Akira Miyake
Akira Miyake is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, best known in his own field for work on executive function. On this site he appears as the senior author, with Nathan Carruth and Jason Ramos, of the 2023 preregistered replication that tested the theory brought in to rescue ego depletion and found nothing. Their paper matters less for the null result than for the review published alongside it, which counted how the supporting studies in that literature had been produced: smaller samples, and far less preregistration.
Who they are
Miyake is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Colorado Boulder whose main body of work is on executive function. That is not why he is referenced here, and the site does not source it.
He is here because of a paper published in PLoS ONE in June 2023, with Nathan Carruth as first author and Jason Ramos as second. It is a preregistered replication of Job, Dweck and Walton (2010), the study proposing that ego depletion appears only in people who believe willpower is a limited resource. By 2023 that belief account had become the standard ending for popular retellings of the self-control story, because the resource model it replaced had been dismantled by a series of large multi-laboratory tests and something had to occupy the space.
Carruth, Ramos and Miyake used the original depletion and outcome tasks, with the letter-cancellation materials obtained from the original authors, and a sample of 187 against the original 60.
They found neither the depletion effect nor its moderation by willpower belief.
A single failed replication settles very little, and the team clearly knew it. What gives the paper its weight is the review they ran alongside the experiment. Of thirteen qualifying studies, five reported some supporting evidence and eight did not. The five supportive studies had a median sample of about 96 participants. The eight null studies had a median of about 275. Only one of the five gave clean statistical support for the original claim, and two studies by Singh and Göritz found the moderation running in the opposite direction, with more depletion among people who believed willpower was not limited. A reversed sign in a larger sample is a worse outcome for a theory than a null.
Then the tally that does the real work. Seven of the eight studies that found nothing were preregistered with publicly shared data. One of the five that found something was. That is the replication crisis stated as arithmetic rather than as an argument, and it is the single most useful number in this literature. The team also asked Job's group for the original dataset and did not receive it. Their conclusion is unusually blunt for a journal: the finding "is not a replicable finding that can provide a solid basis for rigorous theoretical development."
Their scope caveat deserves to travel with the result, and usually does not. The critique is confined to the application of willpower belief within the ego-depletion paradigm. Carruth and his colleagues say plainly that willpower mindset remains a useful concept elsewhere in self-control research and that other findings built on it are not implicated by this failure. Anyone quoting the paper as a demolition of mindset research generally is overreading it.
Key papers
One paper of his is sourced on this site. His executive-function work is named but not cited here, and no claim about it is made.
Carruth, N. P., Ramos, J. A., & Miyake, A. (2023), "Does willpower mindset really moderate the ego-depletion effect? A preregistered replication of Job, Dweck, and Walton (2010)," PLoS ONE, 18(6): e0287911. N = 187, preregistered, original materials. Neither the depletion effect nor its moderation appeared. Includes the review of thirteen qualifying studies and the preregistration tally.
The paper it tested: Job, V., Dweck, C. S., & Walton, G. M. (2010), "Ego depletion, is it all in your head? Implicit theories about willpower affect self-regulation," Psychological Science, 21(11), 1686-1693.
Key ideas
The willpower-belief account of ego depletion did not survive a preregistered test with three times the original sample.
The supportive studies in that literature are systematically smaller and systematically less likely to be preregistered than the null ones: seven of eight nulls preregistered with shared data, against one of five positives.
Two studies found the moderation running the opposite way, which is harder on the theory than a null result would be.
The scope caveat is part of the finding. The critique covers the ego-depletion paradigm only, and willpower mindset remains a useful concept elsewhere in self-control research.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
The Bluesky account states his CU Boulder professorship and his self-regulation research, the X account points readers to that same Bluesky handle, and the Scholar profile is verified at colorado.edu
Checked 2026-09-10. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Carruth, N. P., Ramos, J. A., & Miyake, A. (2023), "Does willpower mindset really moderate the ego-depletion effect? A preregistered replication of Job, Dweck, and Walton (2010)," PLoS ONE, 18(6): e0287911. (Quotation and study tally.)
- Job, V., Dweck, C. S., & Walton, G. M. (2010), "Ego depletion, is it all in your head? Implicit theories about willpower affect self-regulation," Psychological Science, 21(11), 1686-1693.