Kathleen Vohs

Who they are

Vohs spent years inside the research programme she later put to the test. She worked with Baumeister on the strength model of self-control, the account holding that acts of restraint draw down a common limited resource. That history is the context for the 2021 paper rather than a complication of it. The people best placed to design a fair test of a paradigm are usually the ones who have run it, and the objection that a critic did not understand the protocol is not available here.

The study itself was built to be paradigmatic. Thirty-six laboratories, a preregistered protocol, and 3,531 participants, which is more than fifty times the sample of the 1998 experiment that started the literature. It returned d = 0.06. The confirmatory Bayesian analysis found the data four times more likely under the null than under the depletion hypothesis, which is a statement about the weight of evidence rather than a threshold being missed.

Baumeister's response is on the record and belongs on this page. In 2022 he and Dianne Tice published a methodological objection concerning the sample used in the analysis; the replication report sets out the method in full, and both positions are on the record. That objection is not resolved here, and it does not stand alone: the same year as her study, a 12-laboratory replication led by Dang and colleagues found a small but statistically significant effect at d = 0.10. Set against Martin Hagger's 2016 result of d = 0.04, the three preregistered multi-laboratory tests put the effect somewhere between zero and 0.16, on more than 7,000 participants between them. Against a starting estimate of 0.62.

She sits on both sides of the ledger in the wider replication story, and the page says so. Vohs is also an author on the money-priming work, another line of research that has failed to replicate. Being right about one paradigm does not confer general authority over the others, and this site treats her 2021 result as strong because of how it was run, not because of who ran it.

Key papers

The site sources one paper of hers directly. Her earlier collaborations on the strength model and her money-priming work are referenced above only to the extent the vault verifies them, and no claim is made here about the rest of her output.

Vohs, K. D., Schmeichel, B. J., Lohmann, S., et al. (2021), "A multisite preregistered paradigmatic test of the ego-depletion effect," Psychological Science, 32(10), 1566-1581. Thirty-six laboratories, N = 3,531, d = 0.06, with a confirmatory Bayesian analysis finding the data four times more likely under the null. The largest test the strength model has faced.

Key ideas

A preregistered multi-site design is the strongest available instrument for settling whether a laboratory effect is real, because it removes the publication filter before the data are collected rather than correcting for it afterwards.

A Bayes factor favouring the null by four to one says the evidence points away from the effect, which is a different and stronger claim than a result failing to reach significance.

Testing a paradigm you helped build removes the standard defence that the replicators did not understand the protocol.

Exclusion criteria are where a preregistered test can still be contested. Baumeister's objection is that removing roughly a third of the sample changed the result, and it has not been settled.

Being on the right side of one replication does not make a researcher a reliable source across the board. Vohs is also an author on money priming, which did not replicate.

Concepts on this site

Ego Depletion

The Replication Crisis

Find them elsewhere

Scholar profile is verified at umn.edu and the LinkedIn profile states her professorship at the Carlson School, matching the faculty page. No X or Bluesky confirmed

Checked 2026-09-10. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.

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