12 Facts About Ego depletion

Ego depletion is the idea that self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up.

Ego depletion is therefore a critical topic in experimental psychology, specifically social psychology, because it is a mechanism that contributes to the understanding of the processes of human self-control.

Multiple experiments have connected self-control depletion to reduced blood glucose, and suggested that self-control performance could be replenished by consuming glucose.

The majority of ego depletion studies have been carried out on university students, which raises concerns about how generalizable the results really are.

Ego depletion has been implicated in guilt and prosocial behavior.

Ego depletion has been shown to hinder the ability to engage in such reflection, thereby making it difficult to experience guilt.

The results of this study indicated that people who experienced ego depletion felt less guilty and donated less money than non-depleted people.

Ultimately, when participants were led to believe their level of Ego depletion was lower than their true state of Ego depletion, they performed much worse on a difficult working memory task.

Ego depletion has been shown to have some rather debilitating consequences, most notably self-regulation impairments.

An experiment performed by Kathleen Vohs and Todd Heatherton demonstrated how ego depletion is particularly relevant when considering chronic dieters compared to non-dieters.

In two studies there was no evidence that the ego depletion group performed worse in the first trials of the second task.

Many ego depletion studies have shown that mood is not relevant to the results.