Abstract
Research on ego depletion aims at explaining self-control failures in daily life. Both resource models and motivational accounts have been proposed for explanation. The aim of the present research was to test the different assumptions in two dual-task experiments where we operationalized ego depletion as a performance deviation from a self-set goal. In two experiments, we found evidence for this deviation contradicting motivational accounts of ego depletion: Participants experiencing ego depletion set themselves a stricter instead of a more lenient goal than controls, in that they chose to eat less cookies or wanted to perform better. Moreover, only participants without an initial self-control task could adhere to their self-set goal, whereas participants in the ego depletion condition in both experiments could not follow through with their more ambitious intentions. Taken together, our findings demonstrate the importance of goals in ego depletion research.
Highlights
Self-control is usually framed as the ability to control one’s behaviour and its failures are seen as an important factor in individual and societal problems [1]
In order to check whether our manipulation of the first task worked as intended, an independent samples t-test with the depletion measure as the outcome revealed as expected that participants in the depletion condition (M = 2.09, SD = 0.71) perceived the first task as significantly more difficult than participants in the control condition (M = 1.68, SD = 0.57), t(126) = 3.66, p < .001, d = 0.65
We investigated the roles of motivation and goal strength in ego depletion in two experiments
Summary
Self-control is usually framed as the ability to control one’s behaviour and its failures are seen as an important factor in individual and societal problems [1]. In the last two decades, the strength model of self-control has been a prominent theory to explain the limits of self-control [2]. According to this model, overriding a dominant response draws on a limited self-regulatory resource. In this state called ego depletion, people are not able to spend further self-regulatory resources, resulting in subsequent reduced self-control. One common experimental setup to study ego depletion is a dual-task procedure where controls perform a first task, which does not require self-control and, does not deplete the limited resource.
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