Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource?
This is the paper that introduced ego depletion. Four experiments shared one design: do something requiring self-control, then see how well self-control works afterwards. People made to eat radishes while smelling fresh chocolate biscuits gave up sooner on unsolvable puzzles. People making a meaningful choice to act against their own attitude showed the same drop in persistence. People suppressing emotion did worse on solvable anagrams. People completing a task requiring heavy self-regulation became more passive in their subsequent choices. The conclusion drawn was that choosing, resisting, regulating emotion and persisting all draw on one limited inner resource, which is depleted by use. It became one of the most influential ideas in psychology and the foundation of a large literature. One fact must sit on this page: large pre-registered multi-laboratory replications have failed to find the effect, and this vault cites those alongside.
This is the paper that introduced ego depletion. Four experiments shared one design: do something requiring self-control, then see how well self-control works afterwards. People made to eat radishes while smelling fresh chocolate biscuits gave up sooner on unsolvable puzzles. People making a meaningful choice to act against their own attitude showed the same drop in persistence. People suppressing emotion did worse on solvable anagrams. People completing a task requiring heavy self-regulation became more passive in their subsequent choices. The conclusion drawn was that choosing, resisting, regulating emotion and persisting all draw on one limited inner resource, which is depleted by use. It became one of the most influential ideas in psychology and the foundation of a large literature. One fact must sit on this page: large pre-registered multi-laboratory replications have failed to find the effect, and this vault cites those alongside.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
N = 67; persistence 8.35 / 18.90 / 19.40 minutes.
Where we use it
- Willpower Is Not a Fuel Tank, Why We Act
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252
DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252