Self-control

Ontological structure of the space
Psychology is rich with related constructs on self-regulation (e.g. impulsivity, self-control, inhibition etc.) and even richer in behavioral tasks and surveys to measure these putative constructs. It does lack, however, a clear understanding of how these constructs and the measures relate to each other. As part of the Science of Behavior Change initiative we addressed this question by running a large battery (35 tasks, 23 surveys) on a large sample (n=552).

Trait measures of self-regulation
Tasked with finding the best ‘behavioral assays’ of self-regulation we examined the stability of all the measures from our large battery of tasks and surveys. We followed up with 150 of our participants who completed our battery and asked them to complete it a second time 2-4 months after their initial completion. Additionally we completed a detailed analysis of the literature on the retest reliability of all our measures for comparability with our dataset. We found that the literature was noisy to begin with and that the survey measures were more reliable than task measures.

References:

Mazza, G. L., Smyth, H. L., Bissett, P. G, Canning, J. R., Eisenberg, I. W., Enkavi, A. Z., Gonzalez, O., Kim, S. J., Metcalf, S. A., Muniz, F., Pelham III, W. E., Scherer E. A., Valente, M. J., Xie, H., Poldrack, R. A., Marsch, L. A., MacKinnon, D. P. (2020). Correlation Database of 60 Cross-Disciplinary Surveys and Cognitive Tasks Assessing Self-Regulation. Journal of Personality Assessment, 103 (2), 238-245.

Enkavi, A. Z., Eisenberg, I. W., Bissett, P. G., Mazza, G. L., MacKinnon, D. P., Marsch, L. A., & Poldrack, R. A. (2019). Reply to Friedman and Banich: Right measures for the research question. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(49), 24398-24399.

Eisenberg, I. W., Bissett, P. G., Enkavi, A. Z., Li, J., MacKinnon, D. P., Marsch, L. A., & Poldrack, R. A. (2019). “Uncovering the structure of self-regulation through data-driven ontology discovery.” Nature communications, 10(1), 2319.

Enkavi, A. Z., Eisenberg, I. W., Bissett, P. G., Mazza, G. L., MacKinnon, D. P., Marsch, L. A., & Poldrack, R. A. (2019). Large-scale analysis of test–retest reliabilities of self-regulation measures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(12), 5472-5477.