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Taking the New Year’s Resolution Test seriously : eliciting individuals’ judgements about self-control and spontaneity
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Grubiak, Kevin, Isoni, Andrea, Sugden, Robert, Wang, Mengjie and Zheng, Jiwei (2022) Taking the New Year’s Resolution Test seriously : eliciting individuals’ judgements about self-control and spontaneity. Behavioural Public Policy . doi:10.1017/bpp.2021.41 ISSN 2398-063X. (In Press)
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WRAP-Taking-New-Years-Resolution-Test-seriously-eliciting-judgements-self-control-2021.pdf - Accepted Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 4.0. Download (784Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2021.41
Abstract
Self-control failure occurs when an individual experiences a conflict between immediate desires and longer-term goals, recognises psychological forces that hinder goal-directed action, tries to resist them but fails in the attempt. Behavioural economists often invoke assumptions about self-control failure to justify proposals for policy interventions. These arguments require workable methods for eliciting individuals’ goals and for verifying occurrences of self-control failure, but developing such methods confronts two problems. First, it is not clear that individuals’ goals are context-independent. Second, facing an actual conflict between a desire and a self-acknowledged goal, a person may consciously choose not to resist the desire, thinking that spontaneity is more important than self-control. We address these issues through an online survey that elicited individuals’ self-reported judgements about the relative importance of self-control and spontaneity in conflicts between enjoyment and health-related goals. To test for context-sensitivity, the judgement-elicitation questions were preceded by a memory recall task which directed participants’ attention either to the enjoyment of acting on desires or to the satisfaction of achieving goals. We found little evidence of context-sensitivity. In both treatments, however, judgements that favoured spontaneity were expressed with roughly the same frequency and strength as judgments that favoured self-control.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | |||||||||
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| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BJ Ethics H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HM Sociology |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School | |||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Spontaneity (Personality trait) , Self-control , Paternalism , Libertarianism, Choice (Psychology), Social choice, Decision making, Economics—Psychological aspects | |||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Behavioural Public Policy | |||||||||
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press | |||||||||
| ISSN: | 2398-063X | |||||||||
| Official Date: | 31 January 2022 | |||||||||
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| DOI: | 10.1017/bpp.2021.41 | |||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | |||||||||
| Publication Status: | In Press | |||||||||
| Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | This article has been accepted for publication in a revised form for publication in Behavioural Public Policy. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy | |||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | |||||||||
| Copyright Holders: | Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press | |||||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 23 November 2021 | |||||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 24 November 2021 | |||||||||
| RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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