For: Readers comparing philosophical and experimental accounts of self-regulation.
Begin here
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 11 - Weakness of the Will and Procrastination
The lecture explicitly compares weakness of will, discounting and proposed self-regulation strategies instead of treating procrastination as a single cause.
An intention can be sincere and still fail to organise the next action. That observation leaves several possible explanations: a cue may trigger a routine, an immediate reward may become more attractive, the task may be unclear, or the setting may make the intended action difficult. This guide compares explanatory models before turning any of them into a judgement about character.
Gendler’s 2011 lecture on weakness of will brings philosophical accounts, delay of gratification and discounting into the same discussion. It also presents proposed strategies for self-regulation. The date matters: a course discussion is not a current systematic review of those interventions, and a plausible strategy is not a guarantee that it will work for a particular person.
The two virtue-and-habit lectures clarify a different question. Aristotle’s account concerns what it is to acquire a virtue, not simply how frequently a response occurs. The continuation includes a challenge from situationist psychology. Compare this with Bouton’s account of learning, which distinguishes goal-directed action and habit within experimental learning theory. Similar everyday vocabulary can conceal different definitions and different evidence.
The behavioural-economics selections then make time explicit. A model of intertemporal choice asks how outcomes at different times enter a decision. A hyperbolic-discounting model is one specified proposal within that family. To understand it, draw the choices and dates before deciding whether it resembles a real case. Changing valuations, changing information and changing opportunities need not be the same process.
The exercise uses a fictional delayed task to separate a reward-value explanation from a cue-driven routine. Make the two predictions as different as possible. If both accounts can explain every imaginable result, the example has not yet become a useful test.
This route does not diagnose procrastination or turn a missed deadline into evidence of weak moral character. It provides concepts for comparing explanations, with explicit limits on the claims supported by older lectures. A deeper continuation is to follow the full intertemporal-choice sequence and compare its assumptions with a carefully specified everyday decision.
Build the connection
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 9 - Virtue and Habit I
Trace habit as a philosophical idea. Aristotle’s account is connected to learning analogies.
Open Yale Courses · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 10 - Virtue and Habit II
Question stable character. The continuation introduces a situationist challenge and prevents a habit from being treated as a complete character judgement.
MIT OpenCourseWare · Source-checked annotation
Lecture 9: Learning
Return to learning procedures. MIT’s learning session supplies conditioning and reward-value context.
NPTEL — National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning
Intertemporal Choice Models
Formalise time preferences. The behavioural-economics course introduces intertemporal choice models.
NPTEL — National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning
Naïve Hyperbolic Discounting
Inspect a particular model. A lecture on hyperbolic discounting follows the broader intertemporal account.
Draw competing explanations on a timeline
Choose a fictional delayed task. Draw a timeline of cues, rewards and opportunities. Write one explanation based on changing reward value and one based on a repeated cue–response routine; identify what observation would separate them.
Exercise or methods at source ↗Read alongside
- Conditioning and learning — Mark E. Bouton
Compare the experimentally specified learning relations and their limits.
- Judgment and decision making — Noba
State a comparison rule before calling a judgement biased.
Next step
Follow the full intertemporal-choice sequence and identify which assumptions fit the question you care about.
Limits of this route
The principal Yale discussion is from 2011. Proposed self-regulation strategies are not presented as a current intervention review. NPTEL titles establish the time-preference sequence without certifying every claim inside it. Source checks establish scope and selection usefulness; they do not claim full-video viewing, human review or scientific validation.
Sources and editorial check · 2026-11-07
Individual publisher overviews for selected Yale/MIT material; ordered official NPTEL outlines and available course descriptions; the specifically identified supporting reading sections. Each source record states its inspection limit.
Checked by agent. This is not human peer review.
- Lecture 11 - Weakness of the Will and Procrastination — official publisher material
- Lecture 9 - Virtue and Habit I — official publisher material
- Lecture 10 - Virtue and Habit II — official publisher material
- Lecture 9: Learning — official publisher material
- Principles of Behavioral Economics — official course outline
- Conditioning and learning — Mark E. Bouton
- Judgment and decision making — Noba
- Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature — course context