6533b81ffe1ef96bd1278533
RESEARCH PRODUCT
false
subject
Ego depletionMultidisciplinaryOperationalizationbusiness.industrymedia_common.quotation_subject05 social sciences050109 social psychologySelf-control050105 experimental psychologyTask (project management)Test (assessment)Id ego and super-egoMedicine0501 psychology and cognitive sciencesbusinessSet (psychology)Social psychologyGoal settingmedia_commondescription
Research on ego depletion aims at explaining self-control failures in daily life. Both resource models and motivational accounts have been proposed for explanation. The aim of the present research was to test the different assumptions in two dual-task experiments where we operationalized ego depletion as a performance deviation from a self-set goal. In two experiments, we found evidence for this deviation contradicting motivational accounts of ego depletion: Participants experiencing ego depletion set themselves a stricter instead of a more lenient goal than controls, in that they chose to eat less cookies or wanted to perform better. Moreover, only participants without an initial self-control task could adhere to their self-set goal, whereas participants in the ego depletion condition in both experiments could not follow through with their more ambitious intentions. Taken together, our findings demonstrate the importance of goals in ego depletion research.
| year | journal | country | edition | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-06-09 | PLOS ONE |