Episode 31: Is Ego Depletion Real?

Two Psychologists Four Beers

By listener request, Yoel quizzes Mickey about ego depletion. How did we start studying it? How has the replication crisis changed how we think about it? After more than a decade studying ego depletion, does Mickey still have any faith in the phenomenon?

Bonus: what does it mean to say, "don't @ me"?

Links:

• De Hemel Brewery
• Don't @ me
• The Strength Model of Self-Control — Self-control is a central function of the self and an important key to success in life. The exertion of self-control appears to depend on a limited resource.
• Is Ego Depletion Real? An Analysis of Arguments — An influential line of research suggests that initial bouts of self-control increase the susceptibility to self-control failure (ego depletion effect). Despite seemingly abundant evidence, some researchers have suggested that evidence for ego depletion was the sole result of publication bias and p-hacking, with the true effect being indistinguishable from zero.
• Self-Control, Ego Depletion, and Social Psychology’s Replication Crisis — Provides Baumeister's perspective on ego depletion and its status in the context of psychology's replication crisis. Reviews history, controversy, evidence.
• A series of meta-analytic tests of the depletion effect: Self-control does not seem to rely on a limited resource. - PsycNET — We find very little evidence that the depletion effect is a real phenomenon, at least when assessed with the methods most frequently used in the laboratory. Our results strongly challenge the idea that self-control functions as if it relies on a limited psychological or physical resource.
• Bias-Correction Techniques Alone Cannot Determine Whether Ego Depletion is Different from Zero: Commentary on Carter, Kofler, Forster, & McCullough, 2015 by Michael Inzlicht, Will Gervais, Elliot Berkman :: SSRN — Despite our admiration for this program of meta-research, we suggest that bias-corrected meta-analyses cannot yet resolve whether the overall ego depletion is different from zero or not.
• RRR – The Ego-Depletion Paradigm — A Multi-Lab Pre-Registered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Paradigm Meta-analysis of the studies revealed that the size of the ego-depletion effect was small with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) that encompassed zero (d = 0.04, 95% CI [−0.07, 0.15].