Who Believes in Nonlimited Willpower? In Search of Correlates of Implicit Theories of Self-Control

Recently, the most prominent model of self-control, the strength model, was criticized, and other explanations of self-control have been proposed. One of them is a concept of lay, implicit, willpower theories, that is, believing either that willpower is limited (as in the strength model) or nonlimited. Research shows that holding a nonlimited-resource belief prevents individuals from suffering ego depletion and is related to successful self-regulation. The current study explored how personality, time perspective, and intelligence predict willpower theories. Additionally, two aspects of willpower theories, strenuous mental activity and resistance to temptations, were measured separately. The results indicated that the two aspects of willpower theories were not correlated with each other. This supports hypothesis that willpower theories may be domain specific and also suggests that these two aspects should not be aggregated into one, homogenous scale as was done in some previous research. Both aspects of holding a nonlimited-resource theory were related positively to emotional stability and negatively to past negative time perspective. Strenuous mental activity was positively associated with intellect and negatively with present fatalism, whereas resistance to temptations was correlated positively with conscientiousness and future time perspective. There were no relations between willpower theories and intelligence, which posits that similar life outcomes related with these two attributes are based on distinct mechanisms. Regression analyses revealed that only personality traits (emotional stability and conscientiousness) remained significant predictors of willpower beliefs.