New Directions in Self-Regulation and Goal Striving: A Pluralistic Vision for Motivated Behavior

Benjamin Buttlar

University of Trier

A Model of Attitudinal Cognitive Conflict in the Exertion of Situated Self-Control

People regularly have to overcome conflicts of self-control to be successful, healthy, and happy. However, the mechanisms through which self-control conflicts emerge have been underspecified, preventing systematic research on their origins and resolution. In this talk, I propose that self-control conflicts are rooted in people's attitudes. Attitudes are evaluations of people, objects, events, or ideas, and they reflect how such attitude objects align with people's needs and goals. Based on this, I posit the Model of Attitudinal Cognitive Conflict in the Exertion of Situated Self-Control (ACCESS). In the ACCESS model, I argue that self-control conflicts arise when people encounter ambivalent attitude objects that make goal-relevant positive and negative evaluations simultaneously accessible; thus, the capacity to change attitudes and their accessibility determine the success of self-regulatory strategies and their effects on people's well-being. This parsimonious conceptualization suggests that self-control conflicts can be similarly affected by effortful long-term goals and hedonic short-term goals. Crucially, the ACCESS model also suggests that reconciling the attitudinal basis of these conflicts can foster well-being, regardless of whether self-regulation leads people to align their attitudes with short- or long-term goals.

Guido H.E. Gendolla

University of Geneva

The Protective Power of Agency: How Personal Task Choice Shields Against Affective Influences on Volition

Based on a recent action-shielding model (Gendolla et al., 2021), this talk makes a case for a hardly studied effect of personal control: action-shielding against biasing affective influences on volition. The core idea is that personal task choice increases commitment and task focus. A series of experiments in which effort intensity—a core aspect of volition—was assessed physiologically as sympathetic beta-adrenergic impact on the heart supported this idea. Replicating previous research, individuals to whom tasks were externally assigned were receptive for different forms of affective stimulation, yielding systematic effects on resource mobilization by influencing the level of subjective demand. Importantly, the personal choice of tasks or task characteristics immunized against affective influences such as background music, emotion primes, acoustic noise, cognitive conflict, and even dispositional depressive symptoms. Participants who could personally choose their task were shielded against these affective influences, whereas those with externally assigned tasks were not. These findings provide a new perspective on the important role of personal choice: agency can work as a shield against various affective influences on action execution and thus foster the efficiency of self-regulative processes.

Suzanne Oosterwijk

University of Amsterdam

Understanding Negative Information Seeking as a Motivated Phenomenon

People often choose to engage with content that is not pleasant. People watch videos of distressing news events, listen to disturbing podcasts, read stories about other people's hardship, or view art that portrays injustice or suffering. In this perspective talk I will discuss why people engage with content that can be experienced as emotionally evocative or distressing. I use recent empirical findings to argue that epistemic value (i.e., knowledge acquisition), eudaimonic value (i.e., meaningful insight), and aesthetic value can motivate engagement with negative content, and that this experience of value may reinforce continued information seeking. But engaging with negative content can also be costly; people experience negative emotions or distress when doing so. Interestingly, recent research has shown negative, positive, and even inverted U-shaped relationships between the experience of negative affect and motivational states such as curiosity, interest, and choice. This raises the question of when negative affect is experienced as too costly and when it is seen as a valued aspect of processing negative content. With this talk, I aim to make a case for explicitly integrating negative valence in a pluralistic understanding of motivated behavior, and to connect individual costs and benefits in the moment with broader societal consequences of engaging with negative information.

Hodaya Levy-Schulman

Hebrew University of Jerusalem · with Anat Maril & Tali Kleiman

The Cost of the Unknown: How "Voids" Challenge Goal Attainment through Self-Regulatory Failure

Traditional models of self-regulation and goal striving often focus on the interference of known distractors (e.g., the Stroop effect). However, a comprehensive view of motivated behavior must also account for how the absence of knowledge or meaning—"voids"—impacts cognitive efficiency during goal attainment. This research integrates predictive processing frameworks with cognitive control theories to investigate how unknown, task-irrelevant information hinders goal attainment. We argue that self-regulation involves not only the pursuit of explicit task goals but also the management of implicit epistemic goals, such as the drive to resolve uncertainty. When encountering a "void," the predictive system fails to provide credible prior predictions, triggering an involuntary, resource-consuming cognitive control process to inhibit the futile attempt to "fill the void." Across three studies using computerized forced-decision tasks, results consistently showed that participants were slower to respond on trials containing voids compared to known stimuli—but only when voids appeared at the beginning of the process, not at the end. These findings suggest that "voids" act as potent distractors that demand active self-regulatory effort to ignore, shedding new light on the boundaries of goal-striving and the difficulty of inhibiting irrelevant epistemic searches.

J. Lukas Thürmer

Paris Lodron University of Salzburg

Motivation and Groups: Towards Understanding Collective Action Control

Humans have two superpowers: reaching desired end-states (goals) and working together in groups (cooperation and coordination). Motivation Science has traditionally focused on the former but largely neglected the latter. Here, I suggest that both capabilities are, in fact, one: collective action control. Accordingly, future progress of Motivation Science will depend on including and developing group perspectives. I will first briefly discuss the genesis of the schism between motivation science and group research, to build an argument for why understanding groups is key to understanding motivation. I will illustrate this by drawing on research on group responses to high and poor performers. These data converge on the conclusion that groups monitor performance deviants by inferring their group-directed intentions—a property I call attributed pro-group intent. This process maps closely onto key principles of goal setting and goal striving identified by individualistic motivation science: groups rely on observed effort and ability and engage in a meta-motivational assessment, assuming others set goals similarly to themselves. I will discuss this model of group reaction to performance deviants as one example of how Motivation Science may incorporate groups in the future.

Lile Jia

National University of Singapore

When Pleasure Reflects Control: Reconceptualizing Planned Indulgence as an Act of Self-Control

For decades, the field of self-regulation has largely operated under the assumptions of an indulgence-goal dichotomy, viewing hedonic pleasure as an adversary to goal striving, and self-control as the inhibition of impulses. While recent work has identified instances where "indulgence helps" (e.g., temptation bundling, cheat days), these are often treated as exceptions to the rule. This talk proposes a fundamental theoretical shift: moving from viewing self-control as conflict inhibition to viewing it as scope integration. Drawing on the Regulatory Scope Perspective (Fujita et al., 2024) and data from nine studies across academic, dieting, and work contexts, the presentation offers evidence that planned indulgence—hedonic episodes integrated into goal striving—exhibits the hallmark features of self-control. Specifically, findings indicate that high trait self-control predicts the endorsement and use of planned indulgence, and that such indulgence yields affective and motivational benefits without incurring self-control costs (e.g., guilt, further lapses). The talk will end with a reflection on the implications of this shift for the field. If pleasure is not the enemy, how should the diagnostic criteria for self-control success be updated? The discussion will challenge the reliance on abstinence as the gold standard for high self-control and explore how the integration of leisure and labor (e.g., moderation) can be systematically studied.

Marie Hennecke

Ruhr University Bochum

Past Willpower: Strategic and Metacognitive Pathways to Self-Control in Daily Life

Traditionally, self-control has been equated with willpower or the effortful inhibition of impulses. More recent approaches, however, have argued that "willpower is overrated" (Inzlicht & Friese, 2021) or have directly proposed alternative, often less effortful, processes for resolving self-control conflicts. In line with these approaches, I present our work on self-regulatory strategies, regulatory flexibility, and metacognition as central pathways to successful self-control in daily life. Drawing on multiple diary and experience sampling studies involving hundreds of participants reporting on real-life self-control conflicts, my collaborators and I demonstrate that individuals possess rich repertoires of self-control strategies. The size of these repertoires predicts daily self-control success, as does the number of strategies deployed per conflict. Furthermore, individuals who report greater metacognitive knowledge about strategies, actively monitor their use, and apply them in a flexible and context-sensitive manner are more likely to succeed at self-control. Finally, I present emerging evidence indicating that the use of self-control strategies with hedonic orientation—that is with the intention to make self-control more hedonically pleasant—is a key predictor of successful momentary self-control.

Axel Grund & Sebastian Schmid

University of Luxembourg & University of Regensburg

Illusionary Consent: How Explanations by Self-Control Hinder Our Understanding of a Pluralistic World

Research in discursive psychology has shown that the concept of self-control can be used to apologize for deviant behavior (e.g., "I did it because I could not control myself"). We add that it can also be used to legitimize power hierarchies (e.g., "Some people must be controlled because they cannot control themselves"). Both functions in effect veil interpersonal conflicts about values and goals by depicting them as intrapersonal problems of goal implementation. Consequently, self-control talk creates an illusion of social consent, which is at odds with the reality of pluralistic and diverse societies. Contemporary self-control research is not free from such tendencies. As remedy, we suggest drawing on the model of self-control as value-based choice. This model, first, overcomes empirical and conceptual problems of traditional approaches to self-control. In fact, neither research on trait self-control nor self-control strategies provides direct evidence for self-control as an explanatory construct. Second, this model lends itself to forge links with established motivational theories, thereby opening a window to the sociocultural realities people navigate in their everyday lives. Acknowledging the diversity of people's values and goals is also a prerequisite for tailored psychological practice that goes beyond symptom treatment.

Esther Papies

Radboud University

Psychology for a Better Future: Using Behavioural Science to Create Motivation for Addressing Planetary Crises

We are in a crisis of planetary health, with human behaviour in the service of economic growth breaching the safe limits of biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution. This has significant costs for human health and social justice. We are also in a crisis of systems and behaviour: most people are concerned about this crisis, but do not contribute to the systems and behaviour change that is needed for a safe future. This is in part due to a crisis of imagination: the social and health co-benefits of living within planetary boundaries are clear and well-documented, but this is not communicated in mainstream societal discourse in high-income societies. Instead, the focus is on sacrificing comfort to avert catastrophe—which does not create motivation for change. The motivation for change requires expecting rewarding outcomes—in other words, a better future. Using this approach, behavioural science can play at least three key roles in addressing these crises: co-creating visions for a better future that provide motivation for change; communicating these visions to engage stakeholders and grow the movement; and reshaping systems so that behaviour in line with planetary boundaries is rewarding rather than costly.

Wilhelm Hofmann

Ruhr University Bochum

Going Beyond the Individual Level in Self-Control Research

Major societal challenges—from climate change to obesity—are frequently framed as problems of individual self-control. This emphasis, however, often obscures the role of structural forces that determine which choices are available, accessible, affordable, and normative. In this talk, I advance a multilevel perspective that critically examines the interplay between individual agency and structural constraints. I begin by challenging our discipline's traditional emphasis on autonomy, arguing that understanding issues such as sustainable consumption or healthy eating requires acknowledging how institutions and social practices co-shape choice environments beyond individual control. I will briefly outline three research directions that follow from this perspective: First, I introduce the novel concept of structural awareness—the extent to which individuals recognize how structures constrain their consumption choices. Second, I examine how self-control concerns shape policy support, exploring when and why people favor structural interventions that alter their own future choice environments. Third, I discuss potential limits to autonomy-promotion in contexts where actual control is structurally constrained. I will briefly reflect on the general connections between behavioral science and policymaking, arguing for moving beyond the prevailing emphasis on successful behavior change interventions and instead recognizing the importance of accumulated failures of behavior change interventions as diagnostic instruments for structural barriers.

Esmee Veenstra

Utrecht University · with Naomi Ellemers & Félice van Nunspeet

Inviting Shared Responsibility: A Motivational Framework for Sustainable Societal Engagement

How can responsibility for societal challenges become something people willingly embrace together, rather than a burden imposed upon each of them individually? We approach shared responsibility as a psychological state in which interdependent actors jointly orient toward a collective goal and commit to complementary roles in achieving valued societal outcomes. In this conceptual contribution, we develop a motivational framework that integrates insights from Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Social Identity Theory (SIT) to specify when shared responsibility becomes a self-endorsed, enduring source of group-based motivation. Within this integration, SDT specifies when externally prompted responsibilities are more likely to be internalized—through support for autonomy, belonging, and competence—while SIT clarifies for whom and on what normative terms such commitment becomes self-relevant through identification with a shared identity. We propose three interdependent conditions that support sustainable societal engagement, organized around three core motivational functions: energizing, directing, and sustaining effort over time. The framework clarifies when responsibility appeals are likely to be taken up as shared, self-endorsed commitments and when they are more likely to trigger defensiveness or short-lived compliance, with practical guidance for designing responsibility invitations across organizations and communities.