Intelligent self-control
A recent study investigated the influence intelligence and self-control can have on a successful life.
Every person at some point faces choices that affect what rewards or options are available in the future. The cognitive ability to forgo immediate rewards in order to wait for better opportunities is called self-control. This ability is not only relevant in humans. In corvids such as the jay, there is a clear link between the ability to defer rewards and their general intelligence. A recent study conducted in cooperation with the Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences was able to substantiate this. Project leader Dr. Markus Böckle conducts research at the Research Centre for Transitional Psychiatry at KL on, among other things, the promotion of self-efficacy and emotion regulation, but also on evolutionary causes for the development of intelligence. He names three reasons for this: "On the one hand, there is the selective pressure to understand things functionally as well as to classify them in time, which could give rise to technical intelligence. On the other hand, there are social reasons, for example to understand and plan complex social interactions, which could have given rise to social intelligence in an evolutionary way. The third hypothesis for the development of intelligence is subject to the pressure to avoid a predator."
However, being intelligent does not necessarily mean being successful - in people's professional and private lives, for example, says the cognitive biologist, scientist and psychotherapist. "We therefore also looked at the question of whether intelligence can arise independently of the ability to wait for delayed rewards. Or whether there is an evolutionary connection between general intelligence and the ability to suppress impulsive actions. For this reason, we have studied animal behaviour and response in order to draw conclusions about humans and their cognitions."
The connection between self-control and intelligence is therefore not limited to humans. Research on animals has demonstrated a similar relationship, among others in octopuses, as Markus Böckle and his colleagues have already shown. To investigate this relationship in birds as well, the scientists gave ten jays, a songbird from the corvid family, the task of choosing a delayed and preferred outcome instead of an immediate and less rewarding one. The jays were able to wait for better opportunities, while the maximum waiting time varied from individual to individual. "We also gave them five other cognitive tasks that assessed spatial memory, spatial relations and learning ability. These are commonly used as measures of general intelligence. Performance on these tasks significantly correlated with the jays' ability to wait for better opportunities."
The study results strongly suggest that self-control may be a fundamental feature of intelligence. The need to prevent immediate gratification in order to plan future meals may have driven the evolution of intelligence, Markus Böckle summarises. "Studying individual differences in self-control within and between species could help us gain a better understanding of new aspects of cognition patterns and their origins." Especially at the Department of Psychology, he says, it is important to conduct research in these areas in order to implement new findings in counselling, clinical and therapeutic practice in the long term. "For example, in crisis interventions or in the context of longer-term psychotherapy: if clients learn to act in a goal-oriented way through self-control, the successful outcome of a potentially painful psychotherapeutic treatment could be increased."
This article is part of the thematic issue "Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny".
Direct link to the study:https://aspace.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/339126
