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Having self-control leads to power: a new study with 3,500 people finds that showing self-control influences how powerful an individual is perceived to be by their peers
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- Title
- Having Self-Control Leads to Power
- Word count
- 493 words
So a few days ago I watched a video essay on the YouTube channel The Leftist Cooks, with a title that went something like “our car got stolen”, and it had a very interesting take on self-control. It’s a very long video so I won’t bother linking to it; I really mean it more as food for thought.
The gist of it is that in studies about people’s self-control, people who have lived in poverty are less likely to have it. Essentially, those who have lived in poverty have less trust because of the ways that social support systems have failed them. They take the impulsive action because if they didn’t take the smaller prize now they are thinking they might end up not having any prize at all in spite of promises of a larger prize in the future.
I see this in myself, having experienced poverty, but I see it the strongest in my grandparents, who lived through the Great Depression. My grandmother loved shopping at dollar stores because she could get a lot of stuff for cheap and she could get away with an “I want it I buy it” mentality. She would have meat at the center of almost every meal because she didn’t want to relive the experience of not being able to afford it. One thing we all share is that we have in common is that we hoard security above all else. The sure thing is almost always more valuable to us, and that has caused us to make moves that are often non-optimal but long-term harmful. For me it had really damaged my health and I’ve only really started correcting for most of those issues in the past year or so.
What I’m trying to get at with this is that the correlation might be reversed. People who are better off have better control, and people who are better off are also more successful because they have more resources.
From the more recent probing of the Stanford marshmallow studies (see here), I recall there seems to be some evidence that self-control develops as an early childhood skill and more or less carries through life afterwards.
And that there is also a correlation between developing good self control and being in a stable, trusting household. Poverty being an obstacle to that.
If self control is related to success, that would explain how poverty begets poverty and also how wealth can get lost over generations, as the only way it wouldn't bleed out is if self control is passed down at close to a 100% rate (or other systemic features standing in the way of meitocracy persist, but thats a bigger issue).
The bigger problem being that society broadly considers lack of self control a moral failure which is completely in that person's control. Like telling a depressed person "well just stop being sad," providing no support or accomodation, and then blaming them for their situation getting worse.
And an additional follow-up study showed the marshmallow test has effectively zero predictive power. I have an extremely hard time trusting most social science and psychology research, including this study.
I would like to know what can be to improve self control at a society level. While a lack of self control might not be a moral failure, I still wonder what can be done to improve things.
I don't know if just increasing standards of living would necessarily improve self control. Has self control measurably improved over the past 200 years as humans became significantly wealthier and more comfortable?
Self control really does seem to be overrated. This research suggests that in regards to dieting, impulsivity is more important than self control and that these are distinct, competing parts of your brain. The study found people that struggle with obesity usually have higher self control and higher impulsivity. What works, then, is planning ahead with concrete, specific plans. For example, if you know you are impulsive with ice cream, you just never buy it. All the self control in the world doesn't matter if in an impulsive moment you eat a liter of ice cream.
One might say that these are the same thing but research suggests otherwise. As far as a societal view, the concrete, specific plans seems to work as well. Research for class mobility (sorry I'm not going to look for another source right now) shows that impoverished people have much better social mobility when they can see examples of successful people in their life. For example, someone living in a slum may never know a doctor. They will never see from a young age the steps a person must take to become a doctor (doing well in school, volunteering, getting a doctor to sponsor you, applying for scholarships, etc.). Connecting these dots is a lot of what makes classes distinct.
If only I could cultivate some!