A General Model of Preventive and Interventive Self‐Control

The field of self‐control has witnessed an unprecedented boom, not least due to the immense implications of successful and unsuccessful self‐control for people’s lives. However, successful and unsuccessful self‐control can take many different forms, and many conceptual problems have been raised as to what self‐control is about and how to best study it. Integrating different literatures, we provide a general model of self‐control which distinguishes between preventive (i.e., anticipatory) and interventive (i.e., momentary) forms of self‐control. The proposed Preventive‐Interventive Model (PI‐Model) of Self‐Control combines seven basic components: preventive strategies, desire, conflict, control motivation, volition, opportunity constraints, and behavior enactment. The resulting taxonomy helps to distinguish self‐control from standard motivational processes, to define the concept of temptation, and to identify different types of self‐control failure including self‐monitoring failure, motivational self‐control failure, and volitional self‐control failure. Further, the model helps to outline five broad mechanisms through which people may be able to proactively boost self‐control success.