Ego Depletion and Present Bias

Study Context

Does ego depletion cause individuals to exhibit greater present bias in choice allocations? Ego depletion is the idea that self-control is a limited resource, and that frequent exertion of self-control will deplete the individual of this resource and make them more likely to give in to temptation on subsequent self-control tasks. (Baumeister et al. 2007 provides a good overview of the related literature).

Study Design

An experimental design had subjects allocate Greek transcription tasks across two separate periods, but it manipulated subjects’ ego depletion before they made their choice. It did this by employing a well-known ego-depletion task where subjects must cross out certain letters of a text (Baumeister et al. 1998). The rule dictating which letters must be crossed out switches midway through the task, meaning that subjects who habituated to the original rule must exert self-control and override their initial response to follow the second rule. This task has been commonly used in the ego depletion literature.

Results and Policy Lessons

During initial pilot studies, the researcher had difficulty achieving the ego depletion manipulation that was necessary to answer the (revised) research question: does ego depletion cause individuals to exhibit greater present bias in choice allocations? In the interim, further research has revealed that ego depletion may  not be as  robust a psychological phenomenon as previously thought. Two earlier papers had introduced some doubt as to its validity (Carter et al. 2015 and Hagger et al. 2016). In response, researchers carried out a very large, pre-registered replication study (Vohs et al. 2021, “A Multisite Preregistered Paradigmatic Test of the Ego-Depletion Effect”), involving thirty-six laboratories. The preregistered analyses showed no evidence of the depletion effect which suggests that depletion is not as reliable or robust as previously assumed.