How often and how strongly do people experience desires, to what extent do their desires
conflict with other goals, and how often and successfully do people exercise self-control
to resist their desires? To investigate desire and attempts to control desire in everyday
life, we conducted a large-scale experience sampling study based on a conceptual framework
integrating desire strength, conflict, resistance (use of self-control), and behavior
enactment. A sample of 205 adults wore beepers for a week. They furnished 7,827 reports
of desire episodes and completed personality measures of behavioral inhibition system/behavior
activation system (BIS/BAS) sensitivity, trait self-control, perfectionism, and narcissistic
entitlement. Results suggest that desires are frequent, variable in intensity, and
largely unproblematic. Those urges that do conflict with other goals tend to elicit
resistance, with uneven success. Desire strength, conflict, resistance, and self-regulatory
success were moderated in multiple ways by personality variables as well as by situational
and interpersonal factors such as alcohol consumption, the mere presence of others,
and the presence of others who already had enacted the desire in question. Whereas
personality generally had a stronger impact on the dimensions of desire that emerged
early in its course (desire strength and conflict), situational factors showed relatively
more influence on components later in the process (resistance and behavior enactment).
In total, these findings offer a novel and detailed perspective on the nature of everyday
desires and associated self-regulatory successes and failures.
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