Michael Inzlicht
Michael Inzlicht is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and principal investigator at the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience. With Brandon Schmeichel and Neil Macrae he proposed in 2014 that what looks like depleted self-control is not a resource running out but a shift in what a person has come to value. Effort accumulates, attention and motivation move away from the tasks you have to do and towards the ones you want to do, and nothing is consumed. It is the third account in the ego depletion story, it fits the evidence at least as well as either of its rivals, and almost nobody built anything on it.
Who they are
Inzlicht works at the University of Toronto, where he runs the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience. His name reaches general readers mainly through Nir Eyal's Indistractable, which cites him for the reframing that willpower behaves more like an emotion than like a fuel tank, ebbing and flowing with circumstance and feeling rather than draining down a gauge.
The paper behind that reframing is Inzlicht, Schmeichel and Macrae (2014), published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences under a title that concedes the phenomenon while refusing the explanation: "Why self-control seems (but may not be) limited." Their argument is that the experience people report is real and the mechanism attributed to it is not. Sitting through a long stretch of effortful work does leave you less willing to do more of it. What has changed, on their account, is the relative pull of the available options. The person who abandons the unsolvable puzzle has not run out of anything. They have started valuing something else more.
That reading survives the evidence that killed the strength model. It does not require a finite store, so it is untouched by the failure to find one, and it does not require a belief about willpower, so it is untouched by the failure to replicate that either. It also makes no promises. There is no drink to sell alongside it and no mantra to repeat, which is a reasonable guess at why it stayed in the journals while the other two accounts went into trade books.
Inzlicht is worth reading as a corrective to a particular story about science, the one where a discipline protects its findings to the last. The people who took the strength model apart and the people who proposed what should stand in its place are drawn from the same population of researchers. The correction to ego depletion came from inside the field, not from outside it, which is the fairest thing that can be said about the replication crisis in this corner of psychology.
Key papers
One paper of his is sourced on this site.
Inzlicht, M., Schmeichel, B. J., & Macrae, C. N. (2014), "Why self-control seems (but may not be) limited," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(3), 127-133. Proposes that control failure is a motivated shift in task priorities rather than the exhaustion of a resource.
Key ideas
Control failure as motivated priority switching: as effort accumulates, attention and motivation move from have-to tasks towards want-to tasks. Nothing is consumed.
The account fits the data at least as well as the resource model or the belief model, and unlike both it does not depend on a mechanism that has failed to replicate.
Willpower, in the framing Eyal takes from him, behaves like an emotion rather than like a fuel tank.
It sells nothing, which is part of why it never left the journals.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
His Scholar profile is verified at utoronto.ca and links his own site, and the Bluesky account links that same site while the X account of the matching handle states his Toronto professorship
Checked 2026-09-10. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Inzlicht, M., Schmeichel, B. J., & Macrae, C. N. (2014), "Why self-control seems (but may not be) limited," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(3), 127-133.
- Eyal, N. (2019), Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. (Willpower as an emotion rather than a fuel tank.)