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Self-control signals and affords power

today.ucsd.edu

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Re: Self-control signals and affords power

#101

Post by thecosas »

Enjoyed this tidbit from the bottom of the article:

  “To motivate their employees, organizations often want employees to set stretch goals – goals that are challenging and hard-to-reach. However, we found that setting a stretch goal and not meeting it makes someone look less powerful than setting an easy goal and surpassing it,” said Rady School PhD student Shuang Wu, the first author of the paper.

Re: Self-control signals and affords power

#102

Post by advael »

This has a kind of silly sleight of hand I've unfortunately come to expect in psych research. This seems to try to study power while controlling for... power?

It can definitely be interesting to see how the personality one projects can influence the social dynamics of a peer group (with the usual caveats that studying people in laboratory conditions for something iterated and evolving like social relationships is famously fraught in the first place), but this notion of power as something that's given to people by social perception on a moment-to-moment basis seems ill-suited to describe the real world, where in many contexts the relevant power is official and considerably less up for social negotiation

Re: Self-control signals and affords power

#103

Post by FredPret »

thecosas wrote: post #101

Enjoyed this tidbit from the bottom of the article: “To motivate their employees, organizations often want employees to set stretch goals – goals that are challenging and hard-to-reach. However, we found that setting a stretch goal and not meeting it makes someone look less powerful than setting an easy goal and surpassing it,” said Rady School PhD student Shuang Wu, the first author of the paper.

Let me tell you - I did a five-star job of opening my laptop this morning. Just super - knocked it out of the park.

Re: Self-control signals and affords power

#104

Post by verisimi »

pilgrim0 wrote: post #37

IMO simply striving to gain power or money is easier than to achieve greatness and mastery, in general. Mainly because one can lie their way into power and money, countless examples of that both at a local level and global level. Now, mastery requires the opposite of lying and pursuing easy to achieve goals. It’s the hardest path because frustration is constant, and it requires one to keep stretching the limits of th…

Fantastic comment, thanks

Re: Self-control signals and affords power

#105

Post by 48864w6ui »

tboyd47 wrote: post #100

Makes you wonder why the stereotype of the "Playboy"-type billionaire who is slave to his desires has been pushed and accepted for long, when it's plainly false.

Is it plainly false in your circles? In mine, only one acquired (economic) power; all the rest inherited, and they do tend more to the playboy stereotypes. (But this dichotomy may largely be due to the fact that only the former is a nerd?)

Re: Self-control signals and affords power

#106

Post by m463 »

FredPret wrote: post #103
thecosas wrote: post #101

Enjoyed this tidbit from the bottom of the article: “To motivate their employees, organizations often want employees to set stretch goals – goals that are challenging and hard-to-reach. However, we found that setting a stretch goal and not meeting it makes someone look less powerful than setting an easy goal and surpassing it,” said Rady School PhD student Shuang Wu, the first author of the paper.

Let me tell you - I did a five-star job of opening my laptop this morning. Just super - knocked it out of the park.

don't break the hinge achieving your stretch goal. :)

Re: Self-control signals and affords power

#107

Post by boringuser2 »

tekla wrote: post #88
CharlesW wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …you will also accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat. As an overweight person, I don't think it's controversial. You'll also accrue personal and professional benefits from being a tall man and/or good-looking. However, "fat people have no self-control" is still fatphobia and ignores the interplay of genetic, metabolic, physiological, cultural, socio-economic, and environmental factors that co…

As a former obese person, the culture of America is excusing people for being fat is disgusting. I'm not saying you have to be supermodel thin, but being fat is literally bad in every single possible metric (Except for possibly surviving longer in a survival situation, which I presume most fat people will never be in) Being fat is bad. Being a normal weight is better in every metric

It also makes you feel like something as trivial as taking out your garbage out to the curb is a monumental physical task.

The quality of life improvement from not being obese is obscene.

Re: Self-control signals and affords power

#108

Post by JellyBeanThief »

advael wrote: post #102

This has a kind of silly sleight of hand I've unfortunately come to expect in psych research. This seems to try to study power while controlling for... power? It can definitely be interesting to see how the personality one projects can influence the social dynamics of a peer group (with the usual caveats that studying people in laboratory conditions for something iterated and evolving like social relationships is fam…

The word "official" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there.

Re: Self-control signals and affords power

#109

Post by advael »

JellyBeanThief wrote: post #108
advael wrote: post #102

This has a kind of silly sleight of hand I've unfortunately come to expect in psych research. This seems to try to study power while controlling for... power? It can definitely be interesting to see how the personality one projects can influence the social dynamics of a peer group (with the usual caveats that studying people in laboratory conditions for something iterated and evolving like social relationships is fam…

The word "official" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there.

It's here used as shorthand for "not merely a social illusion constructed by the person it is acting upon"

Some power derives from charisma, force of personality, or social fluency. But lots of power, from the perspective of the people it is acting on, derives from or relies on nothing of the sort, and merely requires that consequences can be enacted for failure to cooperate with the power dynamic at play

This narrative is not insignificant. A lot of powerful people love to tell a story where power is just a personal competency, and consequently, that anyone's lack of power in any circumstance is, as the gamers say, a skill issue

Re: Self-control signals and affords power

#110

Post by noduerme »

nostrademons wrote: post #95
ranprieur wrote: post #51

This article mentions a study that found almost no correlation between people who self-report having high self-control, and people who actually do well on tests measuring self-control: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/wi... The most likely explanation is that people who report high self-control are really experiencing less temptation.

Is this a distinction without a difference? In the original qualitative write-ups for the Marshmallow Test, they described the children using all sorts of distraction strategies to basically make themselves forget that there's a tasty marshmallow sitting right in front of them. Maybe this is all that self-control is - having enough self-awareness (and valuing your future self highly enough) to direct your attention e…

There's certainly an experiential difference between consciously stopping yourself from a behavior and not needing to think about avoiding it. If you can walk by the bar/stripclub/second helping of french fries without thinking, "gee, I'd like that, but I'll abstain", then you aren't experiencing what most people would describe as "temptation".

You may be right that if abstaining becomes habitual amd automatic enough, that could be indiscernable from a state in which you have no temptation. But I'd argue it's only "self-control" for the purpose of measuring willpower as long as it requires some degree of conscious decision making.

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