Practitioners and researchers alike explore ways of increasing motivation. Whereas previous research mainly explores interventions that operate on people’s goals (e.g., via goal setting), we explore an intervention that operates on overcoming interfering temptations and nudging self-control success. We report an experiment testing a 1-week smartphone field intervention. Self-control involves an...

A control system usually consists of some control software as well as sensors and actuators to monitor and control certain quantities in the environment. The context of the control software thus consists of the sensors and actuators it uses and the environment. When starting development of the control software, its context is often not predefined or given. There are contextual decisions the dev...

An agent’s intertemporal choices depend on a variety of factors, most prominently, their valuation of future payoffs as encapsulated in a discount function. However, it is also clear that factors such as self-control may also play an important role, and given the similarity of impact, a confounding one. We explore the literature on this issue as well as examining what occurs when those with hig...

The purpose of this study was to examine self-regulation as a mediator of the relation between family functioning and externalizing behaviour in 731 low-income children (M age = 41 months) across three time points. Specifically, this study focused on whether chaos in the home and positive behaviour support were indirectly related to externalizing problems through their influence on inhibitory c...

We first review recent work from our laboratory, which construes hypnotizability as an example of a more general trait capacity for phenomenological control, people can use to create subjective experiences in many nonhypnotic contexts where those fulfill people's goals. Second, we work, control specifically metacognitive process, intentional cognitive and motor action occurs without awareness s...

This paper studies menu choice problems in which the decision maker faces no ex ante uncertainty about her ex post preferences, yet nevertheless exhibits non-trivial menu preferences due to the presence of self-control problems. We introduce a new class of utilities which generalize the Gul-Pesendorfer (2001, 2005) ‘No Self-Control’ model. The main results in the paper provide utility represent...

Since the 1950s, researchers have attempted to understand reports of distant or "psychic" healing, developing experimental protocols that test the distant healing hypothesis by measuring biological changes in a target system while ruling out suggestion or self-regulation as counterexplanations. This article provides a brief overview of these "healing analog" experiments. It also provides a summ...