Superior Self-Regulatory Skills in African American College Students

Abstract

Excessive drinking is more common among Whites (W) than African Americans (AA) on college campuses, but the reasons for this are not clear. The authors investigated demographic and personality factors in a group of 369 W and 202 AA college students, finding that alcohol consumption was significantly less prevalent among AA students (69%) than W students (78%) (p = .02) and that binge drinking was significantly less frequent in AA drinkers (42% past month, 60% past year) than W drinkers (56%, 79%) (p < .00001). Cigarette smoking was also dramatically less frequent in AA students (5%) than W students (28%) (p < .00001). AA students also scored significantly higher on Overcontrolled Hostility (M = 18.2, SEM = 0.40) than did W students (M = 15.7, SEM = 0.19) (p < .00001). The authors conclude that AA college students are a more self-selected group of high achievers who reveal evidence of superior self-regulatory skills.

Regulatory Teaching and Self-Regulated Learning in College Students: Confirmatory Validation Study of the IATLP Scales

“…It refers to the subject's characteristic behaviours of planning, (Pichardo et al, in review). There is prior evidence for the importance of personal regulation in addictive behaviours (Brown & Newby-Clark, 2005;Ernst, Hogan, Vallas, Cook & Fuller, 2009;Neal & Carey, 2005;Rodríguez, Gutiérrez & Pozo, 2010), in social adaptation (De la Fuente, Peralta & Sánchez, 2009) and in grade point average (Okun, Levy, Karoly & Ruehlman, 2009). …”

Demand for Self Control: A Model of Consumer Response to Programs and Products that Moderate Consumption

“…Research on self control in a consumer finance context includes credit cards (Castronova and Hagstrom, 2004;Kawaja, 1969), retirement saving (Thaler and Shefrin, 1981;Laibson, Repetto and Tobacman, 1998;Otto, Davies and Chater, 2007;Benartzi and Thaler, 2007), other investment decisions (Hilton, 2001;Bergstresser and Porterba, 2004;Lai, 2006;Chatterjee, Goetz and Palmer, 2009), personal bankruptcy (White, 2009), smoking (Kan, 2007;Ernst, Hogan, Vallas, Cook and Fuller, 2009), food choice (Smith, 2002;Lin and Yen, 2008 ), and other consumer decisions (Sally, 2000;Karlsson, 2003;Ramanathan and Williams, 2007;Vohs and Faber, 2007;Fryer, 2010;Laran, 2010;Hastings and Washington, 2010). Self control, restraint and moderation technologies are studied in economic history as well (Gamber, 2003;Zhang, Huang and Broniarczyk, 2010), which motivates some interpretations of our model mentioned above.…”