The Effect Of Desire For Self-control On Self-control:the Mediating Role Of Task Motivation And The Moderating Role Of Motivation Type

Self-control refers to the ability of an individual to resist impulses,temptations,and habitual responses.The desire for self-control is a desire to be better able to change and consciously redirect one's cognition,impulses,emotions,performance and other behaviors.In recent years,under the publicity of social media,people have deeply realized that the benefits of self-control and are eager to change their life through have more self-control.In this social context,it becomes very important to study the relationship between desire for self-control and self-control.Based on this,the study introduces two variables,task motivation and motivation type,in an attempt to explore the psychological mechanism and boundary conditions of desire for self-control and self-control.The study took college students as subjects and designed four experiments: the pre-experiment used the intergroup design of single factor 2 level(high desire for selfcontrol vs.low),with a total of 78 subjects,to test the effectiveness of the writing and recall task in inducing the subjects' desire for self-control.Experiment 1 used a experimental design of 2(high desire for self-control vs.low)x 2(simple task vs.difficult task),with a total of 122 subjects,mainly to verify the influence of desire for self-control on self-control under different task difficulty.In experiment 2,task motivation was added as the mediating variable.After measuring the subjects' desire for self-control and task motivation through scales,the anagram task was used to measure the self-control.A total of 51 subjects were tested to explore whether task motivation had mediating effect between desire for self-control and self-control.Experiment 3 used a experimental design of 2(high desire for self-control vs.low)x 2(autonomy vs.controlled motivation),with a total of 117 subjects,mainly exploring whether autonomous motivation can alleviate the negative impact of high desire for self-control on difficult self-control tasks.Three conclusions were drawn: First,on difficult tasks,high desire for self-control will hinder individual self-control;But there was no effect on simple tasks.Second,on difficult tasks,individuals with higher desire for self-control have lower task motivation,which leads to poorer self-control.There,on difficult tasks,autonomous motivation can alleviate the negative influence of desire for self-control on self-control.