The case of ego depletion. Comments from readers knowledgeable about this literature?
I’ve looked only quickly at the linked piece, but I did notice a factual mistake in point 5. Point 5…
3 responses to “Another replication problem in psychology?”
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I would want to read the paper in question — which does not seem to be available anywhere online — before discussing what conclusions can be drawn from it. But there is a meta-analysis of the ego-depletion literature that was published last year, and is also mentioned in this Slate piece, that raises some serious questions: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26076043
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Carter recently gave a presentation at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute where he reiterated and extended some of the findings published in the piece John linked to. I think the ego depletion literature is suspect not just because of Carter's work, but also because there seem to be better explanations of the limits of willpower than Baumeister's theory. For instance, Jonathan Cohen (Princeton University), explains that limitations on willpower are linked to the neural mechanisms involved in cognitive control. Roughly, the limits on willpower stem from the way in which the brain learns to represent and execute the tasks utilized in control-demanding behavior. Cohen's lab just got a massive grant ($10.02 mil) to study this dimension of cognitive control. My guess is that within five years, we'll have replaced the ego depletion theory with a more computationally precise theory (whether one from Cohen's lab or from somewhere else).
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This 2014 Social and Personality Psychology Compass piece is a good overview of the problems with the limited resource model, and of two main alternative models:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.12139/abstract
Robert Kurzban, one of the researchers behind one of the above alternative models (the opportunity cost model) and a critic of the limited resource model for many years:
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25411
Michael Inzlicht and colleagues on their alternative (process) model:
http://michaelinzlicht.com/publications/articles-chapters/
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