ACDE seminar: Measurement of self-control

Our research advances knowledge on the measurement of self-control and impulsivity by establishing the relationship between a rich set of behavioral (laboratory-based) and self-reported (survey-based) measures. We also introduce an innovative behavioral task to measure impulsivity in the context of a laboratory experiment in which participants make decisions about how to allocate attentional effort in a task across time. Participants have multiple opportunities to take breaks during the task which may reduce their payoffs. We allow impulsivity to be expressed in two ways: i) the speed with which break decisions are made; and ii) the amount of prior information sought. Embedding this task in a precisely controlled laboratory experiment to measure self-control in the domain of attention and exploiting an unusually rich set of psychometric scales,  allows us to separately identify the effects of impulsivity, attention, and trait self-control in shaping people’s allocation of effort across time. More generally, our research extends the emerging literature that uses laboratory settings with well-structured economic incentives to examine the role of personality traits and cognitive limitations in economic decision making.

Speaker: Dr Juliana Silva Goncalves, Lecturer, School of Economics, University of Sydney