Flexibility in using self-regulatory strategies to manage self-control conflicts: The role of metacognitive knowledge, strategy repertoire, and feedback monitoring

Abstract

For regulating emotion, it has been shown that people benefit from being flexible in their use of emotion regulation strategies. In the current study, we built on research focused on regulatory flexibility with respect to emotions to investigate flexibility in the use of self-regulatory strategies to resolve daily self-control conflicts. We investigated three components of flexibility: (1) metacognitive knowledge, (2) strategy repertoire, and (3) feedback monitoring. In a 10-day experience sampling study, 226 participants reported whether they had, within the past hour, experienced a self-control conflict of initiating an aversive activity, persisting in it, or inhibiting an unwanted impulse in response to a temptation. Results support the hypothesis that higher levels of all three components of flexibility are associated with higher levels of success in managing daily self-control conflicts, except for strategy repertoire and feedback monitoring in conflicts of persistence. Results also support the hypothesis that higher levels of trait self-control are associated with higher levels of metacognitive knowledge and feedback monitoring for conflicts of initiation, but not for conflicts of persistence and inhibition. We found no evidence of an association between trait self-control and strategy repertoire. These findings demonstrate the importance of flexible strategy use during daily self-control conflicts.

Financial self‐regulation

“…In other words, participants who used the same strategy to self‐regulate across many unpleasant activities were less persistent. Thus, successful self‐regulation may not be solely determined by mastery of a single strategy, but by the ability to respond flexibly to a temptation with a varied repertoire of strategies (also see Bürgler et al., 2020; Hennecke & Bürgler, 2020; Williamson & Wilkowski, 2020).…”

The Metacognition in Self-Control Scale (MISCS)

“…Similar knowledge might be highly important when people face self-control conflicts, too: In fact, recent research has shown that certain selfregulatory strategies are positively related to higher levels of self-control in daily life (Hennecke et al, 2019;Milyavskaya et al, 2020;Williamson & Wilkowski, 2020). In addition, people who report being more knowledgeable with regard to a just-experienced selfcontrol conflict also report that they have been more successful in resolving that conflict (Bürgler et al, 2021;Bürgler & Hennecke, 2022). Given this importance of deploying selfregulatory strategies and having knowledge about self-control conflicts, it is likely that having generally higher levels of metacognitive knowledge in self-control should help a person to resolve self-control conflicts.…”

“…Trait self-control describes a person's tendency to exercise self-control across time and task domains (Tangney et al, 2004). Given previous associations between state-level metacognition and state self-control success (Bürgler et al, 2021;Bürgler & Hennecke, 2022) and given the correspondence between states and traits (Fleeson, 2001), it is likely that correlations between states also "trickle up" to form correlations between traits.…”

“…But people have cognitions about various aspects of their own cognition, also outside of these learning contexts (e.g., Briñol & DeMarree, 2012). Recent studies show that the extent to which people engage in metacognition about self-control is associated with how successfully they deal with various self-control conflicts in daily life (Bürgler et al, 2021;Bürgler & Hennecke, 2022). Such selfcontrol conflicts occur when people need to initiate or persist in aversive activities and when they need to inhibit prepotent responses to temptations (Hennecke et al, 2019;Hoyle & Davisson, 2016).…”

“…One important article by Duckworth et al (2014) points out that metacognition is fundamental to successful self-control and relates metacognition to different self-regulatory strategies, especially the proactive self-control strategies of situation selection and situation modification, which help to facilitate self-control before a conflict even occurs. Recent studies on the importance of self-reported metacognition in the domain of self-control have so far relied on state assessments of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation in daily life (Bürgler et al, 2021;Bürgler & Hennecke, 2022). Because there exists no scale for assessing trait-level metacognition in the domain of self-control, we aimed to construct and validate such a scale.…”