Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource?

“…The duration of primary and secondary tasks was varied (2, 4, 8, or 16 minutes per task), in order to assess the effect of prolonging self-control exertion on performance in a secondary self-control task. Contrary to the proposition of the strength model of self-control 3 , performance did neither suffer in response to prior self-control exertion, nor as a function of task duration. If anything, results even point to the contrary: performance tended to improve when the primary self-control task was of longer duration.…”

“…However, it can be assumed that working on mathematical problems is part of the daily routine for tenth graders; therefore, participants might have considered it worthwhile to practice their mathematical skills by investing time and effort on solving the items over the course of testing, regardless of whether they previously had to exert self-control or not. Thus, contrary to the findings (e.g., [32, 33]) that ego depletion undermines the persistence to work on ‘artificial’ tasks (e.g., unsolvable anagrams), our results raise the question of whether ego depletion negatively affects individuals’ motivation to work on ecologically valid tasks that require self-control and with which they are also confronted in their everyday life. Our results suggest that this is not the case, but further research is required to investigate the effects of ego depletion on students’ achievement motivation in school or in academic contexts.…”

“…Furthermore, in the present studies, we only used cognitive tasks as manipulations and measures of ego-depletion. Moreover, there was no significant main effect of ego-depletion condition on task performance in Study 3, which is in contrast to previously found ego-depleting effects of the e-erasing task on secondary self-control tasks (e.g., Baumeister et al, 1998; Tice et al, 2007). Future studies on depletion sensitivity should include other (non-cognitive) types of manipulations and measures of ego-depletion, such as the handgrip task or an emotion-regulation task (Muraven et al, 1998).…”