Willpower depletion and framing effects

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Discussion papers of the WZB serve to disseminate the research results of work in progress prior to publication to encourage the exchange of ideas and academic debate. Inclusion of a paper in the discussion paper series does not constitute publication and should not limit publication in any other venue. The discussion papers published by the WZB represent the views of the respective author(s) and not of the institute as a whole. We investigate whether depleting people's cognitive resources (or 'willpower') affects the degree to which they are susceptible to framing effects. Recent research in social psychology and economics has suggested that willpower is a resource that can be temporarily depleted and that a depleted level of willpower is associated with self-control problems in a variety of contexts. In this study, we extend the willpower depletion paradigm to framing effects and argue that willpower depletion should increase framing effects. To test this we designed two experiments in which we depleted participants' willpower and subsequently had them take part in a series of tasks, including a framed prisoner's dilemma, an attraction effect task, a compromise effect task, and an anchoring task. However, we find no evidence that framing effects were indeed more prevalent in willpower-depleted participants than in controls. Terms of use: Documents in

Decision-environment effects on intertemporal financial choices: How relevant are resource-depletion models?

“…Indeed, by construction the Stroop task repeatedly draws subjects' attention to the fact that the obvious answer is not always the correct one. This is consistent with the recent studies of Burger et al (2011) andde Haan andvan Veldhuizen (2015) who found that performing the Stroop task does not increase behavioral biases in subsequent tasks. 35 Providing fasted subjects with a sweet-tasting drink, regardless of its sugar content appears to have had a similar effect.…”

“…For example, Burger et al (2011) find that the Stroop task reduces procrastination and leads to a higher completion rate. de Haan and van Veldhuizen (2015) find no larger attraction effects and anchoring effects for subjects who had first to perform the Stroop task. Together, all these results suggest that economic decisions may respond to decision environments in quite complex ways, which may differ from those suggested by resource-based models.…”

Rethinking spontaneous giving: Extreme time pressure and ego-depletion favor self-regarding reactions

“…A few recent studies have investigated the role of ego-depletion on numerous games involving cooperative behavior. However, these studies have been conducted either on iterated games 55 56 , or on games where cooperating with one player implies competing with a third player 57 . To the best of our knowledge, no study has been conducted on one-shot anonymous Prisoner’s Dilemma games.…”

The dual-process approach to human sociality: Meta-analytic evidence for a theory of internalized heuristics for self-preservation

“…Among the remaining studies, only three of them used ego-depletion (Capraro & Cococcioni, 2016), one of them used foreign language (Urbin et al 2016), while none of them used cognitive load. The remaining studies included in the meta-analysis either used the trust game, or they were obtained as last-rounds or average-across-rounds of iterated games (Duffy & Smith, 2014;Døssing, Piovesan, & Wengström, 2017, de Haan & van Veldhuizen, 2015Osgood & Muraven, 2015), or regarded situations in which cooperating with one player implies competing with a third party (De Dreu et al 2015). A similar asymmetry affects also the other two meta-analyses (Kvarven et al, 2019;Rand, 2019), which essentially differs from the original one primarily in the 21 time-pressure studies included in the preregistered replication by Bouwmeester et al (2017).…”