Content area
Full Text
On the Self Regulation of Behavior, by Charles S. Carver and Michael F. Scheier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 439 pp. NPL clock. ISBN: 0-521-57204-5.
When sociologists study the control of human behavior, we typically treat it as an issue of "social" control. Caught up in our sociological imagination, we can lose sight of the fact that individuals control their own behavior as well. Certainly "self" control is not independent from the social world (a status that perhaps we would grant few, if any, human phenomena), but it does have a life of its own that sociologists must attend to as we link the individual and society.
Psychologists, in contrast, have long studied self-control, and this book advances this study with a "cybernetic" view of self-regulation. Behind this daunting term lie two straightforward assumptions: Human behavior is goal-oriented, and it is regulated by feedback control processes. The book presents a model of selfcontrol based on feedback loops. These feedback loops link individuals' goals to their behaviors to their perceptions and back to their goals. Once individuals formulate a goal (also...