Situational self control
Παρέμβαση στην κατάσταση
Handling an impulse by changing something in the situation rather than by resisting it. It is not a weaker version of self control. It is the version that costs less, because impulses get stronger with time and the situation is easiest to move while the impulse is still small.
How to spot it
Ask whether the thing you are about to resist is still one step away from you. If it is, you can move the step instead of the wanting, and the step is the cheaper of the two.
The research behind the term
The term is not our invention. It comes from published research, and what follows is what that research found — our own synthesis of the published abstract, not a translation of the original.
Duckworth, A. L., Gendler, T. S., & Gross, J. J. (2016). Situational Strategies for Self-Control — doi:10.1177/1745691615623247
What it found
- Self-control is not always hard: it becomes easy when a person selects or modifies the situation itself instead of wrestling with the impulse.
- Impulses grow stronger over time, so strategies that intervene early cost less than those that intervene late.
- The full range of self-control strategies can be organised along the timeline of the developing impulse.
How it found it
A theoretical paper applying the process model of self-control, with examples of situational strategies drawn from everyday life.
What it means for self-regulation
The cheapest form of self-discipline is to set up the environment so that none is needed: you change your seat at the table, not your willpower.
Practised in
The term does not stay a definition. It appears inside missions where the pattern happens in real time and you have to recognise it as it happens to you.
Ten Seconds After the Ping
Sources
Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.
- Duckworth, A. L., Gendler, T. S., & Gross, J. J. (2016). Situational Strategies for Self-Control — doi:10.1177/1745691615623247