Wait a second. There’s a guy who writes textbooks about akrasia named Will Powers? That’s great.
“Behavior: The Control of Perception” has very little to say about akrasia actually. The chapter on “Conflict” does a wee bit, I suppose, but only from the perspective of what a PCT perspective predicts should happen when control systems are in conflict.
I haven’t actually seen a PCT perspective on akrasia, procrastination, or willpower issues yet, apart from my own.
I haven’t actually seen a PCT perspective on akrasia, procrastination, or willpower issues yet, apart from my own.
If I’m not mistaken, there is a little cottage industry researching it for years. See e.g. Albert Bandura, Edwin A. Locke. (2003). Negative Self-Efficacy and Goal Effects Revisited. (PDF) (it’s a critique, but there are references as well).
Fascinating. However, it appears that both that paper and the papers it’s critiquing are written by people who’ve utterly failed to understand it, in particular the insight that aggregate perceptions are measured over time… which means you can be positively motivated to achieve goals in order to maintain your high opinion of yourself—and still have it be driven by an error signal.
That is, the mere passage of time without further achievement will cause an increasing amount of “error” to be registered, without requiring any special action.
Both this paper and the paper it critiques got this basic understanding wrong, as far as I can tell. (It also doesn’t help that the authors of the paper you linked seem to think that materialistic reduction is a bad thing!)
“Behavior: The Control of Perception” has very little to say about akrasia actually. The chapter on “Conflict” does a wee bit, I suppose, but only from the perspective of what a PCT perspective predicts should happen when control systems are in conflict.
I haven’t actually seen a PCT perspective on akrasia, procrastination, or willpower issues yet, apart from my own.
If I’m not mistaken, there is a little cottage industry researching it for years. See e.g.
Albert Bandura, Edwin A. Locke. (2003). Negative Self-Efficacy and Goal Effects Revisited. (PDF) (it’s a critique, but there are references as well).
Fascinating. However, it appears that both that paper and the papers it’s critiquing are written by people who’ve utterly failed to understand it, in particular the insight that aggregate perceptions are measured over time… which means you can be positively motivated to achieve goals in order to maintain your high opinion of yourself—and still have it be driven by an error signal.
That is, the mere passage of time without further achievement will cause an increasing amount of “error” to be registered, without requiring any special action.
Both this paper and the paper it critiques got this basic understanding wrong, as far as I can tell. (It also doesn’t help that the authors of the paper you linked seem to think that materialistic reduction is a bad thing!)