Implicit Delegation of Responsibility

Abstract

In everyday life, people often exert self-control not only for their own sake but also for the sake of close others. Here, the authors examine the specific case of joint self-control—when multiple people must simultaneously exert self-control for mutual success—in the context of close relationships. The authors test the hypothesis that people use situational cues to determine if one member of the relationship bears more responsibility for exerting self-control than the other. In this article, the authors test the specific cue of past behavior and find in two studies that participants who exert self-control on behalf of the relationship on a preliminary task continue to exert self-control on behalf of the relationship on a secondary task compared to those who exerted less self-control on the preliminary task. The authors explain these results by focusing on the role that expectations about behaviors play in contributing effort to a difficult or unpleasant task.