Metacognition and polyregulation in daily self-control conflicts.

Metacognition is important for self-regulated learning, and it has recently been argued that it may play an important role in self-control more generally. We studied multiple aspects of metacognition in self-control, namely metacognitive knowledge including a person's repertoire ("toolbox") of different self-regulatory strategies, metacognitive regulation (planning, monitoring, and evaluation), and polyregulation (using more self-regulatory strategies in a single self-control conflict) as predictors of people's self-control success in daily life. In a preregistered experience sampling study, N = 503 participants reported their self-control conflicts up to eight times per day for 10 days, yielding 9,639 reports of daily self-control conflicts. Analyses showed that higher levels of metacognitive knowledge, planning, monitoring, evaluation, and polyregulation as well as a larger strategy repertoire were associated with higher levels of success in resolving daily self-control conflicts. Additionally, higher levels of trait self-control were associated with higher levels of metacognitive knowledge, planning, and monitoring. These findings highlight the importance of metacognition and polyregulation for successful self-control.

Metacognition and self-control: An integrative framework.

Self-control describes the processes by which individuals control their habits, desires, and impulses in the service of long-term goals. Research has identified important components of self-control and proposed theoretical frameworks integrating these components (e.g., Inzlicht et al., 2021; Kotabe & Hofmann, 2015). In our perspective, these frameworks, however, do not yet fully incorporate important metacognitive aspects of self-control. We therefore introduce a framework explicating the role of metacognition for self-control. This framework extends existing frameworks, primarily from the domains of self-regulated learning and problem-solving (e.g., Schraw & Moshman, 1995; Zimmerman, 2000), and integrates past and contemporary research and theorizing on self-control that involves aspects of metacognition. It considers two groups of metacognitive components, namely, (a) individual metacognitive characteristics, that is a person's declarative, procedural, and conditional metacognitive knowledge about self-control, as well as their self-awareness (or metacognitive awareness), and (b) metacognitive regulatory processes that unfold before a self-control conflict (forethought and prevention), when a self-control conflict is identified, during a self-control conflict (regulation and monitoring), and after a self-control conflict (reflection and evaluation). The proposed framework integrates existing research and will be useful for highlighting new directions for research on the role of metacognition for self-control success and failure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).