Every person has a certain relatively stable combination of traits responsible for undertaking specific behaviors. It works in such a way that “people at a certain age lock themselves in life situations and define themselves in certain categories. They also choose and shape their environment in accordance with the traits of their personality. (…) So if a given person has a certain vision of themselves, they confirm it with their behavior. (…) So although it is not impossible that personality can change, powerful forces work for its stability.” (Pervin, 2005, p. 71).
According to the mechanism of creating savings, it can be indicated that self-control is a factor necessary for their accumulation. In the most general sense, self-control can be defined as the ability to control one’s own emotions and behaviors. In fact, self-control is considered a personality trait that manifests itself through self-discipline, which is responsible for the “ability to start and complete tasks” (Siuta, 2009a, p. 37). People with high scores on the self-discipline scale can motivate themselves to various tasks, while people with low scores will delay starting a task, get discouraged easily, and give up (Siuta, 2009a, p. 37).
Self-control has been the subject of many studies. Starting with those conducted on children by W. Mischel (1968) in the form of the so-called Marshmallow Test. It consisted of giving several-year-old children one piece of marshmallow (the children could also choose between a cookie or a pretzel) and presenting the option of eating it immediately or waiting a few minutes and getting another marshmallow. After presenting these options, the researcher left the children in a room alone with the marshmallow, while observing and recording their behavior. Of course, some children ate their treat right away and some waited for the second one. On the one hand, this study confirmed that the sense and strength of self-control are a very individual matter. On the other hand, how self-control works largely depends on the locus of control. According to Mischel, you can’t control the whole world, but you can control the way you think about it. Therefore, children with an internal locus of control coped with the presented situation by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek with the treat or singing songs. Thanks to this, they were able to forget about the strong desire to eat the marshmallow. On the other hand, children with an external locus of control stared at the marshmallow the whole time, which turned out to be completely ineffective. The key to success is therefore to avoid thinking about the object of desire. However, Mischel was aware that the experimental studies he conducted do not allow for controlling all variables, such as the environment in which children are raised, and therefore do not provide a full answer to the questions about what shapes the level of self-control (Lehrer, 2009).
This theme was developed in subsequent studies conducted under the direction of J. Twenge (2006), according to which people who were excluded from any social group may have less control over their behavior. This study involved manipulating the feeling of rejection from the group by convincing people from the experimental group that they would spend the rest of their lives alone. People from the control group were not subjected to the manipulation of the feeling of rejection. The selection to the groups was random. People from the experimental group were less willing to drink an unpalatable but healthy drink. In the second study, people from the experimental group were told that no one from their group wanted to work with them. It turned out that these subjects ate more cookies than people from the control group. In the third study, it turned out that people separated from the group gave up solving a difficult task significantly faster than those who remained in the group. The conducted studies quite unequivocally proved that it is social rejection that leads to a weakened sense of self-control, not the other way around (Parzuchowski, 2006a).
Based on the described studies, it can be concluded that saving may also depend on the sense of control over the situation. People with an internal locus of control will be convinced that it depends primarily on them whether they will manage to save and on what scale. On the other hand, people with an external locus of control will rather look for various factors in the environment that can make this task easier or more difficult. Such people will explain their failures, e.g. with too low income, bad will of banks or the need to allocate money for another purpose.
In turn, as Rachlin claims, self-control is a kind of conflict between higher and lower internal forces and although it seems to be a typical internal conflict, in reality it takes place between environmental sources of control, i.e. short and long-time perspective (Rachlin, 2010, p. 62). In this approach, the tendency to save results from the so-called hyperbolic discounting. It consists on estimating the subjective value of future funds, which, according to this mechanism, becomes smaller with the extension of the time perspective. This regularity is confirmed by, among others, Herrnstein’s research (1990), who asked the respondents what they would prefer: to receive $100 tomorrow or $115 in 8 days. It turned out that most of the respondents chose the first option, which means that the respondents gave up the interest rate of 15% per week, i.e. approx. 60% per month! The conclusion from this study is that people prefer to receive less money immediately than more, but after some time (Dzik and Tyszka, 2004, p. 58).
Katona, on the other hand, claimed that the scale of savings accumulated depends on the ability and willingness to save. Pessimistic people assess their situation consciously and refrain from spending, thus increasing the residual savings, while optimistic people tend to reduce them (Harasim, 2010, p. 26).
It can therefore be stated that saving, which is undoubtedly based on self-control, is, just like it, based on the ability to delay gratification. Consequently, it is also a very individual matter. Problems with delaying gratification also stem from impulsiveness and impatience. Impulsiveness is understood as “the inability to control irresistible desires and needs. The needs (…) are felt too strongly by the individual to be able to resist them, although they may later regret this or that behavior” (Siuta, 2009a, p. 31). Impatience, on the other hand, is understood as the desire to immediately receive a rewarding factor. Impatient people will have a problem with forward thinking, and thus with postponing consumption and creating security for the future, i.e. saving. Problems with delaying gratification can also be justified biologically. Studies show that children with fetal alcohol syndrome have more problems with delaying gratification (Williams, Howard, McLaughlin, 1994, pp. 86-97). In turn, R. Baumaister stated that self-control works analogously to muscles, because just like them it can work hard, but only for a certain time. After a lot of effort it gets tired (Parzuchowski, 2006b, p. 75). This approach provides an explanation for the paradoxical effect of control.
