[PHILOS-L] HuME PhD Program - Invited Talks - Simon van Baal (University of Leeds): Self-Control Conflicts in Natural Language - 20 March 2026

[Evelina Lissoni]

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HuME PhD Program - Invited Talks - 2025/26 Series

IUSS Pavia / UniMI / SNS Pisa 

We are pleased to invite you to the HuME Invited Talk series, promoted by the PhD candidates of the HuME PhD Program, jointly run by Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia, the University of Milan, and Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Please find below information about the next talk, and a prospect of forthcoming meetings.

Simon van Baal (University of Leeds)

Self-Control Conflicts in Natural Language 

Friday, 20 March 2026, 13:00-15:00 (CET)

Abstract: What do our hardest struggles look like, and are we studying the right ones? Self-control research has long focused on habitual, incremental decisions; resisting the snooze button, the dessert menu, the cigarette. But is this where the hardest battles actually happen? Drawing on large-scale analysis of Reddit posts across domains including relationships, finance, health, and career, this talk presents a new picture of self-control in everyday life. Using natural language processing to code posts against taxonomies of goals, temptations, and barriers, we discuss that the most commonly discussed self-control conflicts also involve impactful, one-off decisions, not just recurring habits. We further show that certain temptations (particularly sloth and lust) are systematically over-represented in difficult self-control conflicts. People discussing success stories rely more on situation modification rather than attention deployment or cognitive change. These findings challenge dominant lab-based models of self-control and point toward new directions for both theory and intervention.

In-person venue: Università degli Studi di Milano, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milan (Italy), Sala Martinetti

Virtual venue: https://iusspavia.zoom.us/j/83518566239

Website: https://www.iusspavia.it/en/education/doctoral-programmes/human-mind-and-its-explanations-language-brain-and-reasoning-hume

Forthcoming talks in this series (provisional program):

Nicola Angius (University of Messina)

General Intelligence, Representation, Embodiment. New Perspectives for Cognitive Science from Large Language Models

Tuesday, 31 March 2026, 14:00-16:00 (CEST) at UniMI

Sanford Goldberg (Northwestern University)

How to think about 'Social Defeaters': putting the Expected Common Ground to work

Friday, 15 May 2026, 11:00-13:00 (CEST) at IUSS Pavia

Everyone is invited.

For further information, you can contact: Evelina Lissoni (evelina...@iusspavia.it), Andrea Sereni (andrea...@iusspavia.it)

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