding that goal. Evidence fitting this view comes from several studies. As an example, Hsee and Abelson (1991, Experiment 2) put people in hypothetical situations where they would bet money on sports events. Each person viewed a display showing progress toward winning---at different rates---and indicated how satisfied he or she would be with each event. Of special interest are events in which the starting and ending points were identical but the rate of change differed. Participants liked the faster change better than the slower one. Feelings have implications for actions. As suggested by Simon (1967), when something is going badly and negative feelings arise, you often engage more effort toward the goal the feeling relates to. If you're behind at something and feeling frustrated, you try harder. If you're scared of something, you try harder to get away from it. How do positive feelings affect actions? It's been argued that they also affect priorities (Carver, 2003). When you feel good about your progress toward some goal, you can "coast" a little on it and check to see if anything else needs your attention. There's evidence from several sources that this sort of coasting sometimes happens (Fulford, Johnson, Llabre, & Carver, 2010; Louro, Pieters, & Zeelenberg, 2007). Coasting also helps in the process of juggling many goals at once. If you're ahead on one goal, you can ease up on it to attend to other goals you're pursuing. 13.2.9: Expectancies Influence Effort versus Disengagement Until the last section, this chapter focused mostly on behavior that occurs with no major difficulties. However, things don't always work so smoothly. People often encounter obstacles when they try to carry out their intentions and attain their goals. What happens then? As indicated just earlier, obstacles cause negative feelings. If the obstacles are serious, they also tend to disrupt effort---sometimes briefly, sometimes longer. This can occur before you start (if you anticipate trouble) or while you're acting (if snags arise along the way). The interruptions remove you temporarily from the action and lead you to assess how likely you are to reach your goal, given the situation you're in with the resources you have. Expectancy of success is a concept that's come up in other chapters. We discussed it in the motive viewpoint (Chapter 5), in social learning theory (Chapter 10), and in the cognitive view (Chapter 12). The way expectancies function in self-regulation models is essentially the same as in the others. Having confidence in overcoming obstacles leads people back to self-regulatory effort. When people feel enough doubt, however, they are more likely to disengage, or reduce their effort toward goal attainment. They may even abandon the goal altogether---temporarily or permanently (Klinger, 1975; Kukla, 1972; Wright, 1996). Levels of effort fall along a continuum. It can be useful, though, to think of variations in effort as forming a rough dichotomy. Think of it as the question of whether you keep trying or quit. In many cases, people have only those two options. This view on what happens lets the person who's "walked into a corner" stop, back out of it, and take up another goal (Mens, Scheier, & Wrosch, in press; Wrosch, Dunne, Scheier, & Schulz, 2006; Wrosch, Scheier, Carver, & Schulz, 2003; Wrosch, Scheier, & Miller, 2013). Different people emphasize different facets of expectancies. We've focused on confidence versus doubt about attaining outcomes, rather than reasons for the confidence or doubt (Carver & Scheier, 1998). Bandura, in contrast (see Chapter 10), stresses efficacy expectancy: the belief that one has the personal capability of doing the action that needs to be done. Regardless of which variation you prefer, there's evidence that expectancies play an important role in how hard people try and how well they do. People who are confident about reaching their goals (or who hold perceptions of high efficacy) are more persistent and perform better than people who are doubtful. Confident individuals do better in many ways (see Box 13.2). Box 13.2  Confidence about Life: Effects of Generalized Optimism Expectancies are important determinants of people's behavior. The expectancies considered in the main text are mostly specific ones: confidence about making a desired impression, achieving an academic goal, or carrying out a specific strategy. However, just as people have both specific and general goals, people also have both specific and generalized expectancies. What's been known for centuries as optimism is generalized confidence; what's known as pessimism is generalized doubt---not about a specific outcome but about life in general (Carver & Scheier, 2014; Carver, Scheier, & Segerstrom, 2010; Scheier & Carver, 1992; Scheier, Carver, & Bridges, 2001). This generalized expectancy is very traitlike. It's quite stable over time and seems genetically influenced (Plomin et al., 1992). Optimism, as a dimension of personality, has been studied for a long while, and a lot is known about it (Carver & Scheier, 2014; Carver et al., 2010; Mens, Scheier, & Carver, in press a). People who are optimistic about life are liked better than pessimists. Probably for that reason, they're better at forming social networks when they go to a new environment (Brissette, Scheier, & Carver, 2002). They are also better in relationships, because they are more supportive of their partners in resolving conflicts (Srivastava, McGonigal, Richards, Butler, & Gross, 2006). A lot of the research on optimism concerns its impact on how people deal with stressful situations. Optimists deal better with adversity than pessimists, whether experiencing a missile attack (Zeidner & Hammer, 1992) or confronting cancer or heart disease (Carver et al., 1993; Scheier et al., 1989). Optimists have less distress, are more focused on moving forward, and are less likely to withdraw from their usual activities (Carver, Lehman, & Antoni, 2003). They also seem more prepared to accept the situation as real (Carver et al., 1993). They don't stick their heads in the sand and ignore threats to their well-being. Most of what's known about optimism concerns people's actions and subjective emotional experiences. Increasingly, however, research has gone beyond these topics to look at people's physical responses to adversity. For example, after having major heart surgery, pessimists were more likely than optimists to require rehospitalization (Scheier et al., 1999). Optimists literally healed better. Other recent studies have related optimism to a lower risk of cancer death (Allison, Guichard, Fung, & Gilain, 2003), cardiovascular death (Giltay, Kamphuis, Kalmijn, Zitman, & Kromhout, 2006), and mortality in general (Tindle et al., 2009; see also Rasmussen, Scheier, & Greenhouse, 2009). The idea that this personality trait may have pervasive health benefits is increasingly being investigated (Mens et al., in press b; Scheier, Carver, & Armstrong, 2012). For example, consider a study of women learning to protect themselves against sexual assault (Ozer & Bandura, 1990). They learned skills for self-defense and verbal tactics to deal with dangerous situations. At several points, they rated their confidence that they could do both the physical maneuvers and the verbal tactics. They also rated their confidence that they could turn off thoughts about sexual assault. The most important outcome was ratings of the extent to which they took part in (or avoided) activities outside the home. The results were complex, but a broad theme runs through them. The sense of confidence was very important. The women's confidence that they could use their new coping skills related to perceptions of less vulnerability and ultimately to behavior. In sum, having confidence in diverse areas helped the women cope more effectively with their social world. 13.2.10: Partial Disengagement We've distinguished sharply here between effort and giving up. Sometimes, though, the line blurs. Sometimes a goal can't be attained, but another one can be substituted for it (Freund & Baltes, 2002; Wrosch et al., 2003). For example, suppose that a man who enjoys sports becomes wheelchair bound. He can't play football any longer, but he can turn to sports that don't require using his legs. Sometimes disengagement involves only scaling back from a lofty goal in a given domain to a less demanding one. That's disengagement, in the sense that the person is giving up the first goal. It's more limited, in the sense that it doesn't mean leaving the domain entirely. Partial disengagement keeps you engaged in the domain you had wanted to quit. By scaling back---giving up in a small way---you keep trying to move ahead---thus not giving up in a larger way. We stress that whether giving up is bad or good depends on the context (Wrosch et al., 2003, 2006). In some cases, it's bad. It's a poor way of coping with the ordinary difficulties of life. Sometimes being persistent would pay off in success. In such cases, the goal shouldn't be abandoned easily. On the other hand, it's necessary to give up or defer goals when circumstances make it hard or impossible to reach them. It's senseless to hold onto a lost love who will never return. Giving up sometimes is the right response. Even when it is, it sometimes doesn't happen. In these cases, the failure to disengage leads to continuing distress (Dunne, Wrosch, & Miller, 2011). We return to this point later on, when we consider problems in behavior. 13.3: Further Themes in Self-Regulation 13.3 Identify further themes in self-regulation The chapter thus far has presented a picture in which people form intentions, then shift to a mode of implementing the intentions, which may go well or poorly. We've talked a little about the fact that people have goals at various levels of abstraction and the fact that people have many goals at once (and thus many semi-autonomous feedback loops going at the same time). Now we bring up three complications to this picture. 13.3.1: Approach and Avoidance We've focused on the idea that self-regulation involves moving toward goals. An issue that came up in other chapters also comes up here: Not all actions are about approach. Some are about avoidance. By this term, we don't mean disengaging from a desired goal. We mean actively trying to get away (or stay away) from a threat. Discussion of the motive view on personality (Chapter 5) noted that two opposite motives can underlie the same overt action. You can try to perform well at a task either to approach success or to avoid failure. The motives aren't the same (and sometimes the behavior isn't quite the same either). Virtually anything you think about doing can be viewed in terms of either making one thing happen or preventing something else from happening (Higgins, 1997). The same issue arises in this chapter. As it happens, there's another category of feedback loops that enlarges discrepancies, rather than reducing them. This seems to provide a basis for a model of avoidance. It's clear, as well, that emotions are involved both when trying to approach and when trying to avoid. In either case, you can be doing well or doing poorly. Thus, the self-regulatory model definitely has a place for both approach and avoidance. In the interest of minimizing confusion, though, we will not talk more about the avoidance function here (see Carver & Scheier, 2013). 13.3.2: Intention-Based and Stimulus-Based Action Thus far, the chapter has also focused mostly on behavior that's intentional: behavior that starts with the setting of goals. However, not all behavior happens that way. Some behavior---maybe a lot of it---is cued by stimulus qualities that the person encounters that activate schemas. Early hints of this phenomenon came from studies intended to show that interpretive schemas were closely linked to specifications for action. These studies used priming techniques to activate schemas and found influences on behavior. In one case, people had to form sentences from scrambled sets of words (Carver, Ganellen, Froming, & Chambers, 1983). For some people but not others, the word sets had hostile content. Later, all the people had to punish someone else while teaching a concept. Those who had read the words with hostile content gave stronger punishments than did the others (see Figure 13.5, A). Figure 13.5 Effects of priming an interpretive schema on behavior related to that schema. (A) People who had been exposed to hostile content in a sentence-formation task gave punishments of greater intensity in a later task than people exposed to less hostile content. (B) People who had been exposed to elements of the elderly stereotype in a sentence-formation task took longer to walk to the elevator when leaving the experiment than people exposed to neutral words.  The vertical axis of the first graph is labeled "Punishment Intensity" and ranges from 0 to 3 in increments of 1. The horizontal axis shows hostile prime and control prime as two categories. The value of punishment intensity for hostile prime and control prime shown in the graph is 3.5 and 2.25 respectively. The vertical axis of the second bar graph is labeled "Walking Time (seconds)" and ranges from 5 to 9 in increments of 1. The horizontal axis shows elderly prime and neutral prime as two categories. The value of walking time for elderly prime and neutral prime shown in the graph is 8.2 and 7.4 seconds respectively. Another study used a similar task to prime the stereotype of the elderly (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). Some people read many words pertaining to the stereotype; some did not. All then received credit for participation. The outcome of interest was how long it took people to walk down the corridor on their way out. Those exposed to the stereotype of the elderly walked more slowly, as though they were old themselves (see Figure 13.5, B). The interpretation of these effects goes like this: To form sentences from the words, you have to understand the words. Understanding the words requires activating nodes of meaning in memory. This activation spreads to nodes bearing on behavior. This quality then emerges in the person's own behavior (Bargh, 1997). In fact, the link goes both ways: Acting in a way that fits a stereotype brings that stereotype to mind for use in later perception (Mussweiler, 2006). Findings such as these are part of a large and growing literature on automaticity (some of which was mentioned in Chapter 12; see also Moors & De Houwer, 2006). Much of this work has been done by John Bargh and his colleagues (Bargh, 1997; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001). Many studies now show that goals can be activated (and people pursue them) with no knowledge that it's happening (for review, see Bargh & Williams, 2006). Indeed, some of the studies show that goals can be activated by subliminal stimuli: stimuli that are out of one's awareness. As we noted in Chapter 12, though, the conditions under which subliminal stimuli activate other parts of memory may be more limited than some of this work suggests (Klatzky & Creswell, 2014). Although it's impressive to see that people's minds can be tricked by various sorts of priming, the more important message here is that automaticity is important in people's lives. Indeed, it's been argued that habitual actions occur in much the same way as priming effects: Situations activate goals that are associated with them, and behavior follows the goals automatically (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000). Similarly, categories of people activate specific responses that are well learned to that group, and behavior follows automatically (Jonas & Sassenberg, 2006). Nonetheless, the idea that behavioral qualities can be activated and slide into the ongoing flow of behavior without your awareness is a little startling. Your actions can be affected by things you hear on the radio or read in the paper, by conversations you have, by random stimuli you encounter---and you don't even know it. This idea provides an interpretation of modeling effects (see Chapter 10), in which people repeat things they observe others do (Carver et al., 1983). People mimic, without realizing it, the postures and gestures of their partners in interactions (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). The pervasiveness of such effects leads some people to ask whether behavior is best seen as directed or as self-organizing (Carver & Scheier, 2002; Vallacher & Nowak, 1997; Vallacher, Read, & Nowak, 2002; Vallacher, Van Geert, & Nowack, 2015). Can both be right? Maybe. In Chapter 12, we described dual-process models of cognition. One mode is said to use connectionist, associationist processes, the other mode symbolic processes. The first mode is characterized as­ ­intuitive, whereas the second is characterized as rational. Perhaps dual-process models can also help reconcile how intentions and automaticity both influence action (Bargh & Williams, 2006; Kuhl, 2000; Rothbart, Ellis, Rueda, & ­Posner, 2003; Strack & Deutsch, 2004). The interpretation goes like this. The intuitive system functions automatically. When a stimulus happens to cue an action quality, that action quality slips into the behavioral stream. It seems likely that the action quality has to be either simple or well learned for this to happen. That is, the intuitive system is capable of handling fairly complicated events (Kuhl, 2000), but its capacities derive from associations. It's good at being impulsive and quickly responsive, but it's not good at thinking things through. The rational system, in contrast, is brought into play when you form an intention, or set a goal purposefully. When this system is in charge, behavior is self-regulated in an effortful, top-down manner. It is planful (Eisenberg et al., 2004). Its purpose is to handle situations that have to be thought through, because no automatic, cue-driven response is ready to go. Thinking things through, however, means some delay in action (Keller et al., 2006). In talking about the cognitive view in Chapter 12, we noted that people have a natural tendency to conserve mental resources, because they have many things on their minds at once. The same idea applies here. Being able to do something with little thought is extremely useful, because it lets you think about other things at the same time as you're doing whatever you're doing (Wood, Quinn, & Kashy, 2002). 13.3.3: Self-Regulation as Self-Control Another issue that should receive attention is that acts of self-regulation sometimes (though not always) entail self-control. That is, sometimes people act to restrain behavior aimed at one goal, in order to make it possible to attain another goal. Self-control always concerns conflicts, because the goals are incompatible. Situations entailing self-control arise in a great many circumstances, and the conflicts in question apply to very important practical problems (see Vohs & Baumeister, 2011). This situation exists, for example, in the context of dieting. Dieters are motivated to eat by their desire to consume foods they like, and they are motivated to restrain eating by their desire to lose weight. Similar conflicts arise in circumstances surrounding substance abuse and domestic violence. People who are effective at self-control employ a variety of strategies to counteract temptations that keep them from gaining the long-term goal (Friese & Hofmann, 2009; Trope & Fishbach, 2000, 2005). Discussions of self-control failure (Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996) tend to portray the situations as involving a relatively automatic tendency to act in one way that's opposed by a planful and effortful tendency to restrain the act. The act being restrained is often characterized as an impulse: a desire that would automatically be translated into action unless it is controlled (perhaps in part because this action is habitual, perhaps in part because it is more primal). Once again, this viewpoint seems to have overtones of the dual-process models. Self-control is related both to the strength of underlying impulsive tendencies and to the strength of constraining self-control tendencies (Edmonds, Bogg, & Roberts, 2009). There's also evidence that identifying an action in higher-level terms makes it easier to disregard immediate outcomes in favor of delayed outcomes (Fujita, Trope, Liberman, & Levin-Sagi, 2006). 13.4: Assessment from the Self-Regulation Perspective 13.4 Assess self-regulatory qualities and goals The self-regulation view on personality is fairly new. It's been far more theoretical than applied. Nevertheless, it offers a few suggestions concerning personality assessment. 13.4.1: Assessment of Self-Regulatory Qualities The view described in this chapter emphasizes the existence of several processes in human experience. This emphasis suggests it may be useful to measure individual differences in those self-regulatory processes (Williams, Moore, Pettibone, & Thomas, 1992). For example, private self-consciousness (Fenigstein et al., 1975) is a tendency to be self-reflective---to think about your feelings, motives, actions, and so on. (The term self-­consciousness doesn't mean "embarrassment" here, just "self-focus.") People high in self-consciousness are careful and thorough self-regulators. They notice it if their actions don't match their intentions, and they adjust accordingly. People lower in self-consciousness are more random and less guided in their behavior (see also Box 13.3). Consistent with this, self-consciousness relates to conscientiousness from the five-factor model (Trapnell & Campbell, 1999). There's even evidence that people high in self-consciousness are more prone to do self-regulation that's automatic and nonconscious (Hull, Slone, Meteyer, & Matthews, 2002). Box 13.3  Reduction of Self-Regulation: Deindividuation and Alcohol Elsewhere in the chapter, we described how self-focus causes better self-regulation toward salient standards. If self-focus makes behavior better regulated, it follows that reduced self-focus makes behavior more poorly regulated. But what does this mean? It doesn't mean the person stops behaving altogether. It means the behavior is more likely to become less carefully thought out and more responsive to cues of the moment. Deindividuation occurs when people become immersed in a group. It involves a reduction in self-focus (Diener, 1979; Prentice-Dunn & Rogers, 1982, 1989). The result is aggressive and uninhibited behavior. It's easy to see these effects as reflecting poor self-regulation regarding programs and principles that normally guide action. Thus, there's a tendency to act impulsively---to respond to cues of the moment, rather than to use a well-thought-out plan. These effects are remarkably similar to some of the effects of alcohol. People who've been drinking are often inappropriately aggressive and overly responsive to cues of the moment. Alcohol is widely regarded as a releaser of inhibitions, and it's sometimes used intentionally for that purpose. Alcohol also appears to act (at least partly) by reducing self-awareness (Hull, 1981; Hull & Rielly, 1986) and executive function (Giancola, 2004). As this happens, you stop monitoring your values and intentions. Your behavior becomes more disorganized, impulsive, and fragmented. Another way of looking at both of these phenomena is through the lens of the dual-process view. Deindividuation and alcohol both seem to lessen the influence of the deliberative and planful mode of functioning and increase the influence of the reflexive, impulsive mode. In either view, two distinct sets of phenomena---deindividuation and alcohol intoxication---can be interpreted by the same principles. Both seem to involve interference with a process that underlies the normal self-regulation of behavior. Keep in mind that self-focus in itself is relatively content free. That is, its self-regulatory effect is largely unrelated to what goal is being used. Thus, an athlete who's self-conscious should be sure to work out. A self-conscious biology major should be sure to be caught up on the assigned biology reading. A self-conscious musician should focus closely on practicing to move toward his or her music-related goals. Trapnell and Campbell (1999) distinguished two aspects of self-consciousness. They suggested that two motives underlie it: curiosity (a growth-oriented motive) and the desire to probe negative feeling states (which is ultimately a safety-seeking motive, if it isolates the source of the feelings). They created a measure called the Rumination--Reflection Questionnaire to focus separately on these motives. Rumination items refer to being unable to put something behind you. Reflection items refer to being fascinated and inquisitive. Not surprisingly, reflection relates to openness to experience, and rumination relates to neuroticism. Another self-regulatory function that might be useful to assess is whether people tend to view their behavior in high-level or lower-level terms. Vallacher and Wegner (1989) developed a measure called the Behavior Identification Form for that purpose. They argued that people with similar traits can differ greatly if they think of their goals at different levels. People who identify their actions at high levels tend to look at the "big picture," whether they're socializing, studying, or making music. People who identify their actions at lower levels tend to focus more on the "nuts and bolts" of what's going on. Yet another aspect of self-regulatory function to assess is self-control tendencies. Several measures of impulsiveness are available (e.g., Cyders et al., 2007; Patton, Stanford, & Barratt, 1995; Whiteside & Lynam, 2001). A Self-Control scale has also been developed (Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone, 2004). It's a measure of overall self-control, although the items tend to focus on persistence (or lack thereof) in completing activities. Self-control turns out to be very important: It predicts grade-point average, adjustment, alcohol abuse, and interpersonal skills (Tangney et al., 2004). 13.4.2: Assessment of Goals As we said earlier, the self-regulation view emphasizes goals. It would seem useful, from this view, to assess people's goals and how they're organized (Emmons, 1986; ­Pervin, 1983). One might even want to assess what sort of "possible selves" the person has in mind (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Knowing what goals are salient to a person might be more informative than knowing other aspects of what the person is "like." An example of this approach is the technique Emmons (1986) used to assess personal strivings. He asked people to describe their recurring personal goals in four areas: work/school, home/family, social relationships, and leisure/recreation. People were to think about their own intentions and goals and not to compare themselves with other people. Within these guidelines, they were free to write down any striving that seemed important to them. This produced an individualized picture of the goal values that occupied the person's mind over a given span of time. 13.5: Problems in Behavior, and Behavior Change, from the Self-Regulation Perspective 13.5 Outline how problems in behavior reflect problems in self-regulation Given how new the self-regulation point of view is, one might expect it to have had little or no impact on understanding either problems or therapy. This isn't the case, however (see Hamilton, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Cather, 1993; Ingram, 1986; Merluzzi, Rudy, & Glass, 1981). Self-regulation models have made a number of suggestions about those topics. 13.5.1: Problems as Conflicts among Goals and Lack of Strategy Specifications The hierarchical model suggests several ways for problems to arise (Carver & Scheier, 1990, 1998). The simplest stems from the idea of a deeply rooted conflict between goals. Conflict occurs when a person is committed to two goals that can't be attained easily at the same time (e.g., being a successful attorney while being a good wife and mother; having a close relationship while being emotionally independent). You may alternate between the goals, but that can be exhausting and distressing (Emmons & King, 1988). It takes a lot of effort to keep the conflict from re-emerging. Another solution is to decide that one goal contributes more to your higher-order values than the other and reduce investment in the other one. This isn't always easy to do, though (Mens et al., in press; Wrosch et al., 2013). A second idea suggested by the hierarchical model is that people sometimes want abstract goals but lack the know-how to reach them. If specifications from level to level are missing, self-regulation falls apart. Thus, many people want to be "fulfilled," "successful," or "well liked" but don't know the strategies to attain these goals. Many people even have more specific goals, such as "not arguing with my wife" or "being more assertive," but can't specify the concrete behaviors that would move them in the right direction. Lacking this knowledge, they can't make progress and are distressed. For things to be better, the strategies need to be created (Oyserman et al., 2006). 13.5.2: Problems from an Inability to Disengage A third source of problems stems from the idea that people who expect failure quit trying. As noted earlier, sometimes quitting is the right response. (If you realize you've forgotten your money and credit card, quit shopping.) Sometimes, though, quitting can't be done easily. Some goals are very hard to give up, even if you have grave doubts about reaching them---for example, doing well in your chosen work and having a fulfilling relationship with another person. Why is it so hard to give up these goals? The hierarchical view says it's because these goals are high in your hierarchy (thus, central to your self) or represent paths to those higher goals. Sometimes abandoning a concrete goal means giving up on the person you want to be. When people have serious doubts about attaining goals they can't let go of, they show a predictable pattern. They stop trying but soon confront the goal again. For example, having decided to give up on having a fulfilling relationship, you see a movie about relationships, which reminds you that you want one. Having given up trying to get along with a coworker, you find you're assigned to work on a project together. Having given up on your calculus assignment, you see it's time for calculus class. Deep doubt about reaching an important goal can lead to a repeated cycle of sporadic effort, doubt, distress, disengagement, and confronting the goal again. It's not always bad to keep thinking about a failure. It can motivate you to try harder next time (if there is a next time). Sometimes it leads to ideas about how to do things differently next time (Martin & Tesser, 1996; Watkins, 2008). But it's dangerous to dwell on a failure when it can't be undone (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1985, 1987; Wrosch et al., 2003). When people lose a big source of self-worth and focus too long on trying to regain it, major distress results. Doing this too often turns it into a habit. Focusing on failure and ignoring success not only maintain depressive symptoms, but also create a self-perpetuating pattern. A similar point was made by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and her colleagues (Nolen-Hoeksema, Morrow, & Frederickson, 1993; Nolen-Hoeksema, Parker, & Larson, 1994; Watkins, 2008), who argued that people who are prone to depression focus much of their attention on their sad feelings. This rumination acts to prolong the depressed state. 13.5.3: Self-Regulation and the Process of Therapy Control-process ideas have also been used by several theorists in addressing therapy issues. Fred Kanfer and his colleagues (e.g., Kanfer & Busemeyer, 1982; Kanfer & Hagerman, 1985; Kanfer & Schefft, 1988; see also Semmer & Frese, 1985) depicted therapy in a way that's quite compatible with the self-regulatory ideas presented throughout this chapter. One point these theorists have made is that much of human behavior isn't monitored consciously but is cued automatically and habitually. This is a point made early in this chapter and has been made by many cognitive theorists as well (e.g., Beck, 1972, 1976; Dodge, 1986; Semmer & Frese, 1985). Therapy is partly an effort to break down the automaticity. The person must engage in more controlled or monitored processing of what's going on. Doing this should yield responses that are more carefully thought out. Does this mean that people dealing with problems must spend the rest of their lives carefully monitoring their actions? Maybe. To help people avoid lifelong monitoring, therapy must provide them with a way to make the desired responses automatic in place of the problem responses. How do you do that? Presumably, it's an issue of how thoroughly the links are encoded in memory. New responses become automatic by building them into memory very redundantly. This makes them more likely to be used later, when the person is on "automatic pilot." Many therapeutic techniques that are in widespread use probably do exactly this. Another point made by Kanfer and Busemeyer (1982) is that the process of therapy is itself a dynamic feedback system. It's a series of stages in which clients repeatedly use feedback---both from therapy sessions and from actions outside therapy---to guide their movements through a long-term plan of change. The goals and issues that guide the process of changing behavior also keep changing. As you proceed, you must keep checking to make sure that the concrete goals you're working toward support your higher-order goals. 13.5.4: Therapy Is Training in Problem Solving A point that's been made by many people is that therapy isn't just for the present. It should make the person a better problem solver, more equipped to deal with problems in the future (Nezu, 1987; Schefft & Lehr, 1985). Being able to generate choices and select the best ones are important skills, whether you get them through therapy or on your own. A useful way to create choices is called means--end analysis (Newell & Simon, 1972). You start by noting the difference between your present state and your desired state (the end). Then you think of an action (a means) that would reduce the difference. At first, the things that come to mind are abstract, involving large-scale goals. You then examine each large step and break it into subgoals. If you keep breaking things down long enough, the means--end paths become complete and concrete enough to get you from here to there. You've created a strategy. This line of thought was used in a program designed to help low-income, African American middle school students develop an academic identity (Oyserman, Terry, & Bybee, 2002). Students in this program had trouble creating possible selves that involved school as a pathway to adulthood. Oyserman et al. developed a small-group intervention to do that. They gave students the experience of developing academic possible selves. Moreover, the program tied those possible selves to strategies for achieving desired short-term goals and extended them to adult self-images. The program emphasized the solving of everyday problems, breaking them down by means--end analysis. The result was that the students bonded more strongly to school. Finally, it's important to seek accurate feedback about the effects of your actions. If you get accurate feedback, you don't have to make perfect choices. If you make continual adjustments from the feedback you get, you keep moving in the right direction. This principle, which is basic to the self-regulation approach, yields an important kind of freedom---the freedom from having to be right the first time. 13.6: Problems and Prospects for the Self-Regulation Perspective 13.6 Outline problems and challenges related to the self-regulation perspective As is true of the cognitive view of personality, the self-­regulation view has received mixed responses. It shares loose ends and unanswered questions with the cognitive view, and it has some of its own. It remains unclear whether these are fatal problems or just gaps to be filled. One criticism of the self-regulation view derives from the robotics metaphor it sometimes employs. Critics say that artificial systems can't possibly be good models for human behavior. Humans have free will and make their own decisions. Robots have to rely on the programs they've been given to run them. One response to this criticism is that the behavior of so-called intelligent artificial systems moves farther every year in the direction of what looks suspiciously like self-determination (Brooks, 2002). It seems clear that how humans and artificial systems resemble and differ from each other will be debated well into the future. But as the behavior of artifacts becomes more and more humanlike, the debate may focus on increasingly subtle points. Another response is that the robotics metaphor isn't the only one used for this line of thought. Electronic examples are often used to illustrate the principle of feedback control, but the feedback concept wasn't invented by engineers. It was devised to account for functions of the body (Cannon, 1932). The robotics metaphor may not always feel appropriate to living systems, but the feedback principle itself was devised precisely for living systems. Another criticism sometimes made of this approach (even within the physiological metaphor) is that a model based on feedback principles is merely a model of homeostasis (literally, "steady state"). Homeostatic mechanisms exist to control body temperature, the levels of various elements in the blood, and many other physical parameters of the body. But how much sense does it make to think this way about something we know is always changing? Human behavior isn't about steady states. Doesn't the self-regulation view imply that people should be immobile and stable---or just do the same thing over and over? Actually, no. People do regulate some things in a recurrently homeostatic way---for example, the amount of affiliation they engage in across time (O'Connor & Rosenblood, 1996)---but not always. As we noted earlier, many goals are dynamic (e.g., going on a vacation trip, having an interesting conversation with someone). Being dynamic doesn't make them any less goal-like. It just means that the whole process of matching the behavior to the goal must be dynamic as well. If the goal is to create a particular flow of experiences, rather than a state, then the qualities of behavior being monitored will also have this changing quality. So there's no contradiction between the fact that humans keep changing what they're doing and the idea that behavior occurs within a system of feedback control. Greater difficulty is posed by another criticism aimed at the hierarchical model: that it fails to deal effectively with the homunculus problem. Homunculus is a term once used to explain how people act. It refers to a hypothetical tiny man who sits inside your head and tells you what to do. That explains your behavior. But who tells the little man what to tell you? If people have hierarchies of goals, where do the highest goals come from---the ones that specify all the lower goals? One response is that self-regulatory models typically assume an executive system that coordinates other activities, makes decisions, and so on. The executive is manifest in subjective experience as consciousness. The executive presumably has control over many other systems and thus, in some ways, is the analogue of the homunculus. This reasoning is plausible, but it isn't altogether satisfying. Another response is that people have built-in goals of survival, personal coherence, and so on. These goals are vague enough that they rarely appear in consciousness, but they're pervasive enough that they constantly influence in subtle ways people's decisions about what goals to take up. Thus, behavior is being guided by values that are built into the organism, but which aren't always apparent to the person. This line of reasoning is plausible, too, but it's also less than fully satisfying. The homunculus problem thus remains a real one. Another criticism of the self-regulation view (as well as the cognitive view of Chapter 12) is similar to a criticism made of the learning perspective: All this seems too much a description from the outside looking in. There's too little feel of what it means to have a personality. This view describes the "self-regulation of behavior," but what does it really say about personality? This approach emphasizes structure and process, rather than content. For this reason, some see the ideas as dealing with an empty shell, programmed in ways that aren't well specified, for purposes and goals that are largely arbitrary (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2000). There is some merit to this criticism. Note, however, that these ideas weren't really devised to focus directly on personality. Rather, they were intended to focus on issues that stand at a slight tangent from personality. Although the ideas aren't a theory of personality, they provide a window on the nature of human experience that seems to have substantial implications for personality: the nature of the pursuit of goals and values in life. Will these ideas evolve into a more complete picture of personality? It's too early to know. Despite these criticisms, the self-regulation view on personality has proven to have merit. It's had heuristic value, suggesting new places to look for information about how things work. Indeed, it has made some predictions that aren't intuitively suggested by other views. This value alone makes it likely that the self-regulation view will be around for a while. Only the tests of time and further study will tell whether this approach will continue to emerge as a viable perspective on personality. Summary: The Self-Regulation Perspective In self-regulation models, behavior is sometimes specified by interpretive schemas, if an interpretation is closely tied to an action quality. Sometimes, actions follow from intentions: products of a mental algebra in which personally desired outcomes and social considerations are weighed to yield an intent to act or not act. Theory concerning self-regulation emphasizes goals. The goals underlying behavior have a variety of labels, including life tasks, personal strivings, personal projects, and current concerns. This view treats the structure of the self as an organization among goals. Some goals are fairly neutral, but others imply a standard of excellence. In the latter case, setting specific high goals results in higher performances. This is because committing oneself to a more demanding goal focuses one's efforts more fully. If the goal is too high, though, people don't adopt it. Some intentions concern attaining end goals; others are about implementing action plans to reach those end goals. The latter are important for ensuring that behavior actually gets done. Implementation intentions constitute the linking of strategies to the contexts in which the person wants to engage them. Intentions are formed in a deliberative mindset, but once the person starts to pursue them, he or she is in an implementational mindset. Once a goal for behavior has been evoked, self-regulation reflects a process of feedback control. A reference value (or goal) is compared against present behavior. If the two differ, behavior is adjusted, leading to a new perception and comparison. Given that many goals are dynamic and evolving, this view emphasizes that self-regulation is a never-ending process. A single feedback loop is too simple to account for the diversity in people's actions alone, but complexity is provided by the fact that feedback systems can be organized in a hierarchy, in which one system acts by providing reference values to the system directly below it. The concept of hierarchy accounts for the fact that a goal can be attained by many kinds of actions, along with the fact that the same action can occur in service to diverse goals. Within this framework, emotions have been viewed as calls for reprioritizing one's goals. Emotions are viewed as giving a subjective reading of how well you're progressing toward a goal. Emotions thus convey important information that has a strong influence on behavior. When people encounter obstacles in their efforts, self-regulation is interrupted and they consider whether success or failure is likely. If their expectancies are positive enough, they will keep trying; if not, they may disengage effort and give up. Disengagement is sometimes the adaptive response, but people sometimes give up too quickly. In some cases, disengagement is only partial---goal substitution or scaling back. This keeps the person engaged, in one way, while disengaging in another. Although much of this chapter concerns conformity to goals, self-regulation models also include discussions of avoidance. Avoidance means creating distance instead of conformity. Another issue is that some behavior occurs via intentions, but some actions are triggered fairly automatically, even without the person's awareness. This difference between sources of influence is sometimes dealt with by dual-process models resembling those discussed in Chapter 12. An intuitive system promotes behaviors that are triggered by cues of the moment; a rational system promotes behaviors that are thought out and intentional. Self-regulation sometimes entails self-control: the prevention of pursuing one goal, in service of another more important goal. Assessment, from this view, is partly a matter of assessing individual differences in self-regulatory functions, such as self-reflectiveness, self-control, and the level of abstraction at which people view their goals. This view also suggests the value of assessing goals themselves. There are several ways to conceptualize problems from this view. One possibility focuses on conflict between incompatible goals. Another points to a lack of specification of midlevel behavioral reference values to guide behavior. Yet another emphasizes that people sometimes are unable to disengage from behaviors that are necessary for the attainment of higher-order goals. There's evidence that people who are depressed display an exaggerated inability to disengage. Just as behavior can be construed in terms of self-regulatory systems, so can the process of behavior change induced by therapy. People in therapy use feedback from decisions they've put into practice to make further decisions. They monitor the effects of changes in behavior to determine whether the changes have produced the desired effects. One long-term goal of therapy is to make people better problem solvers through techniques such as means--end analysis, so that they can make their own adjustments when confronting new problems.