The gap between “I want” and “I do”: the science of action control

There is one experience that is almost impossible to explain to someone who has not experienced it, and almost impossible not to recognize if you have experienced it yourself. You want to do a thing. You understand why it is needed. You have time, energy and even the mood. And you don’t do it - an hour, a day, three weeks. Not because I changed my mind. Not because something more important has appeared. But simply because between “I want” and “I do” it’s as if the lights have been turned off, and you are standing in the dark in front of the door that you yourself asked to open.

The problem is that this explanation does not stand up to basic practical testing. There are people who easily manage eight-hour workdays, but cannot bring themselves to dial a single phone number for weeks. There are people who can hardly wait until the end of a short meeting, but are able to stay focused on a complex project for days if it grabs their attention. There are people who, after one failure, cannot recover for months - and there are those who stumble, dust themselves off and move on as if nothing had happened.

If it all came down to one muscle of the will, these differences would be inexplicable.But they are not inexplicable. It's just that the explanation isn't where people are looking for it.

Revolution of 1988: when a psychologist turns the question around

In the late 1980s, a German psychologistJulius Kuhl(Julius Kuhl), then working at the University of Osnabrück, proposed a model that turned the question upside down. He didn’t ask “how much will do you have.” He asked: “How many different mechanisms does this thing we call will consist of, and what happens when one of them malfunctions while the others are working fine?”

The old model of will and the dead end it leads to

To understand what exactly Kuhl proposed, it is useful to first see where he started from.

The classical, pre-scientific and in many ways still everyday model of will is a modelself-control. In it, the will works as a violent suppression: there is an impulse (laziness, fear, boredom, temptation), and there is a volitional effort of the “I”, which suppresses this impulse. The stronger the impulse, the more effort is required. In this model, emotions accompanying activity are perceived as an obstacle that must be endured, and not as part of the process. The psyche, when faced with an obstacle, launches another cycle of suppression - and another, and another.

Here a dead end is discovered, to which Kuhl was one of the first to draw attention. Suppressed impulses do not disappear anywhere - they retain, according to his formulation, a certain “counteraction potential.” Each new cycle of suppression requires more resources than the previous one. It's calledescalation of control, and it leads to a result that sounds like a paradox, but is easily recognizable in the experience of almost any person: the harder you force yourself to do something, the higher the chance that at some point the system will simply fail. Directive hypercontrol at a certain stage results in a complete loss of control. The task either does not start at all, or it starts and ends in the middle.

Kuhl suggested coming from the other side. What if a truly resilient will, on the contrary, remains low in emotional stress - even when the objective difficulty of the task is high? What if attention to the goal in this case does not require voluntary effort, but arises spontaneously? What if obstacles along the way are not broken through by force, but first try to be resolved at the local level - and only when local resources are not enough does the conscious “I” get involved?

This is not a description of some rare superhuman condition. This is a description of what the will looks like when it is working normally - that is, most of the time, for most people, in relation to the tasks that they really need. The problem is not that some people have “real” will and others don’t. The problem is that the psyche is a complex system with several autonomous subsystems, and any of them can fail independently of the others.

Two languages ​​of will: action orientation and state orientation

From this observation grew the central idea of ​​Kuhl's theory - dividing people not into “strong-willed” and “weak-willed”, but into two types of functioning of the action control system.

What Happens Inside: Intent Architecture

Here Kuhl's theory ceases to be just a convenient metaphor and turns into an expanded model, which later became known asPSI theory(Personality Systems Interactions - “the theory of interaction of personal systems”), which Kuhl formalized by 2000 and continues to develop together with colleagues to this day.

According to this model, a full-fledged intention is not a single thought “I should do this”, buta network of three connected cognitive representations:

Seven mechanisms of volitional control

The implementation of intentions up to the achievement of the goal is based on seven mechanisms of volitional control, most of which work at an unconscious level:

What deserves a separate discussion is what Kuhl callsalienation- alienation. This is a disruption of the ability to form representations of one's own expectations and emotional preferences. The consequence of alienation sounds almost philosophical, but is recognized in almost every adult at least once in their life: the subject loses access to the motivational and emotional foundations of his own intention. The goal begins to feel “not one’s own,” and the action aimed at it begins to feel imposed from the outside, and not from the inside.

Scientific confirmation: what science says thirty years later

It's easy to view any psychological theory from the 1990s as something that "was fashionable back then" and has since become outdated. This did not happen with Kuhl’s theory - and not because psychology stands still, but because more recent research for the most part confirms and refines the original model, rather than refute it.

Willpower Depletion Doesn't Work the Same for Everyone

In 2014 in a reputable magazinePersonality and Social Psychology BulletinA series of three studies by Peter Gröpel, Roy Baumeister and Jürgen Beckmann was published. The work directly tested what Kuhl's theory predicts: after depleting their self-control resource, action-oriented people continued to put effort into the task, while state-oriented people went into a "conservation of strength" mode - in fact, they gave up earlier, although objectively the resource was depleted equally in both groups. This is an important result: it shows that the issue is not how much “fuel” a person has, but how differently the strategy for spending it is structured.

This works in the office too, not just in the lab.

Applied research examined how action or state orientation influences employees' responses to work interruptions—those endless notifications, urgent calls, and context switches that make up the modern workday. It turned out that disposition directly moderates the extent to which interruptions reduce a person’s initiative: for some people, after an interruption, the task simply continues from the same place, for others, the impulse is lost, which has to be “started up” again. For organizational psychology, where the topics of digital overwork and fragmented attention are among the key topics, this is a direct and practical application of forty years of theory.

The theory has found a neurobiological foundation

Integration of PSI theory with data on brain function shows the connection of the functional systems of the theory with specific cortical areas. We are talking about two intellectual systems localized in the frontal lobes:memory of intentionprocesses information hierarchically and “step by step” - it is responsible for purposeful action, planning and implementation of complex, long-term intentions.Expanded Memory, associated with the right prefrontal areas of the cortex and the hippocampus, is activated when a person is in a relaxed, non-forced state, and is responsible for the holistic, integrated work of the “I” - the very ability to keep motive, goal and method of action together. In other words, talking about “two languages ​​of the will” is not a metaphor for explanatory convenience, but a description of the work of two different, partly competing neurocognitive circuits.

Why is this not a sentence?

There is a temptation to read everything written above as another coordinate system in which people are sorted into cells: this one is a “man of action”, this one is a “man of state”, and nothing can be done about it. That would be a misreading—and directly contrary to what the research itself shows.

Firstly, orientation to action or state is not a binary switch, but a continuum, and for the vast majority of people, the result according to different mechanisms (start, retention, recovery after failure) does not coincide: someone starts easily, but does not maintain focus well, someone maintains focus perfectly, but cannot recover for a long time after a mistake.

Secondly, the disposition clearly manifests itself precisely under load, stress or exhaustion. This means that the state in which a person is right now - not getting enough sleep, overloaded, going through a protracted period of uncertainty - can temporarily shift his result towards a pronounced state orientation, even if in calm periods of life he is much closer to the opposite pole. State orientation is not a personal stigma, but often a signal of current system overload, requiring not discipline, but resource restoration.

Thirdly, Kuhl himself, in his early experiments, showed that even an acute manifestation of the OS disposition can be corrected externally - sometimes by unexpectedly simple means like saying the next step out loud. This does not leave much room for fatalism: if a state can be shifted by simply changing the conditions in a laboratory experiment, much less can it be shifted by conscious work with the environment, load and task structure in real life.

Application in reality

For more than thirty years, the theory of action control has expanded far beyond the boundaries of academic personality psychology. In organizational psychology, it is used to explain why similarly motivated employees cope differently with multitasking, deadlines, and work interruptions. In sports psychology - to work with athletes’ recovery after defeat and their ability to maintain concentration in long, monotonous training cycles. In clinical psychology - as part of a larger picture in the study of depression, anxiety disorders and chronic procrastination. In education, to understand why students of equal ability perform differently academically depending on how quickly they are able to recover from a bad grade or exam failure.

The common denominator of all these applications is the same: Kuhl’s theory provides a language that allows you not to evaluate a person (“you have a weak will”), but to localize a specific mechanism that is currently not working as well as it could (“your start is slipping” or “your recovery from an error is stalling”). And where there is a precise localization of the problem, there is a much more specific, less traumatic way to solve it.

A gap that was finally called by name

At the beginning of this text, the same experience was described - standing in front of a door that you yourself wanted to open, and not having the strength to grab the handle. For a long time there was no good name for this experience. “Laziness” sounded accusatory and did not explain anything. “Weak willpower” described a symptom, not a cause. “Procrastination” became a common word, but was more often used as a diagnosis rather than as an explanation of the mechanism.

Julius Kuhl gave this gap not just one name, but a map - three separate, empirically distinguishable points where intention can diverge from action, and thirty-odd years of research that confirm this map over and over again. This doesn't make the gap any less real. But this changes the question that makes sense to ask yourself when you once again stand in front of the door and cannot grab the handle. The question is no longer “why am I so weak-willed,” but a much more useful one: “at what point—at the start, during the process, or after the last failure—do I now lack contact with myself?”