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A significant body of research suggests that self-control and willpower are resources that become depleted as they are exercised. Having to exert self-control and willpower draws down a person’s reservoir of these resources and makes subsequent such exercises more difficult. This ego depletion renders individuals more susceptible to manipulation by exerting nonrational influences on individual choice and conduct. In particular, ego depletion results in later choices being less governable by a person’s powers of self-control and willpower than earlier choices. This chapter draws out three implications of this phenomenon: (1) manipulation can exploit ego depletion through the fashioning of social environments that tax willpower or self-control; (2) ego depletion undermines the Platonic-Aristotelian picture of character and strength of will; and (3) ego depletion needs to be a more central focus of theorists of justice, since it appears to be a significant contributor to poverty and other persistent injustices.

Abundant evidence suggests that people exert self-control as if the exertions consumed a limited energy resource, akin to the folk notion of willpower. After exerting self-control, subsequent efforts at self-control are often relatively feeble and unsuccessful. The state of low willpower is called ego depletion. Studies on ego depletion have shown effects on intelligent thought (which is impaired during ego depletion), decision-making (depleted persons shift to more superficial ways of choosing, or prefer to avoid making choices), and passivity (depleted people become more passive). The psychological processes of self-regulation and ego depletion are linked to physical energy, as indicated by evidence that hunger makes people more short-sighted, and that food intake tends to counteract ego depletion. Depletion increases in response to interpersonal conflict, poor sleep, and confronting uncertainty. In daily life, good self-control is linked to avoiding problems and temptations, low stress, and higher happiness.

Philosophers often exaggerate the powers of reason, particularly the capacity of initiating and sustaining deep deliberative (System 2) thought as well as powers of self-control and delayed gratification. Those exaggerations are a important source of confidence in moral responsibility. Many factors influence and inhibit the capacity for effective sustained deliberation. Among those factors are differences in self-efficacy, need for cognition, individual locus-of-control, situational influences, and ego depletion. Differences in those factors undercut the plausibility of basing moral responsibility on deliberative reason.

This chapter describes interdisciplinary research on measuring beliefs about free will and on attempts to alter those beliefs and associated behaviors. The authors developed a new psychometric instrument for measuring people’s beliefs specifically about free will, determinism, and dualism. They generated new primes to manipulate people’s beliefs about free will and tested the relationship between beliefs about free will and various moral and nonmoral behaviors, including cheating, helping, thought suppression, creativity, and persistence in difficult tasks. The chapter describes the assorted results obtained and the lessons learned in the process.

This chapter discusses why people often fail to meet their moral goals and identifies the main obstacles in achieving moral change. It shows how psychological processes specific to animals, as outlined in chapters 2–4, interact with broader components of moral psychology. Three main moral psychological factors are discussed: emotions, situational conditions, and self-control. These factors are used to illustrate the frequent failure of reason and higher-level cognition to modify our moral responses, including our treatment of animals. The discussion draws from a wide range of research within empirical moral psychology as well as recent critical discussion of this research among philosophers.

An important recent distinction in the empirical literature about self-control is between resisting and avoiding temptations. While there is evidence that avoiding temptations is the more efficient method of the two, philosophers have focused almost exclusively on resisting temptations. The aim of this chapter is to examine what the ability to avoid temptations depends on and to argue that it depends primarily on how fragmented one’s mind is: on the inconsistencies in one’s mental setup. The fragmentation of mind requires a significant amount of mental effort to conceal from oneself and this leads to a weakened ability to resist temptations.

A main obstacle to the successful pursuit of long-term goals is a lack of self-control. But what is the capacity for self-control? The aim of this chapter is to contribute to an overarching theory of self-control by exploring the proposal that it is best understood as a form of hybrid skill. The authors draw on recent work on skill in the domain of motor control to highlight important ways in which experts differ from novices in the capacities they deploy. They then consider how the resulting framework can be applied to the domain of self-control. The chapter ends by examining how this approach can help reconcile a motivational construal of self-control, according to which it involves resisting competing temptations in order to do what one deems best, and an executive construal, in which the emphasis is on overriding “cold” habits that are at odds with what one intends to do.