Other scholars have considered that choices appearing to reflect poor self-control may have adaptive outcomes. Some other definitions include strategies that avoid tempting contexts my definition treats these as outside the bounds of self-controlled behaviour. This definition is not universally shared, but it is, from my reading of the literature, the closest to a consensus view available (e.g. The main reason I use this definition is because it brings to the fore the evolutionarily puzzling aspects of self-control failure. The ubiquity of poor self-control, then, poses an important riddle: why has natural selection not endowed us with perfect self-control?įor present purposes, I define self-control as deliberately avoiding the choice of a tempting option so as to choose an alternative that produces greater long-term benefits. Because failures of self-control are costly, the ability to exert self-control can confer evolutionary benefits and ought to be subject to strongly negative selection pressure. It is both a symptom and a cause of diseases that increase mortality, such as addiction, depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder (e.g. Poor self-control is inimical to mental and physical health and to life success it is associated with poverty, obesity, loneliness and other unwanted states. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Risk taking and impulsive behaviour: fundamental discoveries, theoretical perspectives and clinical implications. Poor self-control, in this view, is ultimately a result of bounded optimality. Self-control, then, is a form of cognitive control and the subjective feeling of effort likely reflects the true costs of cognitive control.
These mappings persist in the decision-makers’ repertoire because they result from learning processes that are adaptive in the broader context, either on the timescale of learning or of evolution.
I propose that self-control failures result from cases in which well-learned (and thus routinized) decision-making strategies yield suboptimal choices. The existence of poor self-control presents an important evolutionary puzzle because there is no obvious reason why good self-control should be more costly than poor self-control. Although some apparent failures of self-control are, on closer inspection, reward maximizing, at least some self-control failures are clearly disadvantageous and non-strategic. Self-control refers to the ability to deliberately reject tempting options and instead select ones that produce greater long-term benefits.
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