Ego depletion

Year: 1998 - 2024

The metaphor of the battery is often used to describe our mental energy: we use our willpower to make conscious decisions and resist temptations, but when we get tired and the ‘battery’ is ‘drained’, we become less efficient in controlling ourselves and making decisions.

Around the turn of the century, psychological research showed support for this intuitively appealing idea. Hundreds of studies pointed out that by increasing the cognitive load through doing quizzes and tests, human willpower decreases. The effect is known as ego depletion, and became a widely known phenomenon.

But in the last decade, large scale replications of these studies did not get the same results, and the existence of ego depletion turned into a contested question.

The same happened to other psychological concepts, sending the field, along with several other social sciences, into a crisis. One of the causes of this so-called ‘replication crisis’ is the bias in how research is published. Journals have been mostly interested in publishing positive findings, incentivizing researchers to aim at positive results and leave negative findings unpublished. The result: psychological effects and theories that appear to be confirmed, might actually lack robust support.

In recent years, the field has slowly improved. Researchers have refined their methodology, and journals started requesting researchers to preregister their studies, which prevents negative findings from remaining unpublished. In addition, researchers began researching the ongoing issue, in a field called meta-science, and several failure journals now dedicate themselves to publishing negative results.

Hopefully researchers will not suffer ego depletion and can summon enough willpower to fix this crisis.

For more, see this article by Vox, and this recent overview of improvements of the field in Nature.