The Virtue of Temperance: Restraint and Self-Regulation

The Virtue of Temperance: Restraint in the Face of Excess

Acting with restraint when impulse pushes toward excess, without that being repression or passivity: this is the capacity Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman grouped under temperance in their 2004 classification of positive psychology.

People who lead with this virtue tend to make better medium-term decisions, precisely because they don’t act on immediate impulse alone.

The Four Strengths That Make It Up

• Forgiveness and mercy: the changes that take place in someone who has been offended or hurt, through which the urge for revenge or to avoid the other person turns into more benevolent, tolerant attitudes. It doesn’t mean forgetting the harm, but no longer acting out of resentment.
• Humility/modesty: an accurate, not underrated, estimate of your own achievements and merits, letting them speak for themselves instead of underlining them. It includes being open to advice and ideas that contradict what you think.
• Prudence: a practical orientation toward your own future: thinking through the consequences of decisions and resisting the impulse to satisfy a short-term goal at the expense of a more important long-term one.
• Self-regulation: the ability to govern your own actions, impulses, and emotions to meet a goal or standard, instead of reacting automatically to every internal or external stimulus.

Its Usual Signs

• They own their mistakes without over-justifying them, which makes it easier to repair things and move on.
• They think through consequences before acting on impulse, especially in decisions with lasting effects.
• They let go of resentment when the time comes, without that meaning they deny the harm done.
• They let their achievements speak for themselves, without needing to point them out constantly.
• They ask for opinions that might contradict them, without taking it as an attack on their judgment.

What Research Says About Self-Control and Forgiveness

Temperance is the virtue with the most research behind it, especially on the self-control side.

• Self-control is associated with almost everything good, and no harmful “excess” has been found. June Tangney, Roy Baumeister, and Angie Boone (2004) created a self-control scale and used it in two large studies. High scores were associated with better grades, better psychological adjustment, less binge eating and alcohol abuse, better relationships, and more appropriate emotional responses. They looked specifically for costs of very high self-control (so-called overcontrol) and found none in their data.
• Self-control in childhood predicts adult life. The Dunedin study (New Zealand) followed about 1,000 children from birth to age 32. The greater their self-control in childhood, the better their physical health at 32, the lower their substance dependence, the sounder their finances, and the shorter their criminal record, regardless of their intelligence and social class (Moffitt et al., 2011).
• Forgiveness runs through empathy. Michael McCullough, Everett Worthington, and Kenneth Rachal (1997), who understand forgiveness as a change in motivation toward the person who caused harm, in line with the definition used in Peterson and Seligman’s classification, found that the link between receiving an apology and forgiving was largely explained by increased empathy toward the offender.

Two findings from the VIA-IS questionnaire round out the picture. In the comparison of more than 100,000 people from 54 countries, prudence, modesty, and self-regulation were among the strengths the fewest people attributed to themselves (Park, Peterson and Seligman, 2006). And in Robert McGrath’s (2015) analysis of more than a million cases, prudence, self-regulation, and perseverance formed a factor of their own, which he called Self-Control: temperance, in the data, looks a lot like persistence.

Where Self-Control Really Breaks Down

A useful idea from recent research is that effective self-control depends less on willpower at the critical moment than people tend to think. Angela Duckworth, Tamar Gendler, and James Gross (2016) reviewed self-control strategies and argued that situational strategies, the ones that act before temptation appears (choosing or changing the situation), can be especially effective, because they stop the impulse before it grows, and they involve far less inner struggle than gritting your teeth once temptation is already there.

An example: someone who knows that at eleven at night they end up checking work email and firing off rushed replies doesn’t need more willpower at that hour; it’s enough for the laptop to stay in another room. Knowing precisely when your self-control almost always gives way (a time of day, a type of decision, certain company) lets you put the structure exactly there.

What Sets Temperance Apart From Indecision

One point that often comes up is the pause before deciding, especially for decisions made in the heat of the moment or under emotional pressure: someone who sends an angry email five minutes after reading something that annoyed them would rarely write it the same way an hour later.

That margin isn’t the same as avoiding the decision: temperance means deciding with judgment rather than on impulse, not postponing the decision indefinitely. Accepting your own mistakes without dramatizing or minimizing them, with the same simplicity with which you correct course, completes the same pattern.

If forgiveness is the strength you recognize most in yourself of the four, the Forgiveness Quiz goes deeper into exactly that. To compare temperance with the other five virtues, there’s the Character Strengths Test.

Sources

• Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press.
• Tangney, J. P., Baumeister, R. F. and Boone, A. L. (2004). High self-control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success. Journal of Personality, 72(2), 271-324. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3506.2004.00263.x
• Moffitt, T. E., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D., Dickson, N., Hancox, R. J., Harrington, H., Houts, R., Poulton, R., Roberts, B. W., Ross, S., Sears, M. R., Thomson, W. M. and Caspi, A. (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 2693-2698. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1010076108
• McCullough, M. E., Worthington, E. L. and Rachal, K. C. (1997). Interpersonal forgiving in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(2), 321-336. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.73.2.321
• Duckworth, A. L., Gendler, T. S. and Gross, J. J. (2016). Situational strategies for self-control. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(1), 35-55. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615623247
• Park, N., Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Character strengths in fifty-four nations and the fifty US states. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(3), 118-129. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760600619567
• McGrath, R. E. (2015). Integrating psychological and cultural perspectives on virtue: The hierarchical structure of character strengths. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 10(5), 407-424. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2014.994222