Self-Control as a Performance-Enhancing Drug
Like cognitive ability, self-control predicts health, wealth, and all things good
Just a quick note today to share with you one of my all-time favorite graphs. It’s from a classic paper by the psychologist Terrie Moffit and colleagues, and it shows how self-control measured in childhood correlates with a range of important adult life outcomes. Long story short, self-control is an all-purpose good like IQ: It predicts health, wealth, and all things good.
What are the implications? The main one is that interventions to increase self-control could potentially greatly enhance human wellbeing. And the good news here is that people aren’t quite as uncomfortable with the concept of self-control as they are with the concept of IQ. That means we might more easily be able to make some headway.
Anyway, the paper is open access, so you can read the whole thing for free. Here’s the abstract to whet your appetite:
Policy-makers are considering large-scale programs aimed at self-control to improve citizens’ health and wealth and reduce crime. Experimental and economic studies suggest such programs could reap benefits. Yet, is self-control important for the health, wealth, and public safety of the population? Following a cohort of 1,000 children from birth to the age of 32 y, we show that childhood self-control predicts physical health, substance dependence, personal finances, and criminal offending outcomes, following a gradient of self-control. Effects of children’s self-control could be disentangled from their intelligence and social class as well as from mistakes they made as adolescents. In another cohort of 500 sibling-pairs, the sibling with lower self-control had poorer outcomes, despite shared family background. Interventions addressing self-control might reduce a panoply of societal costs, save taxpayers money, and promote prosperity.
Further Reading
The Nature and Nurture of Self-Control
The graph below compares levels of self-control for identical twins (monozygotic or MZ) and non-identical twins (dizygotic or DZ). Each point represents either the MZ or DZ twins from one study, with the studies arranged by sample size (x-axis). The higher the correlation (
12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ
IQ is one of the best-known concepts in psychology, on a par with self-esteem, positive reinforcement, and the Freudian unconscious mind. Everyone is familiar with the term, and everyone seems to have an opinion on the topic. But like many ideas in psychology, IQ is the subject of a lot of misunderstandings and misinformation. Some believe that IQ tests are basically meaningless - that they don’t measure intelligence in any real sense or tell us anything about IQ-test takers except how good they are at taking IQ tests. Others go further, arguing that IQ research is malign pseudoscience aimed only at justifying discrimination.
Thanks for your regular and always exciting posts! What I'm wondering is whether there are actually any psychological traits that can be explained to a relevant degree by shared environment? Do you think that shared environmental influences such as dysfunctional family background, trauma or war have an impact? What about parenting styles (e.g. authoritarian vs. egalitarian)?