Ego Depletion-Is the Active Self a Limited Resource-Baumeister et al. (1998).pdf

Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?
Roy E Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne M. Tice
Case Western Reserve University
Choice, active response, self-regulation, and other volition may all draw on mon inner resource.
In Experiment 1, people who forced themselves to eat radishes instead of tempting chocolates
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
subsequent drop in performance of solvable anagrams. In Experiment 4, an initial task requiring
high self-regulation made people more passive (., more prone to favor the passive-response option).
These results suggest that the self's capacity for active volition is limited and that a range of
seemingly different, unrelated acts share mon resource.
Many crucial functions of the self involve volition: making ego depletion, as a way of learning about the self's executive
choices and decisions, taking responsibility, initiating and inhib- function. The core idea behind ego depletion is that the self's
iting behavior, and making plans of action and carrying out acts of volition draw on some limited resource, akin to strength
those plans. The self exerts control over itself and over the or energy and that, therefore, one act of volition will have a
external world. To be sure, not all human behavior involves detrimental impact on subsequent volition. We sought to show
planful or deliberate control by the self, and, in fact, recent work that a preliminary act of self-control in the form of resisting
has shown that a great deal of human behavior is influenced by temptation (Experiment 1 ) or a preliminary act of choice and
automatic or nonconscious processes (see Bargh, 1994, 1997). responsibility (