Too Sweeping and Too Narrow

Contemporary social psychology is not known for its theoretical and research attention to the pressing social issues of the day. With the possible exception of its studies of prejudice and stereotyping, this field's most prestigious endeavors typically deal with conceptual issues that are relatively far removed from society's dominant concerns. Yet, it is of course highly likely that societal preoccupations and values still impinge, if only indirectly, on what a number of our most active social psychologists do and think. I cannot help wondering if the growing social psychological interest in self-regulation, shown, for example, in Baumeister's research and writings, has been influenced to some degree by the conservative values and suppositions that are becoming increasingly regnant in U.S. political life. These beliefs are now so important that President Clinton, a Democrat, has repeatedly called on Americans to exercise greater individual responsibility and self-control in their daily lives. Is it not possible, then, that this pervasive and now salient interest in individual restraint and responsibility has penetrated into the social psychological consciousness, at least to some extent? The target article and a number of Baumeister's other recent writings testify to the sweep and ambitiousness of Baumeister's thinking. In the target article with Heatherton, he encourages us to interpret an extremely broad range of widely disapproved actions (including crime, teen pregnancy, alcoholism, educational underachievement, and domestic violence) as being due to inadequate self-regulation. In principle, I applaud Baumeister's ambition and believe scientists should attempt to extend their theoretical notions as far as is reasonably possible. (There is a real possibility, however, that Baumeister and Heatherton have missed some significant differences among the various misbehaviors in their list. More will be said about these differences later.) Yet, without implying that this casts any doubt on the validity of Baumeister's generalization, I am also struck by the parallel between this sweeping view of human misbehavior and conservative assumptions about many of our social problems. Generally speaking, conservatives have long attributed crime, poverty, and many other social ills to lack of will or inadequate self-control on the part of those afflicted by these problems. We have a good example of this in the Wilson and Herrnstein (1985) interpretation of criminal misconduct propounded in their book Crime and Human Nature. For these writers, as for many other social conservatives, crime is best explained as a failure to restrain wrongful actions, often because the wrongdoers do not or are unable to anticipate sufficient negative consequences for this behavior in the long run. With this emphasis on the importance of learned inhibitions in maintaining socially approved conduct, Wilson and Herrnstein appropriately identify themselves with what sociologists term the control theory view of crime. The Baumeister and Heatherton approach to social problems also places them with the sociological control theorists. However important inhibitions and social controls may be, this particular perspective on social problems is much too one sided and does not give sufficient attention to the role of other social influences on crime, violence, and many other forms of antisocial conduct (e.g., poverty and other stressful conditions-the factors favored by sociological "strain theorists") and subcultural norms and attitudes (highlighted by criminological theorists such as Marvin Wolfgang; e.g., Wolfgang & Ferracuti, 1967). Stepping away from this matter of the possible influence of currently dominant societal beliefs and values, it also seems to me that the Baumeister and Heatherton target article is too narrowly social psychological in nature. Like many other contemporary social psychological discussions, it does not give adequate consideration to a variety of ideas and research findings originating outside current social psychological formulations. My commentary attempts to identify a number of conceptions from earlier times as well as from other psychological areas that are germane to the general problem of self-regulation and that Baumeister and Heatherton appear to have missed. I have already noted the relevance of several sociological theories of antisocial conduct but there is also a surprising inattention to other kinds of observations and conceptions from psychology itself. We can see this in a number of ways, some fairly trivial and others more important. The Baumeister and Heatherton section, Inertia and Attention, offers some especially nonsignificant examples of neglected ideas in psychology. For one, if they wish to pursue their suggestion that "psychological processes . acquire a kind of inertia," they may find the Atkinson and Birch (1970) theorizing along these lines of some interest. Also, I wonder if the Zeigarnik effect, as originally proposed, actually has anything to