Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self

[C C]

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...ou/509726/

EXCERPT: [...] Which makes perfect sense. Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else’s, and step into their shoes. Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self—a removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person. So think of self-control as a kind of temporal selflessness. It’s Present You taking a hit to help out Future You. “For a long time, people have speculated that we use the same mechanisms to reason about other people as about our hypothetical selves,” says Rebecca Saxe from MIT. “So this new study fits really well....”

[Syne]

Yeah, we've know for ages that people tend to judge others by the same criteria they judge themselves. So it's no surprise that the same mechanism should mediate both empathy and self-control. This has probably been obscured by the tendency to conflate empathy with sympathy.