Ego Depletion Reduces Attention Control: Evidence From Two High-Powered Preregistered Experiments

Abstract

Two preregistered experiments with over 1000 participants in total found evidence of an ego depletion effect on attention control. Participants who exercised self-control on a writing task went on to make more errors on Stroop tasks (Experiment 1) and the Attention Network Test (Experiment 2) compared to participants who did not exercise self-control on the initial writing task. The depletion effect on response times was non-significant. A mini meta-analysis of the two experiments found a small (d = 0.20) but significant increase in error rates in the controlled writing condition, thereby providing evidence of poorer attention control under ego depletion.These results, which emerged from preregistered experiments in large samples of participants, represent some of the most rigorous evidence yet of the ego depletion effect.

Depletion manipulations decrease openness to dissent via increased anger

“…To avoid such practices, recently published studies of ego depletion have often been pre-registered (e.g., Alquist et al, 2018;Garrison, Finley, & Schmeichel, 2018) or highly transparent (e.g., Francis, Milyavskaya, Lin, & Inzlicht, 2018). To address the weaknesses of traditional depletion manipulations with a short duration or weak intensity (e.g., Letter 'e' task; Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998), recent research has also used different manipulation tasks (e.g., Blain, Hollard, & Pessiglione, 2016;Sj astad & Baumeister, 2018).…”

Time to Set a New Research Agenda for Ego Depletion and Self-Control

“…Similarly, studies that employed other depleting tasks also yielded results from which no definitive conclusion could be drawn, with some studies reporting substantive, non-zero effects (Bayer & Osher, 2018;Dang, Liu, Liu, & Mao, 2017;Garrison, Finley, & Schmeichel, 2019) while others reporting effects that were no different from zero (Etherton, Osborne, Stephenson, Grace, Jones, & De Nadai, 2018;Lurquin et al, 2016;Singh & Göritz, 2018).…”

Lead us not into temptation: The seven deadly sins as a taxonomy of temptations

“…Concerns include the fact that depletion research often involves small samples, that it likely suffers from publication bias, and that it sometimes fails to produce the expected effect (for a summary of criticisms, see Friese, Loschelder, Gieseler, Frankenbach, & Inzlicht, ). For example, a meta‐analysis of 116 studies found no evidence of a depletion effect (Carter, Kofler, Forster, & McCullough, ), but critics have argued the correction techniques used in this analysis were flawed (Garrison, Finley, & Schmeichel, ). Similarly, a high‐powered replication study conducted across multiple labs failed to find the effect (Hagger & Chatzisarantis, ); however, these studies have been criticized for employing an invalid self‐control manipulation (Baumeister & Vohs, ).…”

“…Similarly, a high‐powered replication study conducted across multiple labs failed to find the effect (Hagger & Chatzisarantis, ); however, these studies have been criticized for employing an invalid self‐control manipulation (Baumeister & Vohs, ). More recent replication attempts using large (1,000+) samples and pre‐registered methods found evidence that prior exertion did have a small but significant impact on subsequent self‐control performance (Garrison et al, ; Wagenmakers & Gronau, ).…”