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Problems of self-control as well as social cooperation may be seen as conflicts not between internal spiritual or neurological entities, but between highly valued overt behavioral patterns of differing temporal extents or social distances. For example, an alcoholic must choose between having a drink now—valuable in the short run—and being healthy, performing well at work, maintaining satisfying social relationships, etc. —valuable in the long run. The essential question addressed in this chapter is how the latter may come to dominate the former within a person's lifetime. A behavioral evolutionary process is proposed by which valuable temporally or socially extended behavior patterns evolve over an individual lifetime from simpler, shorter patterns. It is argued that complex patterns, such as social cooperation over long periods, arise from simpler patterns in behavioral evolution analogously to the way complex structures, such as the human eye, arise from simpler structures in biological evolution. The idea that complex, long-term behavioral patterns in conflict with short-term patterns, if they are not inherited in toto, must be generated by an internal and autonomous spiritual, neurological, or cognitive process is compared to creationism in biological evolution. The role of delay and social discount functions in measuring the extent of coherent behavioral patterns is explicated. Finally, the chapter examines several implications of teleological behaviorism for practical behavioral control.

Self-control is defined in relation to current goals of an organism. Working memory capacity (WMC) is defined as a cognitive system for maintaining access to goal representations as needed. Self-control depends on cognitive control, which depends in large part on WMC. We discuss the proposal that WMC reflects the abilities to control attention and to control retrieval from long-term memory. From within this dual-component framework (Unsworth & Engle, 2007) we discuss research that has examined relations between WMC and some types of mental self-control failure like over-general autobiographical memories, intrusive thoughts, and mind-wandering. We also discuss research examining the relation between WMC and delay discounting, a popular experimental paradigm for assessing self-control (Rachlin, 2000). Evidence suggests that for some of these phenomena, WMC is a more primary factor than the associated clinical disorders. In other cases, WMC appears to be secondary to other factors such as intelligence. Across these mixed findings at least two generalities can be derived. The positive findings demonstrate that individual differences in WMC can be a confounding “third variable” for a proposed relation between, for example, depression and over-general autobiographical memories (Dalgleish et al., 2007). On the other hand, the negative findings illustrate that individual differences in WMC can obscure more primary influences in a situation like delay discounting (Shamosh et al., 2008). In either case it would be advisable for researchers to measure WMC as a participant factor, if only to control a major source of interindividual variability in their data. Overall, we hold to our position that WMC is critically important for maintaining good self-control in support of a wide variety of goals.

This chapter reviews the diagnosis and prevalence rates of pathological gambling, including its link with substance use disorders, and also discusses studies evaluating constructs of impulsivity in pathological gamblers and substance abusers. A treatment strategy for substance use disorders, known as contingency management, is explained, and it is shown that substance use and gambling disorders have high rates of comorbidity. Gambling and substance use disorders also lie along a continuum with respect to delay discounting. Moreover, contingency management interventions have demonstrated efficacy in treating a variety of substance abusing populations and are beginning to be applied to gamblers as well.

This chapter, which distinguishes between altruism and social cooperation in terms of repeated games, discusses altruism as really social cooperation over a wide temporal extent. It defines more clearly between self-control and altruism, and illustrates that social discounting and delay discounting may be compared experimentally. The chapter shows that a crucial variable distinguishing self-control from social cooperation is the probability of reciprocation of cooperation and defection. In addition to the standard behavioral treatments for addiction, it also suggests that addicts need to be trained in organizing their behavior into wide temporal patterns—effectively making friends with their own future selves.

Behavioral science has assumed that reward which is not innate is a soft currency that must be backed by the hard currency of an innately rewarding process somewhere in prospect. However, hyperbolic delay discount curves predict that there can be arbitrarily self-generated reward, which may be not only robust but addictive. Such endogenous reward depends on the appetite for it, and therefore becomes intense when occasioned by signals that are adequately singular and surprising. Because signals are often singular because they predict innate rewards, it may be hard to distinguish this predictive value from their hedonic value as occasions for endogenous reward. The conflict between an instrumental incentive to accelerate rewarding events and a hedonic incentive to refresh appetite may motivate indirect approaches to these events, which maximize these events’ total reward by creating obstacles to them. Gambling is offered as an example.

Human investment activities are vulnerable to delay discounting and a range of other common choice biases. This chapter summarizes conceptual work and research on choice biases and discusses implications for individual and public health strategies to reduce addictive behaviors, with emphasis on public health. Principles of population science, prevention, and public health practice are summarized to explicate the basis for an integrated intervention strategy, informed by research on human choice behavior, which spans clinical, community, healthcare system, and policy interventions. Interventions may remediate choice biases (e.g. seek to reduce delay discounting) or manipulate the architecture of choice by framing options to help people choose in their best interests (e.g. make the more beneficial choice the default option). Choice architecture strategies implemented within healthcare systems and communities have greater potential for population impact than individual clinical treatments, and what mix of options may maximize population benefits remains to be determined.

Addiction appears to contradict expected utility theory and has therefore been the subject of many re-examinations of motivation. It is variously said to arise from and/or be maintained by conditioning, habit learning (as distinct from the goal-directed kind), the elicitation of counterfeit reward in the midbrain, accelerated delay discounting, hyperbolic delay discounting, and unspecified sorts of disease or compulsion that imply addiction is not motivated at all. Each of these models has some roots in observation but each has problems, particularly in accounting for addictions that do not need a neurophysiologically active agent, such as gambling or videogames. An implication of hyperbolic delay discounting—recursive self-prediction—adds necessary mechanisms for addiction within a motivational framework. An addict’s “force of habit” may be motivated by what amounts to accumulated consumption capital within an endogenous reward process. In a recursive motivational model the addict’s impaired responsibility is more like bankruptcy than disease.

This chapter approaches self-control via a problem arising in decision theoretic discussions of sequential choice within a broadly Humean conception of action and motivation. How can agents stick to their plans and honor their commitments in the face of temptation, if at the moment of choice the short-term temptation motivationally outweighs the long-term goal? After introducing the sequential choice puzzle in section 19.1, section 19.2 surveys suggestive psychological work on the mechanisms of self-control, pointing to the importance of how outcomes are framed. Section 19.3 offers a solution to the sequential choice problem in terms of frame-sensitive reasoning—i.e. reasoning that allows outcomes to be valued differently depending on how they are framed, even when the agent knows that she is dealing with two (or more) different ways of framing the same outcome. Section 19.4 argues that this type of quasi-cyclical, frame-sensitive reasoning can indeed be rational.

A person’s self may be viewed as the more or less extended temporal and social patterns of that person’s overt behavior, and nothing more. In this view, your relation with your future self is essentially a social relation to be studied along with your relation to other people. As these temporal and social patterns are narrow or wide, you are acting selfishly or altruistically with respect to your future self and other people. The value of a reward (or utility of consumption) may be quantified as a function of social discounting (“altruism”) as well as delay discounting (“self-control”). Addiction may thus be conceived as a kind of hyper-selfishness. This chapter draws out the implications, in theory and practice, of this social conception of addiction.

Unlike the pausing that takes place in music, the hesitant pause, such as in dithering or procrastination, can be, if not debilitating, at least a problem. But there can be some advantages to dithering. One is that it slows down time, allowing us more time to contemplate what is about to or liable to happen, and to make a decision at the appropriate time. That’s probably the very latest minute. This is Frank Partnoy’s conclusion as it relates to decision-making and as it relates to being effective in business. This version of dithering, a process rather than an emotional experience, is almost a competitive strategy—that’s a very good reason for thinking of dithering as being alarming.