Willpower

Research

Ego Depletion

• HO Module 3. Quotes Job, Dweck & Walton 2010
  • Reference: Job, V., Dweck, C. S., & Walton, G. M. (2010). Ego depletion-is it all in your head? implicit theories about willpower affect self-regulation. Psychological Science, 21(11), 1686–1693. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610384745
  • Everything Is Crumbling - An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have just been debunked. How can so many scientists have been so wrong? Slate.
  • @Florin: Some of Baumeister's counter-critics are valid and have been acknowledged elsewhere ( "[...] most studies adopted very brief depletion manipulations that were generally less than 10 min.. Participants’ responses to these weak manipulations could vary to a great extent." source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1948550619887702 )
  • @Florin: Recent replications support the effect: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1948550619887702  and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797620904990, reporting either small (first replication) or stronger results (second replication), in favor of the ego depletion effect.

• See https://www.apa.org/topics/willpower
  • "Willpower may also be made less vulnerable to being depleted in the first place. Researchers who study self-control often describe it as being like a muscle that gets fatigued with heavy use. But there is another aspect to the muscle analogy, they say. While muscles become exhausted by exercise in the short term, they are strengthened by regular exercise in the long term. Similarly, regularly exerting self-control may improve willpower strength... Others have also found that flexing your willpower muscles can strengthen self-control over time. Australian scientists Megan Oaten, PhD, and Ken Cheng, PhD, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, assigned volunteers to a two-month program of physical exercise—a routine that required willpower. At the end of two months, participants who had stuck with the program did better on a lab measure of self-control than did participants who were not assigned to the exercise regimen. That’s not all. The subjects also reported smoking less and drinking less alcohol, eating healthier food, monitoring their spending more carefully, and improving their study habits. Regularly exercising their willpower with physical exercise, it seemed, led to better willpower in nearly all areas of their lives."
• Battle of the Generation Ch. 28 - Why we need willpower.