Research interests
Self-control and self-regulation in the lab and in everyday
life
Impulsive and reflective processes
Desire, temptation
Health behavior, especially eating and drinking behavior
Executive functioning, working memory capacity, impulse control
Self-conscious emotions, affective well-being
Relationship between implicit and explicit cognition
Predictive validity of implicit measures
Self-knowledge, introspection, consciousness
Evaluative conditioning
Everyday Self-Control
Little is known about how people experience and regulate
desires in daily life. In order to better understand everyday
desire and self-control, I led a large-scale experience sampling
project (Everyday Temptation
Study) in which adult participants (N = 205) were
equipped with personal data assistants and re
ported on a more than seven thousand desire
episodes as they occurred in their natural environments over the
course of one week. The database from this project grants novel
insights into how often various desires (e.g., for food,
alcohol, sex, sleep, media etc.) are experienced, which desires
are felt most strongly, the degree to which the various desires
evoke inner conflict (thus turning into temptations), and how
often and how successfully people resist these desires (Hofmann,
Vohs, & Baumeister, 2012).
These analyses revealed, among other things that self-control
failure rates were highest with regard to desires to consume
media and to work, indicating that these two domains were
particularly hard to resist successfully when compared to the
other domains (click HERE
for a short non-technical summary of findings). My collaborators
and I also tested numerous predictions about how everyday
self-control is affected by situational and social factors such
as alcohol consumption, resource depletion, presence of social
models as well as personality factors such as trait
self-control, BIS/BAS, perfectionism and narcissistic
entitlement affect (Hofmann, Baumeister, Foerster, & Vohs, 2012).
For instance, we obtained strong evidence for proactive
self-control (e.g., avoiding tempting situations) in high trait
self-control individuals.
Impulse and Reflection in Self-Control
In typical self-control situations, people are torn between
their long-term goals to restrain behavior (i.e., weight
control) and their immediate impulses that promise hedonic
fulfillment (i.e., being attracted by a high-caloric snack). A
good metaphor for such internal conflicts is that of a wild
horse on the one hand and a rider whose job it is to tame the
horse. Such internal conflicts are very common in everyday life,
and the unfettered expression of impulses has far-reaching
implications such as caused by overeating, drug abuse, violent
aggression, or sexual harassment. Previous social psychological
research has primarily focused on the situational determinants
that are detrimental for self-control. Personality and
individual differences research on the other hand has identified
those traits that appear to be particularly relevant for
self-control outcomes. However, neither the situational nor the
dispositional approach has so far been much concerned with
conceptualizing the notion of impulse.
In order to overcome this limitation, my colleagues and I proposed an integrative approach to the study of self-control with a special focus on health psychology (Hofmann, Friese, & Strack, 2009; Hofmann, Friese, & Wiers, 2008). The approach is consistent with a dual-systems perspective (e.g., Strack & Deutsch, 2004) and enables to investigate the interplay of three important elements: (a) reflective precursors such as deliberate evaluations or restraint standards, (b) impulsive precursors such as automatic affective reactions or approach-avoidance tendencies, and (c) situational and dispositional boundary variables that shift the relative influence of reflective versus impulsive precursors on behavior.
So far, the suggested framework has been applied to the
prediction of a large range of self-control outcomes in the
domains of eating behavior (Hofmann, Friese, & Roefs, 2009;
Hofmann, Rauch, & Gawronski, 2007), drinking behavior
(Friese, Hofmann, & Wänke, 2008; Hofmann & Friese,
2008), sexual behavior (Hofmann, Gschwendner, Friese, Wiers,
& Schmitt, 2008), consumer choice behavior (Friese et al.,
2008), addiction (Wiers, Beckers, Houben, & Hofmann, 2008),
aggression (Hofmann et al., 2008), and prejudice (Hofmann,
Gschwendner, Castelli, & Schmitt, 2008).
In this research program we identified a number of important
boundary variables such as
- ego depletion (Hofmann et al., 2007)
- cognitive load (Friese et al., 2008)
- alcohol consumption (Hofmann & Friese, 2008)
- mortality salience (Friese & Hofmann, 2008)
- low working memory capacity (Hofmann et al., 2008,
2009)
- low behavioral inhibition (Hofmann et al., 2009,
Nederkorn et al., 2010)
- low implicit affect regulation (Hofmann et al., 2009)
- low trait self-control (Friese & Hofmann, 2009)
We found that these boundary variables increase the impact of
impulses on behavior (for a reviews, see Friese, Hofmann &
Schmitt, 2008;
Hofmann et al., 2009).
This conclusion was driven by a stronger predictive validity of
implicit measures under these conditions as compared to control
conditions. This body of evidence indicates the need to consider
both reflective and impulsive determinants in models of
self-control. It also draws attention to the many situational
and personal risk factors involved in self-control and to ways
to improve self-control. We have recently argued that many of
these findings can be understood in terms of temporary
reductions or stable trait differences in executive functions,
and have recently highlighted the many fruitful connections
between self-regulation and cognitive research (Hofmann,
Schmeichel, & Baddeley, 2012).
Relationship between Implicit and Explicit Measures (Implicit-Explicit Correspondence)
In analogy to earlier consistency debates in social and personality research, the development of implicit measures has brought up the question of how strongly implicit and explicit measures of attitudes, self-esteem, and personality traits correspond or diverge. We addressed this issue in a meta-analysis on the correlation between IAT measures and explicit self-report questionnaires (Hofmann, Gawronski, Gschwendner, Le, & Schmitt, 2005). Across studies, there was evidence of a slight positive overall relationship. More importantly, the variability in correlations was substantial, indicating that the implicit-explicit relationship depends on a variety of moderators or boundary conditions.
Drawing on a dual-systems framework of associative and
propositional representations (e.g., Strack & Deutsch,
2004), my colleagues and I (Hofmann, Gschwendner, Nosek, &
Schmitt, 2005)
proposed a model of implicit-explicit correspondence (see
figure) that organizes the empirical evidence into five broad
factors:
- translation between implicit and explicit representations
(e.g., representational strength, introspective awareness)
- additional information integration for explicit
representations (e.g., low time pressure; high need for
cognition)
- properties of explicit assessment (e.g., social desirability
concerns)
- properties of implicit assessment (e.g., situational
malleability)
- research design factors (e.g., sampling bias, measurement
correspondence)
Self-Knowledge of Implicit Attitudes or the Implicit
Self-Concept
In past and ongoing work, I am particularly interested in the conditions that moderate the degree to which inner mental experiences (Hofmann, Gschwendner, & Schmitt, 2005) or self-observed behavior stemming from implicit processes may enter conscious awareness so that they can be integrated into one’s explicit representation of an attitude or a personality disposition (for a review, see Hofmann & Wilson, 2010). In a series of studies (Hofmann, Gschwendner, & Schmitt, 2009), we found that people appear to have a blind spot with regard to the nonverbal behavioral manifestations of their implicit dispositions, even though neutral observers may readily detect these cues and use them as a basis for dispositional inferences.
Predictive Validity of Implicit Measures
Just as implicit-explicit correspondence, the predictive validity of implicit measures appears to be highly context-dependent (see also the above evidence in the self-regulation domain). Recently, my colleagues and I conducted a review of the available evidence on the predictive validity of implicit measures (Friese, Hofmann, & Schmitt, 2008) and suggested a classification system of moderators with two dimensions that is based on contemporary two-process models: One dimension distinguishes moderators according to their influence on the opportunity to control, the motivation to control, or the reliance on either automatic or controlled processes without changes in opportunity or motivation. The second dimension classifies moderators according to whether they pertain to a disposition of the acting person, the situation the behavior occurs in, or the behavior itself. The general view that emerges from the empirical work we reviewed is that implicit measures seem to predict behavior well under certain (but not all) situations, for some (but not all) people, and with regard to some (but not all) types of behavior. Furthermore, implicit measures seem to complement explicit measures in that they often appear to work best in cases where explicit measures fail to yield satisfactory predictive validity.
Evaluative Conditioning
How are our likes and dislikes acquired? A classic paradigm to
study these processes is Evaluative Conditioning (EC). EC can be
defined as a change in the liking of a stimulus (Conditioned
Stimulus; CS) that result from pairing that stimulus with other
positive or negative stimuli (Unconditioned Stimulus; US).
Despite decades of research on the phenomenon, there is still a
lot of debate regarding the generality of the phenomenon, its
similarity or difference with regard to Pavlovian conditioning,
and the processes underlying EC. In an attempt to address these
questions from a summative perspective, my colleagues and I
(Hofmann, De Houwer, Perugini, Baeyens, & Crombetz, 2010)
conducted a large-scale meta-analysis spanning more than 50
years of EC research. Across a total of 214 studies included in
the main sample, we obtained a medium size mean EC effect of d =
.52. More importantly, about 70% of the variance in effect sizes
across studies were attributable to true systematic variation.
We conducted moderator analyses to partially explain this
variation as a function of concrete aspects of the procedural
implementation and abstract aspects of the relation between CS
and US. Among a range of other findings, EC effects were
stronger for high versus low contingency-awareness, for
supraliminal versus subliminal US presentation, for
post-acquisition as compared with post-extinction effects, and
for self-report as compared with implicit measures.