Project overview
Resource depletion accounts of self-control have had difficulty identifying a resource that mechanistically drives self-control. Given that many theoretical traditions suggest the search for meaning is central to psychological experience, we propose that one possible resource is meaning. Accordingly, we formulate an existential model of self-control consisting of three hypotheses. First, exercising self-control is aversive, triggering a drop in meaning which instigates a search for meaning. Second, preemptively boosting meaning reduces depleted participants’ need to search for meaning. Third, exercising self-control (vs. not) on an initial task leads participants to perform better on subsequent effortful tasks when those tasks provide meaning. Our conceptual and theoretical innovation offers generative hypotheses to inspire the next generation of self-control researchers and breathe new life into an influential theory. Ultimately, this proposal can harness the power of existential psychology to help resolve one of the most contentious debates in psychological science.
