The Fable of State Self-Control, [Inzlicht (UToronto) and Roberts (Urbana-Champaign)], state in personality psychology referring to a temporary period of effort as opposed to a trait, which is part of your ongoing personality. Yes, there are arguments about which is in play in any given activity, but that's the general idea.
The authors challenge the idea that creating temporary states encouraging people to show more self-denial, more discipline, more willpower, transfers to other activities and becomes part of your general character. It is the old discussion of whether sports (or Latin, or playing scales) improves character or only reveals it. We want the former to be true, but is there actual evidence for it? Perhaps some, but not a great deal. Most of the experiemental evidence is quite flawed and the anecdotal evidence suffers from the same biases that anecdotes always do: we choose which anecdotes to remember and highlight and we interpret them through self-serving prisms right from the start.
Self-control is a cherished value. People who have lots of it are celebrated and seen as morally righteous [1,2]. In Aesop's fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper, we celebrate the industrious ant not the gleeful grasshopper. After all, while the grasshopper plays and sings throughout summer the ant foregoes pleasure to find and store food for the winter. The lesson here is that we should strive to be like the ant, not like the grasshopper. Although the modern science of personality largely vindicates this fable, here we wonder if our admiration of trait self-control confused us into celebrating state self-control, which is mostly ineffective in bringing about sustained change...Just like the ant, people who are premeditated, patient, and controlled live objectively better lives than their grasshopper-like peers...
Despite its intuitive appeal, there are three problems with extolling state self-control because of our love for trait self-control. First, people high in trait self-control do not engage more state self-control...
I wrote we want the former to be true, but I may have spoken too soon. Sometimes it serves us more to believe the opposite, that we never could have become much better than we did. Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
(Thanks to The Studies Show for the link to the study.
Psychology here is denying the standard Aristotelian account of ethics. A virtuous character is a habituated 'trait,' on this model, which you get (only) by going through the 'state' phases frequently and redundantly.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of empirical evidence that this really does work -- literally millennia of it -- but only if you are doing the practice because you want to do it. Perhaps that's the middle ground: if you don't have the 'trait' to incline you to want to realize and actualize these virtues, being forced to practice isn't going to bring them about. If you do, well, practice is the only way to turn your potential for virtue into actual virtues.
My view is that I can't prove Virtue Ethics and it's scientific foundation is shaky, but it's still the way to bet. It's what I raised my children on and what I apply to myself.
ReplyDeleteAs the Rabbi says "It couldn't hurt."
I've been thinking some more about this. The datum that trait self-controllers don't rely much on state control efforts is actually perfectly Aristotelian; the Nicomachean Ethics itself says that the point of habituating the virtue is that it becomes a 'state of character' (in this phrase the term 'state' is used in a different technical sense, more similar to 'trait' in this discussion). As such you no longer have to think about what to do or to struggle with it, so that you will do the virtuous thing without the bother of having to reason about it any longer.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I've been thinking about is the number of friends I have who have given up alcohol, after a youth of significant heavy drinking. That seems like an example of successfully struggling through state changes to habituate a reformed trait, and I've observed success well in excess of the seven years they cite.
However, the group of "Grim's chosen friends" is not random, and therefore probably inadmissable as scientific evidence even if it's empirical. It's very likely that I chose them in part because they had good qualities like the ability to engage in acts of self-control/mastery; and indeed, when they were drinking they were still masters of themselves even while drunk. So it may be they have an underlying trait that makes them one of the exceptions -- the paper doesn't say it never happens, just that "most commonly" there is a reversion to the mean over time.
That seems a good distinction. While people can reasonably object that this continuum does not have any bright lines, I think it is fair to say that we can notice, both in ourselves and in others, when the changes are ephemeral and when they stand some chance of becoming part of character. That "underlying trait" may be inborn, and may be mysteriously tied to notions of The Elect - or at least the capable according to evolutionary selection.
ReplyDelete