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

2019

The conceptualization of self-control capacity as a domain-general limited resource, and the accompanying state of low self-control resource, known as the ego depletion effect, has received considerable attention in social psychology literature. The effect has also been widely publicized in popular media largely due to its elegant simplicity and intuitive appeal. Since its inception (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998; Muraven, Tice, & Baumeister, 1998), the ego depletion effect has been a “hot” topic of research and has stimulated hundreds of laboratory studies to test the effect (Hagger, Wood, Stiff, & Chatzisarantis, 2010).