What is Self-Control? A Discussion of Unresolved Issues

High self-control is widely valued and linked to health, occupational success, and well-being. Despite its popularity as a research topic, major conceptual ambiguities remain. Such inconsistencies are not trivial: they obscure whether researchers study the same phenomenon, weaken construct validity, and produce conflicting findings. Clarifying what self-control is – and is not – is therefore essential for theoretical progress. Key issues concern whether self-control is best understood as an ability or a personality trait, and whether we should conceive of effortless habits as self-control processes. Another key issue is that some conceptualizations of state self-control (momentary attempts to regulate behavior) show little overlap with trait self-control (being generally good at regulating behavior), although they should be conceptually aligned. Further confusion arises around what constitutes self-control conflict: some definitions include any motivational conflict between goals, others limit it to intertemporal choices where short-term and long-term benefits are opposed, and some require affective components such as desire. This article outlines these definitional problems and proposes clearer conceptual boundaries as a foundation for future theoretical and empirical work and proposes that self-control deals with “intentionally avoiding or attenuating anticipated or resolving present conflicts between two response options in favor of the response option that benefits a more important goal or standard, even though the competing response option represents a momentarily dominant, affectively charged response tendency”.