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Exercising self-control is about more than simply maintaining a willpower of iron and an eye toward the greater good, a new Yale study finds; it's really a delicate dance full of waffling deliberation.

When people are able to resist temptation in pursuit of a long-term goal, the researchers found, they do so via a continuous back-and-forth balancing process rather than making an unwavering choice shaped by unwavering self-control.

The research team—which included Yale psychologist Melissa Ferguson and Paul Stillman, a former postdoctoral researcher in Ferguson's lab who is now at Boston University—defined "self-control" as the ability to pursue long-term goals over short-term gain. And to observe this deliberation in action they used a common tool: the computer mouse.

An increasingly popular research tool in disciplines like psychology and marketing, the use of mouse-tracking surveillance offers a window into an individual's mental processes. For instance, if participants are asked to choose between a cookie or an apple, such an experiment allows researchers to tell whether their mouse veered closely to the cookie before selecting the apple.

In the new study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Yale researchers analyzed more than 500 participants as they chose between receiving an immediate, though small, monetary reward versus getting a larger reward that they would have to wait for.

"I love mouse-tracking because it's a very different way of observing how people behave in the process of making a decision," said Ferguson, a professor of psychology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "The majority of psychological research relies on asking people to tell us what's going on with what their thinking. But I'm interested in other ways that can measure not only reported mental content but the dynamics of cognition."

In an interview, Ferguson discusses the siren call of temptation, the meandering path of impulse control, and the complex process that's really behind decision-making. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How do people typically understand self-control?

It's viewed across subfields of psychology as a battle between short-term versus longer-term gains. It's about conflict resolution: I want this thing in front of me, but I know it's going to ultimately be worse for me than this other more difficult option. Maybe it's getting up early or sleeping in. Or having a cookie, a cigarette, a drink—whatever it is, it has a lot of pull in the moment.

So, the resolution is framed as making a conscious choice?

The dominant theory is that there's an immediate pull toward the temptation, or the short-term reward, and we have to somehow override it. This theory is called "impulse inhibition." When successful, it suggests, we control the inhibition, the temptation, the impulse in some way, move beyond it, and do the thing that we would want our better selves to do.

What did your most recent study uncover?

We found that that how we exercise self-control is actually a lot more complicated. We found there are two paths to successful self-control choices: impulse inhibition and a new one we call "dynamic competition," which is much more prevalent.

How do they differ?

So, there's the impulse inhibition path we've discussed. The way that we see it showing up in a mouse tracking task is that people's mouse trajectories will show a process at play where first they move straight toward the temptation, and then they abruptly correct by moving toward the better option, the one that is more aligned with their long-term goal.

In the case of dynamic competition, the short-term and long-term goals battle it out iteratively from the beginning, and it's an ongoing competition as to which impulse will win. The mouse trajectory is not a correction trajectory. It's more of a gradual thing where there is movement toward the temptation, back and forth, but people gradually end up inching toward the more healthful option.

Did anything about the findings surprise you?

That the impulse inhibition path is a much smaller subset of how people ultimately make successful self-control decisions. People showed this kind of correction in only about a quarter of the trials. In the vast majority, there are gradual, dynamic competition types of decisions where people ultimately make the decision that's in line with their long-term interests.

In this research we used an approach that takes people's temporal and spatial trajectories much more into account, and we learned that this information is predictive. Using the trajectories of choices in the first half of the study, we were able to predict up to 70% of the actual choices in the second half of the study. That's a lot of predictive power. These trajectories may also be telling us something about how people are likely to make other choices.

Why is it helpful for the average person who is, say, trying to eat healthier, to understand the difference?

Well, the dominant understanding that you just need to stomp down impulses, and that it's all about willpower, is oversimplified. The process is more nuanced. Knowing this may help people devise better reactions and responses that support their longer-term goals. The most important objective here, though, is that we're trying to get a better sense of how the mind makes decisions. The more we understand about that, the better we'll be able to translate our findings to recommendations.