Since Odysseus committed to resisting the Sirens, mechanisms to limit self-control failure have been a central feature of human behavior. Psychologists have long argued that the use of self-control is an effortful process and, more recently, that its failure arises when the cognitive costs of self-control outweigh its perceived benefits. In a similar way, economists have argued that sophisticated choosers can adopt pre-commitment strategies that that tie the hands of their future selves in order to reduce these costs. Yet, we still lack an empirical tool to quantify and demonstrate the cost of self-control. Here, we develop and validate a novel economic decision-making task to quantify the subjective cost of self-control by determining the monetary cost a person is willing to incur in order to eliminate the need for self-control. We find that humans will pay to avoid having to exert self-control in a way that scales with increasing levels of temptation and that these costs are modulated both by motivational incentives and stress exposure. Our psychophysical approach allows us to index moment-to-moment self-control costs at the within-subject level, validating important theoretical work across multiple disciplines and opening new avenues of self-control research in healthy and clinical populations.

中文翻译：

---

量化人类自我控制的主观成本

自奥德修斯（Odysseus）致力于抵抗警笛声以来，限制自我控制失败的机制一直是人类行为的主要特征。心理学家长期以来一直认为，使用自我控制是一个费力的过程，最近，当自我控制的认知成本超过其预期收益时，自我控制就会失败。经济学家以类似的方式认为，精明的选择者可以采用预先承诺的策略，将其与自己未来的双手联系在一起，以降低这些成本。但是，我们仍然缺乏量化和证明自我控制成本的经验工具。在这里，我们开发并验证一种新颖的经济决策任务，通过确定一个人为消除自我控制的需求而愿意承担的货币成本，来量化自我控制的主观成本。我们发现，人类将付出一定的努力来避免必须进行自我控制，这种自我控制的方式会随着诱惑水平的提高而扩大，并且这些成本会受到动机性激励和压力暴露的共同调节。我们的心理物理学方法使我们能够在受试者内部对当下即刻的自我控制成本进行索引，从而验证跨多个学科的重要理论工作，并为健康和临床人群中的自我控制研究开辟新途径。