Abstract
Abstract. The aim was to quantify ego depletion and measure its effect on inhibitory control. Adults ( N = 523) received the letter “e” cancellation ego depletion task and were subsequently tested on Stroop task performance. Difficulty of the cancellation task was systematically manipulated by modifying the text from semantically meaningful to non-meaningful sentences and words (Experiment 1) and by increasing ego depletion rule complexity (Experiment 2). Participants’ performance was affected by both text and rule manipulations. There was no relation between ego depletion task performance and subsequent Stroop performance. Thus, irrespective of the difficulty of the ego depletion task, Stroop performance was unaffected. The widely used cancellation task may not be a suitable inducer of ego depletion if ego depletion is considered as a lack of inhibitory control.
Highlights
Ego-depletion, the finding that self-control is temporarily impaired because of a previous task that has tapped into self-control resources (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998) is one of the most studied phenomena in Social Psychology (PsychINFO search term “egodepletion” yields 518 results)
Bayesian analyses that compared performance in three different pairs of previously widely used ego-depletion and outcome tasks revealed evidence in favour of the null hypothesis
There is rarely a quantitative measure of ego-depletion nor is it taken into consideration for subsequent task performance, with an exception being Lurquin et al (2016) who did not find the effect per se
Summary
Ego-depletion, the finding that self-control is temporarily impaired because of a previous task that has tapped into self-control resources (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998) is one of the most studied phenomena in Social Psychology (PsychINFO search term “egodepletion” yields 518 results). A preregistered replication study involving 23 laboratories that used the letter cancellation task as ego-depletion measure and the multi-source interference task as outcome measure of inhibitory control (Carter, et al, 2015; Etherton, et al, 2018; Hagger et al, 2016) raised further doubts about the strength of the effect. The type of depletion task, such as controlling emotions, thoughts, impulses, attention, choice and volition, cognitive and social processing, has no effect on the strength of the egodepletion effect (Haggart et al, 2010) It is unclear what processes underlie egodepletion per se, while performance on the ego-depletion task itself is largely ignored. The rate of decrease on letter crossing did relate to subsequent working memory score, which suggests that some resource, if only willingness to attend to the experiment, is being depleted
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