Field: Psychology › Applied PsychologyType: Couldn't replicate a published resultArea: self-control researchTarget: Ego depletionStage: replication
Hypothesis
Using up self-control on one task (crossing out letters) would weaken self-control on a following task, as the limited-resource model predicts.
What failed
Four studies, two with community samples and two with young adults, used handgrip persistence and a modified Stroop task before and after depletion. None found a significant depletion effect.
Broken assumption
Self-control draws on a limited resource that one demanding task can use up.
Why
The authors suggest that depletion has smaller or more limited effects than earlier publications implied.
From the published paper: Xu et al. PLoS ONE, 2014. ↗CC BY