Ego Depletion and Self Control

Abstract

Recent investigations have shown that exerting self control reduces the ability to regulate behaviour in subsequent self control tasks. A state of depleted self control resources is known as ‘ego depletion’ and the purpose of this study was to see how our capacity to inhibit urges can be affected by ego depletion. This study was also done to test the effects of beliefs about self control on subsequent performance in self control tasks. Participants’ performance on the Stroop task and phonemic fluency task and subjective feelings of tiredness were assessed before and after an ego depletion task, one group was primed to believe that self control resources are limited whereas the other group was primed to believe they were unlimited. Results showed significant differences in performance for the Stroop task, phonemic task and tiredness levels and significant differences in performance under the two conditions. These results support the notion that subsequent performance in self control tasks will be hindered and priming participants will have an effect on the performance in following tasks, however, other explanations for these effects are also discussed.

Introduction

The human ability for self control has been much more widespread than any other animal; this suggests that the evolutionary pressures that guided the selection of traits that make up human nature must have found self control to be a powerful and imperative skill for survival, with many functions (Baumeister, 2005, as cited in Gailliot et al., 2007). Self control is a central function of the self and an important key to success in life. Self control has attracted increasing attention from psychologists because understanding it will allow us to understand the nature and function of the self and self control also has many practical implications (Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). A lot of recent studies have focused on the strength model (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998)....