Self-control and normativity: Theories in social psychology revisited

The exercise of self-control is of great significance in people’s daily lives and in the organization of social institutions. The reasonableness of the self-control concept, however, has been challenged by recent developments in cognitive, behavioral, and neurosciences that identify human behavior as a result of complex automatic processes generated by people’s environments. Collating more data on self-control and developing new theoretical approaches is crucial to meeting this challenge. Still, this article argues that a conceptual analysis of the meaning of self-control is also needed. Reflecting on recent work in philosophy, it discusses how self-controlled behavior is characterized not only by distinct causal mechanisms, but also by fundamental normative evaluations. Four conceptualizations of self-control will be presented to highlight why the corresponding self-control failures are essentially also normative failures. Furthermore, it discusses how the normativity of self-controlled behavior can contribute to further theorizing in social psychology.