Understanding self-control: the role of metacognitive beliefs and strategy use

Abstract

Self-control allows people to align their behaviour with intention in the face of a motivational conflict. Successful self-control predicts positive long-term outcomes in terms of career, health, and social relationships. Recent research highlights the role of metacognition in self-control performance. This dissertation examines people’s metacognitive beliefs about self-control, how these beliefs vary depending on individual characteristics, and how they relate to strategy use in everyday self-control situations and at the level of executive function (EF). In the first two studies, we find evidence that beliefs about the short-term limitedness versus long-term malleability of self-control are relatively independent of each other. Moreover, limitedness beliefs vary depending on the self-control domain. Our results thus support a multidimensional and domain-specific approach for measuring self-control beliefs. Next, we demonstrate that people’s beliefs about self-control depend on whose self-control they are thinking about. If people are told that a person has ADHD, they are more likely to view this person’s self-control is a limited resource and a fixed trait. Moreover, people with strong ADHD traits appear to view their own self-control as more limited and fixed. By contrast, we find no consistent association between people's self-control beliefs and their knowledge and use of different self-control strategies. In the last two studies, we further investigate metacognition and strategy use, focusing on specific EF subprocesses. Our findings suggest that the benefits of verbal strategies are not limited to information maintenance: verbal representations may also support the efficient updating of task-relevant information. However, contrary to our hypothesis, self-control beliefs were not associated with performance in an EF task. These results are discussed in relation to existing literature to propose an integrative framework of how metacognitive beliefs, EF, and strategy use interact to enable self-control.