Self-ControlAuthor(s): Howard RachlinSource: Behaviorism, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1974), pp. 94-107Published by: Cambridge Center for Behavioral StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27758811 .Accessed: 21/10/2011 09:40

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Self-control1

Howard Rachlin State University of New York at Stony Brook

We ordinarily use the term "self-control" to describe decisions between alternatives arriving at different times. For instance, having a roast-beef sandwich for lunch provides a reward now; having cottage cheese instead can provide a

reward tomorrow when I step on the scale. Take the temporal issue away and the issue of self-control goes away as well. If it were suddenly discovered that cottage cheese was just as fattening (and therefore had the same ultimate consequences for me) as a roast beef sandwich and I still ate the cottage cheese, I would have to admit that I simply liked the cottage cheese better. The decision would become, like one between blue and brown suits, simply one of taste.

When the events chosen between are continuous in the sense that they cannot be located in a brief temporal interval (e.g., working at a job and being paid at a certain rate) then self-control applies when the events differ in temporal extent. The primary rewards obtained by working at an unpleasant job must extend further in time than the job itself before we ascribe self-control to the worker when he works. If the unpleasantness and pleasantness are completely co

temporaneous, self-control is not involved. We would see' the worker as weighing the two factors and choosing to work only if the resultant was pleasant. Other

wise, why work? But let the worker's reward extend further in time ? to providing for his family, enjoying luxuries, etc. and working versus not working becomes a matter of self-control.

Psychologists studying self-control (JVlischel, 1966; Rotter, 1954) have long noticed that self-control is a "now" versus "later" issue. Their subjects show self control when they prefer larger rewards in the future to smaller rewards in the

present or, symmetrically, avoid greater pain in the future in return for lesser pain

1. Preparation of this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. For helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper I thank G. Ainslie, W. Baum, E. Erwin, E. Fantino, R. J. Herrnstein, F. Levine, G.H. Whitehurst, and G.T. Wilson.

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in the present. In this context visiting the dentist is showing self-control and not

visiting him shows lack of self-control. The hedonic picture looks something like that of Figure 1. The reason for indecision between two alternatives, one already assumed to be better than the other, is that the better alternative is only better in

MORE PAIN

don't visit

dentist

visit dentist

LESS

PAIN

Figure 1: Hypothetical diagram of the way pain would vary on visiting the dentist and without visiting the dentist.

the long run. The worse alternative offers immediate benefit. The difference

between someone who is controlling himself and someone who is not controlling himself is thus not in the spatial locus of control (from inside versus from out

side his skin) as the term "self-control" seems to imply but in the temporal locus ? how far away from the present must we look to find the source of control.

With regard to the establishment of self-control the question to ask is how con

trol is shifted from immediate to distant consequences. Again, this is a temporal question, not a spatial one. However, as Skinner (1955) has pointed out, psy

chologists have been hesitant to ascribe causality to events far apart, temporally, from each other. They have translated the action of distant events into present events and placed the present events inside the organism. Thus "ego strength," "in

ternalization," "subjective probability," "resistance to frustration," and other cog nitive or motivational terms have made their way into discussions of self-control. These terms refer to mediating mechanisms which represent a past or a future event in the present. It is my contention that these mediating mechanisms are not

necessary to understand or empirically study self-control. They have served for the

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Self-control

psychologist, as the ether formerly served the physicist, as a way of bridging between causes and their consequences when those causes and consequences were

separated by an entity through which it was not believed that causality could act. In the case of the physicists this entity was unfilled space. In the case of the psy chologists this entity is an unfilled temporal interval. As Staddon (1973) has concluded in a recent analysis of causality in psychology, ". . . limitation of the causes of behavior to temporally contiguous stimuli is without justification.,,

WHAT CAN CAUSE BEHAVIOR? A good deal of psychological research has recently shown that the cause of

behavior can be the relationship between that behavior and events in the environ ment (Baum, 1973; Bloomfield, 1972; Herrnstein and Hineline, 1966; Majer, Seligman and Solomon, 1969). To take one example, Herrnstein and Hineline

(1966) arranged a set of contingencies for a rat so that the rate of irregularly delivered brief electric shocks varied inversely with rate of bar pressing. If the rats pressed faster the shocks came slower; if they pressed slower the shocks came faster. The rats learned to press the bar although no single bar press avoided

any single shock. The rate of bar presses and the rate of shocks were the critical variables. But the rate of a discrete event has no meaning at an instant of time. At any instant the event is either occurring (in which case its rate is infinite) or is not occurring (in which case its rate is zero). Consider Figure 2. The pips represent shocks or bar presses in a hypothetical replication of the Herrnstein Hineline experiment. It is generally true about the bar presses and shocks that the more bar presses, the fewer shocks. But if all the data were not available, if an observer just saw what was between M and N, between O and or between

shocks

bar presses

0

! il

0

I II Mil II I

-

TIME

Figure 2: Hypothetical pattern of shocks and responses in the Herrnstein-Hineline experiment. Tne pips on the top line stand for shocks and the pips on the bottom line stand for responses. The vertical dotted lines represent restricted periods of observation, M-N, 0-P and Q-R.

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Howard Kachlin

Q and R he might conclude that shocks were causing bar presses, that bar presses were causing shocks or that the two were unrelated. Only an extended view of the temporal properties of bar presses and shocks allows us to see the true relation

ship. Imagine a rat in the Herrnstein-Hineline experiment that presses the bar as in Figure 2. We can now ask, "What causes the bar presses?" In the light of the above discussion the cause of the bar presses is the relationship between bar press ing and shocks as it is experienced by the rat.

Suppose in the Herrnstein-Hineline experiment that each bar press costs the rat something. We could imagine that the effort of pressing was increased or that a low intensity shock followed upon each press. In that case the immediate con

sequences of pressing the bar would be painful (or effortful) but the long-term consequences of not pressing the bar would be still more painful. The picture

would be something like that shown in Figure 1. Replace "visit dentist" by "press bar" and "don't visit dentist" by "don't press bar" and you have a fair picture of the rat's situation. Will rats press bars under these conditions? In a more recent

experiment, Lambert, Bersh, Hinelineand Smith (1973) arranged contingencies for a rat so that a press produced a single shock immediately but avoided several shocks of equal intensity later on. The rats in the Lambert et al experiment con

sistently pressed the bar. Can we say that the rats were exhibiting self-control? If the criterion for exhibiting self-control is choosing an alternative which involves a larger future good over a smaller present good then these rats were exhibiting self-control; they avoided a more painful experience in the distant future in favor of a less painful experience in the immediate future.2 if, on the other hand, we insist that exertions of "ego-strength," "internalization," "expectancy," or other

cognitive or motivational events must also go on somewhere within the rat we shall have the difficult task of trying to verify their occurrence. But such explanatory efforts are unnecessary. The behavior itself is all the evidence we need that self control is going on. What would we say if we found somehow that the rat had the appropriate motivational or cognitive apparatus but did not press the bar? It would be pointless, then, to claim that the rat was controlling itself. It is the rat's behavior in relation to the contingencies imposed that comprises self-control.

Similar arguments apply as well to all human instances of self-control. The way in which human behavior is more complicated than a rat's behavior is not that human behavior is controlled from inside while the rat's behavior is controlled from outside but that the environmental events controlling human behavior prob ably occur over a wider temporal interval than those which control the behavior of the rat. When we refuse the third martini at a party (if we do refuse it) it is not because of an exercise of some force within us but part of a response to con

tingencies spread out widely in time before and after we are offered the drink. The wider contingencies involve events on the way home and the next morning while the narrow contingencies involve only events at the party itself. Why we should act in accordance with wide contingencies rather than with the narrow ones which

2. Fantino (1966) showed that pigeons could learn to show self-control in a symmetrical situation with positive reinforcement. The pigeons in Fantino's experiment could obtain an immediate reward (followed by a penalty) by pecking a red key or they could wait a few seconds until the key turned green and obtain a reward with no penalty. The pigeons initially pecked the red key but with six months of training came eventually to wait for the green key.

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dictate acceptance of the drink is another question, which we shall try to deal with later. It suffices to say now that the question is answered no better by referring to internal events or states than it is without them.

Let us return to the rats in the Herrnstein-Hineline experiment. These rats were pressing the bar relatively rapidly and receiving relatively few shocks. I

argued that the contingency between the bar presses and the shocks as experienced by the rat is the cause of the bar pressing. Traditional psychology would invoke the cognitive and motivational mediating mechanisms previously discussed. What is the purpose of those mechanisms? In order to avoid having an event at one time caused by an event at another time the concept of a state of the organism is introduced. Events at one time affect the state, and the state affects the behavior.

The state in question may be motivational or cognitive. Past events are supposed to govern present events via the motivational state while future events are supposed to govern present events via the cognitive state. Herrnstein (1969), Bolles (1972), and Seligman and Johnston (1973) have argued against motivational and for

cognitive explanations of the bar pressing of rats, but if we grant that events extended in both temporal directions are directly caused by other events similarly extended there is no need to refer to either kind of state. The notion that cog nitive and motivational states mediate between past and future events and present behavior is not necessary. It obscures the search for the most direct causes of behavior because it tends to direct that search into the organism instead of into the past and future.

This does not imply that a given act can be manipulated by events which occur after the act is over. When the environmental event and the behavior are extended in time it makes no sense to talk of an environmental sub-event at one point in time causing a sub-act at another point in time. Each sub-act is to be seen only as

part of the complete act; and it is the causal relation between the complete act and the complete environmental event which concerns us. In Figure 2 a certain rate of bar pressing is caused by the relationship between shocks and bar presses. At our level of inquiry no individual bar press is "caused" at all. It makes as little sense to place the cause of an individual bar press in the past as it does to place the cause in the future. Analogously, if I like a painting, it is me who likes the

painting as a whole. One could not say whether my left eye liked the lower

right corner of the painting.3 With respect to the traditional dichotomy between classical and instrumental

conditioning, the notion that the cause of behavior extends into both the past and future removes the usual temporal distinction between classical conditioning (where the reinforcer ? the unconditioned stimulus ?

precedes the act) and instrumental conditioning (where the reinforcer follows the act) and concentrates, as has recently been suggested (Bloomfield, 1972; Catania, 1971; Gamzu and

Schwartz, 1973; Rachlin, 1970; Staddon, 1973), on correlations between one environmental event and another (classical conditioning) and between an environ mental and a behavior event (instrumental conditioning).

3. If we were forced to consider individual sub-events as being caused we would have to admit that an event could be changed by a subsequent event. Modern historians recognize that the facts of the past are not easily separable from their interpretation (their context). If individual past events were considered in isolation of their context, a modern theory of history which revises our interpretation of those events would, in effect, be changing them.

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To say that the origin of self-control is not in the self is not to say that the

organism has no properties or has been subtracted out of consideration. The

biological properties of the organism determine which environmental events control which behavioral events. What has been subtracted out are those psy chological (as opposed to biological) properties of the organism such as memory, expectancy, response strength, etc. which serve only to bridge temporal gaps. The remaining biological properties of the organism are those that serve for reaction to immediate as well as long-term contingencies. If a man is stabbed and he

bleeds, no one will be tempted to talk about memory of the stabbing and

response strength of the bleeding intervening between stabbing and bleeding, although the properties of his body determined that he would bleed when stabbed. But for temporally extended events such as his dissatisfaction with a

bad job, traditional psychological analysis will invoke memory, expectancy and response strength in order to bring the cause and effect into immediate

temporal proximity. It is certainly something about the man that reacts to the

long hours, the low pay, the hostile boss, etc., by complaining, going on strike or quitting. But it is nevertheless these external temporally extended events that cause his behavior and not his immediate memories, expectations, and response

strengths.

Very often widespread and narrow contingencies cause the same behavior.

Working at a pleasant job provides rewards now, in the past and in the future. The relationship between these rewards and work, more directly than anything else, causes the work to be done. But often temporally extended events cause behavior in conflict with that caused by temporally constricted events. When such conflict arises a choice has to be made between the constricted and extended

consequences, the choice of extended consequences being self-control. The sub

jective state corresponding to "exertion of self-control" may be no different

qualitatively than that corresponding to any difficult choice. Deciding whether to accept that third cocktail may be more difficult than deciding whether it is to be a martini or a manhattan but the difference between the two decisions would be simply that one is more difficult, not that one is different in kind from the other.

To say that the cause of action can be narrow or widespread in time is not to

say that events have equal effects whenever they may occur. There is often a

greater weight attached to constricted than to widespread contingencies. The

cognitive and motivational theorists invoke gradients of memory and certainty to

explain the reduction in control by events far in the past or future. But, given these gradients, they need not be first applied to the state of the organism and

only then to its behavior. They can apply directly to behavior. Furthermore,

many actions, and in the case of humans most of our significant actions, are un

related to present causes. We move from one city to another, get married or

divorced, get jobs or quit them not because of anything that is happening at the

very moment we perform these actions (even when the actions themselves are

brief). It has proved difficult and fruitless, moreover, to trace chains of secondary reinforcers back from some presumably primary reinforcer just in order to bring the reinforcer in temporal proximity with the acts. If a man moves from

Maine to Florida he does not move because of the weather on the day he moves al

though he may be moving because of the weather. The cognitive or motivational theorists will say that the weather in Maine causes a certain state in the man and the weather in Florida causes another state in the man and that moving is rein

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forced by a transition from one state to the other. But such states have been

difficult to pin down. They are awkward, unparsimonious and invite freewheeling

theorizing which can explain anything in their terms. Their one convenience, of

bringing causes and effects into temporal proximity, is simply not worth its price. The cause of a man's moving from Maine to Florida is most parsimoniously described in terms of the weather in Maine and the weather in Florida ? in terms

of mean temperatures and average snowfall, etc. ? nothing that could occur

within a brief temporal interval.

Despite the emphasis above on the environment I am not arguing that there are

no individual differences in ability to exercise self-control. Like other abilities, self-control undoubtedly develops through some combination of genetic and en

vironmental conditions. Heredity vs. environment is not the main issue here.

What is at issue is whether the causes of behavior we label self-control are different

in kind from the causes of behavior we label lack of self-control. Analysis reveals

that the two causes differ in degree of temporal extent, not in their place of origin.

TECHNIQUES OF SELF-CONTROL

The kind of self-control to which we have been referring might be called "brute force" self-control. When the temptation is offered it is simply refused. The

martini is turned down at the party, the bakery is passed without a purchase, the dessert is pushed away, etc. The direct cause of such behavior is the long-term correlation between the behavior and its consequences.

An objection might be raised that the view espoused here applies well enough to

brute-force self-control but not to more sophisticated techniques of self-control such as those developed by Weight Watchers, or Alcoholics Anonymous or the

strategies we are constantly inventing in everyday life to manipulate our own

behavior. Consider the following ways in which a student might get himself to study:

1. He simply studies despite the temptation to go to the movies instead.

2. He rewards himself for studying by going to the movies afterward.

3. He has previously deposited a fairly large sum of money with a friend. He has instructed the friend to check every half-hour

during the evening to see that he is studying. If the friend does not find him studying, the friend is further instructed to

send the money to a political party whose views are exactly contrary to those of the student.

So far we have discussed only alternative Number 1 and that only in theory. Let us reserve for the next section speculations on how self-control might be

brought about, and turn now to alternatives 2 and 3. They are both forms of self control because their object is to increase the likelihood that behavior will be in accordance with its long-term consequences. They are fairly representative of

types of self-control often recommended by behavior therapists and might be

called, respectively, self-reinforcement and commitment. Let us consider self-reinforcement first. A little analysis reveals that the reinforce

ments given to oneself do not support the behavior upon which they are contingent. Suppose, for a moment, that the student in our example increased his studying by

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going to the movies afterward. Now, suppose that this self-reinforcement cont

inued but external reinforcers, the good grades, the knowledge, the social approval to be gained from studying were withdrawn. How long would studying continue

without them? What would the point of studying be? Would going to the movies continue to "work" as a self-imposed reinforcer for studying? One does not have to do an experiment to answer these questions negatively.4 In what sense, then,

was the movie a reinforcer? This is a critical question because the test for a re

inforcer must be whether it can support behavior. If we take away external re

inforcers leaving only self-reinforcement which supports no behavior other than that involved in its consumption5 then self-reinforcement loses its effectiveness.

It seems likely that self-reinforcement is a form of secondary reinforcement.

Going to the movies might have increased studying not because of its reinforcing properties but because of its stimulus properties. This hypothesis could be tested

by substituting neutral, but strong, stimuli for self-reinforcers. For instance, a

student who rewards himself by eating a peanut after each 10 minutes of studying ought to study as well if, instead of eating it, he simply transfers the peanut from one dish to another as a way of counting 10-minute periods of studying. The ques tion is empirical, but in the research on self-reinforcement, whether with humans or animals, it has rarely been addressed directly.6

A behavior therapist might ask his patient to institute a program of self reinforcement for studying as sort of a cast or mold but the therapist might not be satisfied until the cast was removed. The program might start with going to

the movies as a self-reinforcer, switch to a more convenient and less time consum

ing activity like eating peanuts after each 10 minutes of studying, then switch to a

program of record-keeping, then nothing. Presumably, by this time, the con

tingency between studying and grades would be controlling studying directly. Relapses might be treated by returning to prior supports. The point is that the

sequence from going to the movies to peanuts to record-keeping to nothing may not be a withdrawal of reinforcement but a withdrawal of stimuli.

Self-reinforcement may be like saying to oneself "Yes. I did just do that," per

forming the same function for the subject as the feedback click which we arrange to tell the pigeon it has just pecked a key. if the correlation between events affects

behavior, other things being equal, correlations between intense stimuli will affect

4. Yet, recently self-reinforce ment has emerged as an area of study with humans (Bandura

1971) and even animals (Mahoney and Bandura, 1972).

5. The behavior involved in eating, chewing and swallowing, for instance, can be thought of as reinforced by the digestion of food. Restricted to such events, self-reinforcement is a valid and

interesting concept. But the more common use of the term is in the sense of example number 2 where the behavior is not consummatory.

6. Bandura and Perloff (1967) had children set their own criterion for a task (turning a crank) and then reward themselves with tokens for reaching their own criterion. The children who set their own criterion turned as fast as those children whose criterion was set for them (the latter group was also given tokens instead of rewarding themselves). The interesting part of this experiment is the setting of the criterion, which is a question of commitment (Why didn't the children set the criterion as low as possible?), not the self-reward. Once the criterion was set the children would have been disobeying the rules of the "game" (they were told that they

were evaluating a game) had they rewarded themselves without reaching criterion.

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behavior more than will correlations between weak stimuli. The feedback involved in self-reinforcement may well be more intense than the normal proprioceptive and kinesthetic feedback of most behavior. Where this is not the case, self reinforcement should not work.

Occasionally the term "self-reinforcement" is used the way cognitive and

motivational internal mechanisms of self-control have been used, to bring cause

and effect into temporal contiguity. If, as the cognitive and motivational theorists

assume, reinforcement must come immediately after the act being reinforced but no immediate external reinforcer is observed then one has to be invented. Covert self-reinforcement is a likely candidate. It provides all the advantages of un

observable (hence, untestable) concepts while preserving the flavor of behavioral

terminology. But covert self-reinforcement, rather than lending rigor to a basically vague underlying concept, is in danger of lending vagueness to the basically rigorous behavioral terminology it borrows.

Now let us turn to the sort of involved strategies exemplified by the third

alternative, where the student has made an agreement with his friend to send his

money to an opposing political party if he does not study. This self-control involves a commitment. It is rather like the signing of a contract specifying various kinds of performance in the future and setting forth penalties for failure to comply. George Ainslie (1970) and Leonard Green and I (1972) have argued that commit ment of this kind follows from the simple descriptions of choice advanced by Logan (1965) and by Herrnstein (1970). We showed that complicated internal mechanisms were not necessary to explain commitment; that rats and pigeons were capable of employing commitment strategies in situations where the con

tingencies involved were straightforward. Ainslie's argument and his experiment differ in their detail from Green's and mine, but the main arguments are the same

and will be summarized here. Let us suppose that the long-term consequences of studying are valuable, but

occasionally the value of not studying rises above studying. The dilemma is that, because of the short-term aversive consequences of studying, the time in the

presence of the stimuli which make it possible to study (a quiet room with a desk, a book, a pad and sharpened pencils) is the very time that the value of not study ing rises above studying. As soon as those stimuli are removed, say, while lying in bed in the morning, the value of studying assumes its usual high place. This is where a commitment strategy is useful. The student is offered the contract (the commitment outlined in alternative Number 3 at the beginning of this section). The commitment is offered and accepted at a time when the value of studying is

high. The effect of the commitment is to reduce the student's choice ? to compel him to study.

Figure 3 is a diagram of the commitment decision process in the case of alter native 3. There are two decisions in question. Decision X takes place in the even

ing when the student is supposed to study. Decision Y takes place the morning before. The decision at time X is between studying and not studying. But at time X the short term consequences of not studying will determine the student's choice. Thus, not studying will be the invariable result. The other decision at time Y is whether to agree to the commitment. Assuming the commitment is ef fective (that the student absolutely will not tolerate the sending of his money to an opposing political party) instituting the commitment is equivalent to choosing

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I TIME I Figure 3: Flow diagram of commitment to study. Choice at X is between studying immediately and not studying. It is assumed that a student would not study at X. Choice at Y is between having a choice later (top arm) and being forced to study later (bottom arm). A student who would not study at X might nevertheless commit himself to study by choosing the lower arm at Y.

the lower branch of Figure 3, to studying, and to experiencing the consequences thereof. But, given the value structure as we have outlined it, at time Y the value of studying is higher than that of not studying and the student must agree to the commitment.

Once the commitment is available and once the contingencies are made effec tive, commitment behavior follows automatically. To emphasize that exercise of commitment was not dependent on ego strength, internalization, resistance to

frustration, or other sophisticated cognitive or motivational apparatus, Ainslie showed with rats, and Green and I, with pigeons, that relatively naive animals

would exhibit commitment. The experiment Green and I did closely follows the schema of Figure 3. The choice at Xfor our pigeons was between a small immediate

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food reward (analogous to not studying in Figure 3) and a larger food reward

delayed by several seconds (analogous to studying in Figure 3). The pigeons in

variably chose the small immediate reward at X. But, at Y, several seconds before

X, when they could choose to restrict subsequent alternatives, they chose not to

have a choice ? they chose the bottom branch of Figure 3 and obtained the larger

(but delayed) reward. The values of the delays and amounts were determined by Herrnstein's (1970) model for choice which predicts that preference varies

directly with amount and inversely with delay.7 The model further predicts that commitment will be more likely the greater the temporal separation between the choices at Y and X. This was also confirmed.

It is necessary to distinguish between two operations ? the exercise of the com

mitment strategy and the invention of the strategy. While the exercise of commit ment has nothing to do with higher mental processes, the invention of commitment

strategies is another matter. The invention may be a higher mental process (how ever that is defined) and it may be performed by the user (the student) or another

person (his friend or his therapist) but inventing a commitment strategy is not

exercising self-control. Neither does it take ego strength, internalization, etc. to invent a self-control strategy any more than these qualities were necessary to invent the cotton gin. Self-control is done by using the strategy so that one's be havior will be in accordance with its long-term consequences. And use of the

strategy occurs automatically once an effective strategy is invented. To summarize, both self-reinforcement and commitment are related to self

control because they both increase the likelihood that behavior will be controlled

by its long-term consequences. Self-reinforcement makes the relation between behavior and its consequences more vivid by providing stimuli correlated with those consequences. Commitment restricts choice so that behavior will automatic

ally conform to long-term consequences.

TEACHING SELF-CONTROL

Unfortunately, we shall have little to say in this section. Most of the research on self-control has been on the personality correlates of people who are good at

controlling themselves. The old, it seems, do it better than the young (Mischel, 1958), the sane better than the schizophrenic (Klein, 1967), the intelligent better than the unintelligent (Mischel and Metzner, 1962), the rich better than the poor (Maitland, 1967), etc. Obviously, self-control is a good thing to have. But environmental events which can generate self-control (i.e., shift the cause of be havior from short-term to long-term events) have not been systematically examined.

The preceding analysis would direct investigation to the following areas:

7. According to Herrnstein's model, the relative value of two activities is: 2 = A2 Dl wnere

A = amount and D = delay of reinforcement. In our experiment, alternative 1 was a small im

mediate reward and alternative 2 a larger delayed reward. A1/A2 always equalled 0.5, and VI D2 was always 4 seconds greater than Dl. At choice X, referring to Figure 3, = 0.5

(^ )= infinity, predicting that the small immediate reward would be chosen. At choice Y, 10 VI seconds prior,

= 0.5 (4+10/0+10) = 0.7 predicting that the large delayed reward would be

chosen.

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1. Does practice with long-term contingencies controlling one

activity increase the likelihood that they will control other activi ties? The notion that there are "addictive personalities" implies that some people cannot or do not respond to long-term con

tingencies in several behavioral areas. Can they be taught to behave

generally in accordance with these contingencies? Perhaps a per son who has learned not to overeat will have an easier time learning not to smoke. This implies that the way to begin in the cure of harmful habits may be through control of other habits. For instance, alcoholics might first be trained to keep their weight under control or to stop smoking. Control of eating an ice cream sundae by the next day's consequences might transfer to control of getting drunk

by the next day's consequences. 2. The long-term antecedents and consequences of certain events might be isolated from those of other events by techniques to make them more vivid or salient. The subject is in pretty much the same state with respect to observation of events controlling his behavior as the observer is. The way that we know better than

anyone else what causes our behavior is not that we have access to our internal sources of control but simply that we have more

behavioral data.

Counting and timing of events with mechanical or written

aids and the techniques of self-reinforcement (and self-punishment) are, as we have indicated before, ways to increase the salience of

the relationship between behavior and its consequences. Simply counting calories has been found to be as effective in short-term

weight reduction as self-reward, external monetary reward, aversive

imagery in connection with food, and relaxation training

(Romanczyk, Tracey, Wilson and Thorpe, 1973). The reason for

this may be that the reward for eating less is losing weight regardless of the subsidiary rewards inserted between the two events. These

subsidiary rewards do no more than emphasize the relation between

eating and losing weight, a function performed just as well by

counting calories.

3. Finally, commitment strategies may be instituted. Like self

reinforcement strategies they may be kept in force permanently. Behavior according to long-term contingencies is guaranteed as

long as they are in force. If I habitually keep my alarm clock across the room from my bed, I will have to get out of bed every

morning to turn it off. This technique of getting myself up in the

morning is one that can conveniently be used every day. But often commitment strategies involve awkward or expensive apparatus, and because they are commitments they limit choice. Ironically, in the ultimate long term, it may be better to occasionally behave

according to short-term contingencies (i.e., to act impulsively).

Rigid commitment does not allow such behavior and may be

undesirable for that reason. Commitment strategies thus might often be instituted only to bring behavior initially into conformity with long term consequences. Once these consequences are ex

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perienced they may serve to maintain behavior by themselves.

For instance, consider the following studies being done by G. T.

Wilson at Rutgers University's Behavior Research Laboratory. The aim of these studies is to bring control outside of the laboratory and into the everyday life of the alcoholic by a series of graded commitments. It has been found easy to control drinking in the

laboratory (at Rutgers, four alcoholics live together for several weeks at a time) by severe electric shock following each drink ? but this

procedure alone will not transfer to the everyday life of the alco holic. In future studies alcoholics will be asked to commit them selves in the morning (the "morning after") to a "contract" which

specifies that they be shocked after each drink they take that night. Eventually the commitment could be made each day and

drinking may cease in the laboratory setting. The control of drink

ing would have been transferred from the immediate shock to the

long-term relationship between drinking and shock. It seems more

likely that non-drinking established in this way will carry over to

everyday life, where temporally extended rewards for non-drinking are present in other forms, than would non-drinking established by immediate punishment for each drink, a form of contingency notoriously absent from everyday life.

It may be naive to expect that harmful habits with complex and varied etiologies should be curable by such a straightforward technique but, straightforward as the

technique may be, it has not yet been tried, perhaps because of a tendency to focus on the inner organism when faced with problems of self-control. If this technique or a similar one does work, it will be the best kind of evidence that such a

focus is misplaced.

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