198 Self-Regulatory Perspectives on Personality
attempts to control their thoughts. The data consistently indi-
cate that an instruction to exert mental control yields better
control if the person has no other demands. If something else
is going on, however (e.g., if the person is trying to remem-
ber a 9-digit number), the instruction backfires, and people
tend to do the opposite of what they are trying to do.
Wegner (1994) interprets this as follows: Trying to sup-
press a thought engages two processes. An intentional process
tries to suppress. An ironic monitoring process looks for
the occurrence of whatever is being suppressed. If it finds it, it
increases the effort of the first mechanism. The ironic monitor
is sensitive, but it is automatic and does not require much in
the way of mental resources. The intentional process requires
more resources. Thus, any reduction in mental resources (e.g.,
being distracted by a second thought or task) disrupts the
intentional process more than it disrupts the ironic monitor.
The monitor, searching for lapses, in effect invites those
lapses to occur.
This theory also applies to the opposite pattern—attempts
to concentrate. In this case, the intentional process con-
centrates, and the ironic process looks for the occurrence
of distractions. As in the first case, if the person’s mental
resources are stretched thin, the ironic process seems to invite
the undesired thought into consciousness. In this case, the
thought is a distraction.
This research indicates that trying hard to do something (or
suppress something) gets much harder when your mental re-
sources are stretched thin. Not only does it get harder, but you
may even begin to do the opposite of what you are trying to do.
Lapses in Self-Control
Another important literature bearing on this set of issues con-
cerns what Baumeister and Heatherton (1996) termed self-
regulatory failure, which we will term lapse in self-control.
The potential for this kind of event arises when someone has
both the desire to do something (e.g., overindulge in food or
drink) and also the desire to restrain that impulse. Self-control
of this sort is often especially hard, and sometimes the re-
strained impulse breaks free.
Consider binge eating as an example. The binge eater wants
to eat but also wants to restrain that desire. If self-control
lapses, the person stops trying to restrain the desire to eat, lets
himself or herself go, and binges.
In characterizing the decision to quit trying to restrain,
Baumeister and Heatherton noted that restraint is hard work
and that mental fatigue plays a role; however, giving up the
restraint attempt rarely requires that the person reach a state
of total exhaustion. Rather, there is a point where the person
has had enough and stops trying to control the impulse. We
have suggested that confidence about resisting the impulse
plays a role in whether the person stops trying (Carver &
Scheier, 1998). The confident person continues the struggle
to restrain. The person whose confidence has sagged is more
likely to give up.
Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister (1998) have extended this
line of thought to argue that self-control is a resource that not
only is limited but also can become depleted by extended
self-control efforts. When the resource is depleted, the person
becomes vulnerable to a failure of self-control. This view
also suggests that there is a shared pool of self-control
resources, so that exhausting the resource with one kind of
self-control (e.g., concentrating very hard for many hours on
a writing assignment) can leave the person vulnerable to a
lapse in a different domain (e.g., eating restraint).
It seems worthwhile to compare the cases considered in
this section (lapses in self-control) with those described just
earlier (mental control). Both sections dealt with efforts at
self-control. In many ways the situations are structurally quite
similar. Each is an attempt to override one process by another,
which falters when mental resources are depleted. There even
is a resemblance between the “overdoing” quality in the pre-
viously restrained behavior in Baumeister and Heatherton’s
cases and the rebound quality in Wegner’s research.
One difference is that the cases emphasized by Baumeis-
ter and Heatherton explicitly involve desires that direct the
person in opposing directions. In most cases studied by
Wegner, there is no obvious reason why the suppressed
thought (or the distractor) would be desirable. This difference
between cases seems far from trivial. Yet the similarities in
the findings in the two literatures are striking enough to war-
rant further thought about how the literatures are related.DYNAMIC SYSTEMS AND SELF-REGULATIONRecent years have seen the emergence in the psychological lit-
erature of new (or at least newly prominent) ideas about how
to conceptualize natural systems. Several labels attach to these
ideas: chaos, dynamic systems theory, complexity, catastro-
phe theory. A number of introductions to this body of thought
have been written, some of which include applications to
psychology (e.g., Brown, 1995; Gleick, 1987; Thelen &
Smith, 1994; Vallacher & Nowak, 1994, 1997; Waldrop,
1992). These themes are of growing interest in several areas of
psychology, including personality–social psychology. In this
section we sketch some of the themes that are central to this
way of thinking.