Exercising self-control is about more than simply maintaining a willpower of iron and an eye toward the greater good, a new Yale study finds; it's really a delicate dance full of waffling deliberation.
When people are able to resist temptation in pursuit of a long-term goal, the researchers found, they do so via a continuous back-and-forth balancing process rather than making an unwavering choice shaped by unwavering self-control.
The research team - which included Yale psychologist Melissa Ferguson and Paul Stillman, a former postdoctoral researcher in Ferguson's lab who is now at Boston University - defined "self-control" as the ability to pursue long-term goals over short-term gain. And to observe this deliberation in action they used a common tool: the computer mouse.
An increasingly popular research tool in disciplines like psychology and marketing, the use of mouse-tracking surveillance offers a window into an individual's mental processes. For instance, if participants are asked to choose between a cookie or an apple, such an experiment allows researchers to tell whether their mouse veered closely to the cookie before selecting the apple.
In the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Yale researchers analyzed more than 500 participants as they chose between receiving an immediate, though small, monetary reward versus getting a larger reward that they would have to wait for.
"I love mouse-tracking because it's a very different way of observing how people behave in the process of making a decision," said Ferguson, a professor of psychology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "The majority of psychological research relies on asking people to tell us what's going on with what their thinking. But I'm interested in other ways that can measure not only reported mental content but the dynamics of cognition."
