Ego Depletion Is the Active Self a Limited Resource.docx

1、Ego Depletion Is the Active Self a Limited ResourceEgo Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?AbstractChoice, active response, self-regulation, and other volition may all draw on a common inner resource. In Experiment 1, people who forced themselves to eat radishes instead of tempting choc

2、olates subsequently quit faster on unsolvable puzzles than people who had not had to exert self-control over eating. In Experiment 2, making a meaningful personal choice to perform attitude-relevant behavior caused a similar decrement in persistence. In Experiment 3, suppressing emotion led to a sub

3、sequent drop in performance of solvable anagrams. In Experiment 4, an initial task requiring high self-regulation made people more passive (i.e., more prone to favor the passive-response option). These results suggest that the selfs capacity for active volition is limited and that a range of seeming

4、ly different, unrelated acts share a common resource.Many crucial functions of the self involve volition: making choices and decisions, taking responsibility, initiating and inhibiting behavior, and making plans of action and carrying out those plans. The self exerts control over itself and over the

5、 external world. To be sure, not all human behavior involves planful or deliberate control by the self, and, in fact, recent work has shown that a great deal of human behavior is influenced by automatic or nonconscious processes (see Bargh, 1994, 1997). But undoubtedly some portion involves delibera

6、te, conscious, controlled responses by the self, and that portion may be disproportionately important to the long-term health, happiness, and success of the individual. Even if it were shown that 95% of behavior consisted of lawful, predictable responses to situational stimuli by automatic processes

7、, psychology could not afford to ignore the remaining 5%. As an analogy, cars are probably driven straight ahead at least 95% of the time, but ignoring the other 5% (such as by building cars without steering wheels) would seriously compromise the cars ability to reach most destinations. By the same

8、token, the relatively few active, controlling choices by the self greatly increase the selfs chances of achieving its goals. And if those few “steering” choices by the self are important, then so is whatever internal structure of the self is responsible for it.In the present investigation we were co

9、ncerned with this controlling aspect of the self. Specifically, we tested hypotheses of ego depletion, as a way of learning about the selfs executive function. The core idea behind ego depletion is that the selfs acts of volition draw on some limited resource, akin to strength or energy and that, th

10、erefore, one act of volition will have a detrimental impact on subsequent volition. We sought to show that a preliminary act of self-control in the form of resisting temptation (Experiment 1) or a preliminary act of choice and responsibility (Experiment 2) would undermine self-regulation in a subseq

11、uent, unrelated domain, namely persistence at a difficult and frustrating task. We then sought to verify that the effects of ego depletion are indeed maladaptive and detrimental to performance (Experiment 3). Last, we undertook to show that ego depletion resulting from acts of self-control would int

12、erfere with subsequent decision making by making people more passive (Experiment 4).Our research strategy was to look at effects that would carry over across wide gaps of seeming irrelevance. If resisting the temptation to eat chocolate can leave a person prone to give up faster on a difficult, frus

13、trating puzzle, that would suggest that those two very different acts of self-control draw on the same limited resource. And if making a choice about whether to make a speech contrary to ones opinions were to have the same effect, it would suggest that that very same resource is also the one used in

14、 general for deliberate, responsible decision making. That resource would presumably be one of the most important features of the self.Executive FunctionThe term agency has been used by various writers to refer to the selfs exertion of volition, but this term has misleading connotations: An agent is

15、 quintessentially someone who acts on behalf of someone else, whereas the phenomenon under discussion involves the self acting autonomously on its own behalf. The term executive function has been used in various contexts to refer to this aspect of self and hence may be preferable (e.g., Epstein, 197

16、3; see Baumeister, 1998). Meanwhile, we use the term ego depletion to refer to a temporary reduction in the selfs capacity or willingness to engage in volitional action (including controlling the environment, controlling the self, making choices, and initiating action) caused by prior exercise of vo

17、lition.The psychological theory that volition is one of the selfs crucial functions can be traced back at least to Freud (1923/1961a, 1933/1961b), who described the ego as the part of the psyche that must deal with the reality of the external world by mediating between conflicting inner and outer pr

18、essures. In his scheme, for example, a Victorian gentleman standing on the street might feel urged by his id to head for the brothel and by his superego to go to church, but it is ultimately left up to his ego to start his feet walking in one direction or the other. Freud also seems to have believed

19、 that the ego needed to use some energy in making such a decision.Recent research has convincingly illuminated the selfs nearly relentless quest for control (Brehm, 1966; Burger, 1989; DeCharms, 1968; Deci & Ryan, 1991, 1995; Langer, 1975; Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982; Taylor, 1983, 1989; White,

20、1959). It is also known that when the self feels highly responsible (accountable) for its actions, its cognitive and behavioral processes change (Cooper & Scher, 1994; Linder, Cooper, & Jones, 1967; Tetlock, 1983, 1985; Tetlock & Boettger, 1989). Active responses also have more powerful effects on t

21、he self and its subsequent responses than do passive ones (Allison & Messick, 1988; Cioffi & Garner, 1996; Fazio, Sherman, & Herr, 1982). The processes by which the self monitors itself in order to approach standards of desired behavior have also been studied (Carver & Scheier, 1981; Duval & Wicklun

22、d, 1972; Wegner, 1994; Wegner & Pennebaker, 1993). Despite these efforts, it is hard to dispute that understanding of the executive function remains far more vague and rudimentary than other aspects of self-theory. Researchers investigating cognitive representations of self have made enormous progre

23、ss in recent decades (for reviews, see Banaji & Prentice, 1994; Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Likewise, there has been considerable progress on interpersonal aspects of selfhood (e.g., Leary, 1995; Leary & Kowalski, 1990; Schlenker, 1980; Tesser, 1988). In comparison, understanding of the selfs executive f

24、unction lags behind at a fairly primitive level.Ego DepletionThe notion that volition depends on the selfs expenditure of some limited resource was anticipated by Freud (1923/1961a, 1933/1961b). He thought the ego needed to have some form of energy to accomplish its tasks and to resist the energetic

25、 promptings of id and superego. Freud was fond of the analogy of horse and rider, because as he said the rider (analogous to the ego) is generally in charge of steering but is sometimes unable to prevent the horse from going where it wants to go. Freud was rather vague and inconsistent about where t

26、he egos energy came from, but he recognized the conceptual value of postulating that the ego operated on an energy model.Several modern research findings suggest that some form of energy or strength may be involved in acts of volition. Most of these have been concerned with self-regulation. Indeed,

27、Mischel (1996) has recently proposed that the colloquial notion of willpower be revived for self-regulation theory, and a literature review by Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice (1994) concluded that much evidence about self-regulatory failure fits a model of strength depletion.An important early stud

28、y by Glass, Singer, and Friedman (1969) found that participants exposed to unpredictable noise stress subsequently showed decrements in frustration tolerance, as measured by persistence on unsolvable problems.1 Glass et al. concluded that adapting to unpredictable stress involves a “psychic cost,” w

29、hich implies an expenditure or depletion of some valuable resource. They left the nature of this resource to future research, which has not made much further progress.Additional evidence for a strength model was provided by Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister (1998), whose research strategy influenced the

30、 present investigation. Muraven et al. sought to show that consecutive exertions of self-regulation were characterized by deteriorating performance, even though the exertions involved seemingly unrelated spheres. In one study, they showed that trying not to think about a white bear (a thought-contro

31、l task borrowed from Wegner, 1989; Wegner, Schneider, Carter, & White, 1987) caused people to give up more quickly on a subsequent anagram task. In another study, an affect-regulation exercise caused subsequent decrements in endurance at squeezing a handgrip. These findings suggest that exertions of

32、 self-control do carry a psychic cost and deplete some scarce resource.To integrate these scattered findings and implications, we suggest the following. One important part of the self is a limited resource that is used for all acts of volition, such as controlled (as opposed to automatic) processing

33、, active (as opposed to passive) choice, initiating behavior, and overriding responses. Because much of self-regulation involves resisting temptation and hence overriding motivated responses, this self-resource must be able to affect behavior in the same fashion that motivation does. Motivations can be strong or weak, and stronger impulses are presumabl