Self-regulation and the executive function: The self as controlling agent.

A man squanders his money on gambling. A woman beats her child. A drunk driver causes a crash that destroys three cars and injures several people. A student postpones studying until the night before the test and gets a bad grade. A young couple engages in unprotected sex and creates an unwanted pregnancy. A delinquent shoots an acquaintance during an argument. A dieter eats seven donuts and a pint of ice cream at one sitting. An athlete trains off and on for a year without any improvement in performance. A girl breaks a promise and betrays a friend's confidence. An old man again neglects to take his daily dose of insulin and goes into diabetic shock. What these disparate events have in common is failure of self-regulation. When self-regulation works well, it enables people to alter their behavior so as to conform to rules, plans, promises, ideals, and other standards. When it fails, any one of a broad range of human problems and misfortunes can arise. Self-regulation is thus a key to success in human life and, when it falls short, a contributing cause that helps explain many forms of human suffering. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the psychology of self-regulation. We shall review what it is, its importance, how it functions, how it fits into the broader context of human psychological functioning, and what some of its principal applications are. To appreciate the importance of self-regulation, it is necessary to consider both practical and theoretical implications. The practical ones were anticipated in the opening paragraph of this chapter, but they can be stated more systematically as follows: Most of the social and personal problems that afflict people in modern western society have some element of self-regulatory failure at their root. This is not to say that better self-regulation would alone solve all society's problems — but it would probably go a long way toward that end. Perhaps the problems that most obviously revolve around self-control failure are those of impulse control. Drug and alcohol addiction has multiple determinants, but to Self-regulation and executive function 3 the extent that people can regulate their consumption of these problematic substances, they will be less vulnerable to addiction. Many of the problems associated with sexual behavior are fully preventable, if only people would control themselves sufficiently to minimize risks. These include the paradoxical epidemic of unwanted and out-of-wedlock pregnancy (paradoxical …