Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
The term 'Ego-Depletion' was first used in research in 1998. But to fully grasp the meaning of ego-depletion, and understand how they came up with this concept we have to first take a trip to the year 1923...
In 1923 Sigmund Freud was the first to descride the ego:
'The part of the psyche that must deal with the reality of the external world by mediating between conflicting inner and outer pressures.'
(Freud, 1923/ 1961a, 1933/1961b)
But Freud's idea about the human psyche contained more than the aspect of the ego …
Freud also described the Id, which is the more primitive and instinctual part of a person and believed to be unconscious and biologically constructed. On the other side he explained about the Superego, which is constructed later in life by morals, norms and values picked up from society.
Picking between 2 options, could result in conflict between the Id and Superego, but it eventually is up to the ego to decide. He seemed to believed that the process of making a decision needed some source of energy.
Then in 1994 Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice came up with a model that proposed that self-control was something that is resourced based. This was the start for something big. Time for some experiments!
(Baumeister et al., 1994)
In 1998 an experiment was conducted by Roy F. Baumeister and 3 colleagues.
Before the experiment they asked the participants to restrain ceveral hours from eating. Then after letting the participants take place in a room with fresh baked cookies, either let them eat the cookies or eat the radishes that were placed next to them.
Than the participants were asked to try to solve a puzzle, that was in fact unsolvable.
The participants that ate the cookies showed greater persistency when trying to complete the puzzle than the participants that had to eat the radishes.
The control group did not eat during the experiment, but only solved the puzzle.
Baumeister et al., 1998
But where did this difference come from?
To explain the notable differences between the two groups, they came up with an explanation: The concept of ego-depletion was born!
'The core idea behind ego-depletion is that the self's acts of volition draw on some limited resource, akin to strength or energy and that, therefore, one act of volition will have a detrimental impact on subsequent volition'
(Baumeister et all, 1998)
To make it clear:
Ego-depletion is all about self-control and willpower. Making use of willpower on a task is asking effort of a limited source of energy in our brains. So when we continue to use willpower we get exhausted - just like the use of a muscle - and in the tasks to come, our ability to control ourselves gets lower.
This video gives some nice daily life examples of ego-depletion, although they use the term decision fatigue the idea here is the same (just watch the first 2 minutes).
After 1998, when Ego Depletion was introduced in the field of social psychology, a lot of researchers started to look into the application of the theory. More and more research was done on the topic and people started to wonder in what fields of science ego-depletion could play a roll.
'For more than a decade, the proposition that self-control relies on a limited resource has been a mainstay of theorizing on self-control that has influenced researchers across psychology sub-disciplines, including social-personality.'
(Carter et al., 2014)
(Govorun & Payne, 2006)
This study mainly focused on the automatic and controlled components (remember this from Freud?) of stereotype-based responses. They wanted to measure if being depleted of willpower has an influence on giving a stereotypical response like: ‘A woman must be the secretary rather than the boss’ or ‘A Black man is likely to be a criminal’.
The results of the study showed that ego-depletion did not have an effect on the automatic component of responses, but did have an effect on the controlled components. Furthermore they concluded that participants who already showed automatic stereotype activation, gave even more stereotypical errors.
(Stucke & Baumeister, 2006)
During this research 3 experiments were executed to find out if it takes a person that has already exercised self-regulation, has an decreased capacity to inhibit aggressive behavior.
Experiment 1: Participants were asked not to eat 3 hours before the experiment. Then they were asked to write an creative end to a story while not eating of the big plate of fresh baked cookies in front of them.
Experiment 2: Participants were asked to concentrate on a particular boring film, while controlling their body to not move or show facial expressions. Before and after the film they were also asked to do some creative assignments.
Experiment 3: This experiment was similar to the second one, bur measured the mood and effort of participants.
After all the experiments the experimenter
made some negative and provoking
comments about the assignment they did.
Notion: The control group in every experiment did not have tasks were they needed to self-regulate (like be creative, not eat the cookies or don't show movement).
The results were: in each experiment the group that had to self-regulate reacted significantly more aggressive when they were asked to evaluated the experimenter. Experiment 3 also showed that this wat not due to differential moods.
(Staller et al., 2018).
In this report researchers wanted to find out what the impact of ego depletion is on police officers’ decision to use force. Police officers in the experimental group got the assignment of the ‘e’ crossing task. After this task, they had to watch a video of a provocative person violating the law and estimate how long it would take for them to use force to resolve this.
It showed that officers that had done the depleting tasks beforehand were using force much earlier than the control group.
(Daley & Howell, 2017)
This report shows that ego-depletion is a complex concept that is truly used in all sorts of fields.
It concludes that marketers nowadays try to use the process of ego-depletion to their interest. It is seen as being unethical because consumers get so depleted that they are not able to make a good trade-off between products or services. They argue that to make this more ethical we need a cross-over between marketing and social scientists.
Researcher wanted to explain the how and why ego-depletion could happen. Why is our willpower limited?
Then researcher came up with the idea that this limited recourse was in fact glucose in your blood. Tests showed that:
‘1. Acts of self-control reduced blood glucose levels,
2. Low levels of blood glucose after an initial self-control task predicted poor performance on a subsequent self-control task, and
3. Initial acts of self-control impaired performance on subsequent self-control tasks, but consuming a glucose drink eliminated these impairments.’
(Gailliot et al., 2007)
More than a decade after ego-depletion was put on the map, criticism started to rise surrounding the theory. More recent studies suggest that the theory as we know it may not be true.
To paint a clear picture of where the concept nowadays stands in science, the next research reports show where this criticism came from and where it is based on.
The publication of Gailliot in 2007 about glucose as a source for self-control (mentioned before), caused some reaction:
In 2010 Kurzban did some research on the effect of glucose on self-control. He reanalyzed the data from the study in 2007 and found out that only some participants showed a drop in their glucose levels after an act of self-control and some even showed an increase. He concluded that there was no relation between glucose level measured in blood and the level of self-control.
(Kurzban, 2010)
Another interesting experiment that conflicted with the earlier findings, was the experiment of Molden et al. in 2012. It showed that glucose can enhance self-control even when you do not actually ingest it. If a participant only rinsed their mouth with a glucose rich drink, so no actual rise of glucose could be measured in the blood, there was a increase in self-control.
(Molden et al., 2012)
In 2010 a meta-analysis of 198 tests was done and it concluded that for the theory of ego-depletion, there was robust evidence and replicable with a significant overall effect size.
(Hagger et al. 2010)
So it seemed that it was pretty clear that the theory was correct, right?
Well not so much, researchers working on an article that revisited the meta-analysis of 2010, thought that publication bias and imprecise small studies could had have a big impact on the results of the study. Because of the bias, not one unpublished study was included in the analysis. When correcting for the previous mentioned errors they found that the depletion effect was basically zero.
(Carter et al., 2014)
Because of all the criticism, a large research project was designed to measure the effects of ego depletion. A large-scale replication report was composed with data from 23 different laboratories conducting a similar experiment. Unfortunately they did not find convincing evidence of the effect of ego-depletion.
(Hagger et al., 2016)
After reading several articles and reports on the subject of ego-depletion, I have come to some personal conclusions on the subject and all the fuzz surrounding it.
I believe it is extremely important that we do not just take this theory as it was interpreted in 1998. Too many questions have been raised since then and it’s only fair that so many have criticized the concept.
At this point in time there is no clear right or wrong in this discussion. The concept certainly has some truthfulness to it. Maybe rephrasing the term ‘ego-depletion’ will help to take away some of the vagueness. But to me the problem lies with how experiments, that try to prove the effect of ego-depletion, are constructed and executed. I do not think that they always capture the complete meaning of self-control in the experiments, in the way that they want and is needed to prove the effect.
Room for improvement is there for correcting the application of these imperfect methods and clearly we need to continue experimenting with this rather vague concept in the future.
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252
Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton, T. F., & Tice, D. M. (1994). Losing control: How and why people fail at self-regulation. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Carter, E. C., & McCullough, M. E. (2014). Publication bias and the limited strength model of self-control: has the evidence for ego depletion been overestimated? Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00823
Daley, K., & Howell, R. (2017). Draining the Will to Make the Sale: The Impermissibility of Marketing by Ego-Depletion. Neuroethics, 11(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-017-9335-6
Freud, S. (1961a). The ego and the id. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 12-66). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1923)
Freud, S. (1961b). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 22, pp. 7 -182). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1933)
Gailliot, M. T., Baumeister, R. F., DeWall, C. N., Maner, J. K., Plant, E. A., Tice, D. M., … Schmeichel, B. J. (2007). Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(2), 325–336. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.2.325
Govorun, O., & Payne, B. K. (2006). Ego—Depletion and Prejudice: Separating Automatic and Controlled Components. Social Cognition, 24(2), 111–136. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2006.24.2.111
Hagger, M. S., Chatzisarantis, N. L. D., Alberts, H., Anggono, C. O., Batailler, C., Birt, A. R., … Zwienenberg, M. (2016). A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 546–573. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616652873
Hagger, Martin S., Wood, C., Stiff, C., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2010). Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(4), 495–525. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019486
Kurzban, R. (2010). Does the Brain Consume Additional Glucose during Self-Control Tasks? Evolutionary Psychology, 8(2), 147470491000800. https://doi.org/10.1177/147470491000800208
Molden, D. C., Hui, C. M., Scholer, A. A., Meier, B. P., Noreen, E. E., D’Agostino, P. R., & Martin, V. (2012). Motivational Versus Metabolic Effects of Carbohydrates on Self-Control. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1137–1144. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612439069
Staller, M. S., Müller, M., Christiansen, P., Zaiser, B., Körner, S., & Cole, J. C. (2018). Ego depletion and the use of force: Investigating the effects of ego depletion on police officers’ intention to use force. Aggressive Behavior, 45(2), 161–168. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21805
Stucke, T. S., & Baumeister, R. F. (2006). Ego depletion and aggressive behavior: Is the inhibition of aggression a limited resource? European Journal of Social Psychology, 36(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.285