This is an excellent post by Rob, the OG of ego depletion critics. It was through reading and reviewing his eventual 2010 paper (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22947794/) that I became convinced that the theory behind ego depletion (the resource model) was not tenable and needed to be replaced. I worked quickly to do that, with paper in 2012 ad 2014 calling out inconsistencies in the resource model and then proposing something better. In 2013 Kurzban wrote an incredible paper (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3856320/) that I did not fully appreciate at the time, but in my opinion it reignited the field’s fascination with effort, something that continues to this day.
But…
I disagree with Rob’s assessment here about the importance of theory in the eventual unraveling of ego depletion. My case is simple: Good theory or bad theory, you need some facts on the ground that need explaining first. Without some invariant observation out there in the world, there is nothing to explain. For example, even if I have a stupid theory of why cars stop at red lights (the color red stresses people, makes them think of death, who then engage in braking as a way to cope with this death anxiety), the fact that cars stop at red lights doesn’t change. Similarly, if I have a correct theory of self-control (it involves computations), it won’t mean that 5 minutes of slightly boring copy editing will mean I will over-indulge on ice cream minutes later.
Thanks for the kind words! I agree that you need facts on the ground and I generally see the justice of your position. To some extent, there’s no right answer: theory and evidence are both crucial to knowledge and understanding. I put more weight on theory, and that might be a matter of taste, experience, bias, and so on. I guess in this case it’s hard because I imagine there are some people who continue to have faith in empirical facts which you and I both agree are probably wrong, and the people who still believe those facts do so in virtue, at least in part, of hanging on to bad theory. But, yes, I take the point and I appreciate the comment!
This is a tangent, but wait -- aren't domesticated bananas (what most people think of when you say "banana") _very_ different than wild bananas both in size and shape, precisely because of selective breeding by humans? I can imagine a similar, plausible story for domesticated horses: perhaps not their overall shape, but the details of their temperament, shyness, etc., have surely been subject to strong selection by human breeders. No? Anyway, I agree with your point about the theory of evolution being useful because it constrains and regularizes the class of hypotheses in biology, but your specific illustrations, paraphrasable as "surely bananas and horses are not as they are to please humans," fall flat given the fact of prolonged, deliberate selective breeding of those things by humans.
I agree that for those species that have been artificially selected, as opposed to naturally selected, we should expect those species to have traits good for us (people), rather than for them. No argument there. It would have been better for me to indicate that I intended to exclude species that have been artificially selected. Fair.
So I just read through the Beumeister et al paper and to the layperson atleast, they appear to be able to marshall quite a lot of evidence for ego depletion. Now I know enough to know that you can't just tally up the number of studies and then say "ha! see,...I win!" but many of them look - again, to the layperson - to be reasonably well designed.
They have evidence for the usefulness of the concept in multiple real life situations (sports, workplace, etc) and they say critics focus on the failures to replicate and ignore the success stories.
If I hadn't read yours and Dr Inzlicht article, I'm pretty sure I would've been left thinking that actually, ego depletion is very solid and the criticisms haven't done enough to debunk the concept.
Yes, I agree that it can look confusing. My view is that this is a more general problem about science, at this point. It can be extremely hard to determine who is in the right. This problem is exacerbated by the entry of politics into science, which has undermined trust. But the problem is not limited to that because scholars win to the extent they can persuade others they are correct. Just a few points. First, I would say that the meta-analyses and the enormous replication effort constitutes the most important evidence. Those efforts help to arbitrate the overall quality of the evidence. Second, I would be cautious about claims regarding the usefulness of the concept. It can be true that people’s ability to persist over time on certain tasks declines and, at the same time, that the resource explanation on offer is incorrect. So the issue isn’t exactly whether or not the ideas are useful, it’s whether they are useful compared to other explanations. Overall, though, I take your point. My view is the one I put in the “Critics, Clowns, and Helpful Vulcans” post. You can get famous in science by being wrong and doing good marketing. That’s just not helpful to other people.
I love the irony that ego depletion theory is being kept alive by a fragile ego.
And my brain runs better on fat than glucose.
Have you read about what Robert Epstein is setting out to prove? I believe he's correct. I've heard several artists say "I dont create anything, Im just an antenna" or a conduit.
If I’ve understood you correctly, I’m not sure if I agree with the overall point. It seems like sometimes there can be paradigm shifts of existing theory that wouldn’t be explored if everyone had to stick to existing theories. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 500 years, science is guided by a more nuanced form of evolution theory that may generate different hypotheses than the current form of evolution theory
Thanks for the comment, and of course you're welcome to disagree! But I'm not sure we disagree. Towards the end of the piece, I wrote, "Sure, sometimes it makes sense to publish papers that present anomalous findings. Data that don’t fit with existing explanations can stimulate additional theory," linking to an entry for Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." So in that sense, I agree. I would just say there's anomalies and there's anomalies, and a task of a scholar/editor is to try to discern the difference.
Yea I don’t think the disagreement is significant haha. I think the crux of the disagreement might boil down to how much a culture of expecting new data to be anchored to current explanations (no matter whether the data validates or falsifies the explanation) might decrease the proposal of new good explanations. Intuitionally, I feel like once you have operated within the current paradigm, there are assumptions that then become really difficult to shed later. Early stage scientists seem uniquely positioned here to not have those assumptions, and propose alternative paradigms that may be at least interesting to think about. I think having a culture of having to anchor data to current explanations might lose out on the benefits of a clean slate. I’m not sure if this argument is as true for later stage scientists though. Also not sure whether this is equally true in different scientific disciplines. I also say this as an early stage scientist and am therefore very biased in thinking this haha
I found this whole argument fascinating - even though I admit I didn’t understand all of it. For example, when you give the example of a slow computer and say the explanation cannot be based on resources (electricity), but shouldbe based on some computational aspect ( the functioning of the chip) : isn’t RAM/working memory a “resource” as well?
Yes, I think it makes sense to think of those as "resources." But they are not resources that run out, as in glucose, or water in a reservoir. They are computational resources that can be deployed in some limited fashion per unit time. This distinction is crucial for the claim I am making about the nature of the cause of task performance reductions.
"the field has resisted with all of its willpower the idea that explanations need to be disciplined by the evolutionary approach"
I see multiples debates about validity of evolutionary psychology/darwins evolutionary theory, what is your reasoning behind emphasizing its importance?
The best account of why an evolutionary analysis is required, rather than optional, is still, in my opinion, The Psychological Foundations of Culture in The Adapted Mind. We tried to lay out our assumptions here on this Substack in the post called Living Fossils Overview. That short piece has some useful sources and links.
This reminded me of the Generalizability crisis article by Yarkoni that was published a few years back: an incredible amount of effort and resources are spent on replicating stuff that is not useful fiction (e.g. ego depletion) or just plain irrelevant (the example Yarkoni uses is "verbal overshadowing effect"). Paul Meehl used even more examples of the "psychological debris" in his classic 1978 article. These things stay alive because, at some point, some critical mass of people adopted them and ran with them. And because theories in psychology are undetermined by the data (several theories can fit to the same data), if you push long and hard enough - bonus points for being "distinguished" in the field like Roy Baumeister or Daryl Bem - you can make almost anything a "thing" in the psychological literature. I am not sure whether you'll bring psychologists to refer to evolutionary theory in their quest to unveil ever more concepts (possibly because the curricula are filled with statistics and not theory-testing methods?), but maybe cybernetics (William Powers) could be a better working paradigm? (haven't read the book yet). Good article, thanks!
I'm copying what I wrote in Notes.
This is an excellent post by Rob, the OG of ego depletion critics. It was through reading and reviewing his eventual 2010 paper (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22947794/) that I became convinced that the theory behind ego depletion (the resource model) was not tenable and needed to be replaced. I worked quickly to do that, with paper in 2012 ad 2014 calling out inconsistencies in the resource model and then proposing something better. In 2013 Kurzban wrote an incredible paper (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3856320/) that I did not fully appreciate at the time, but in my opinion it reignited the field’s fascination with effort, something that continues to this day.
But…
I disagree with Rob’s assessment here about the importance of theory in the eventual unraveling of ego depletion. My case is simple: Good theory or bad theory, you need some facts on the ground that need explaining first. Without some invariant observation out there in the world, there is nothing to explain. For example, even if I have a stupid theory of why cars stop at red lights (the color red stresses people, makes them think of death, who then engage in braking as a way to cope with this death anxiety), the fact that cars stop at red lights doesn’t change. Similarly, if I have a correct theory of self-control (it involves computations), it won’t mean that 5 minutes of slightly boring copy editing will mean I will over-indulge on ice cream minutes later.
Anyhow, this is worth a read!
Thanks for the kind words! I agree that you need facts on the ground and I generally see the justice of your position. To some extent, there’s no right answer: theory and evidence are both crucial to knowledge and understanding. I put more weight on theory, and that might be a matter of taste, experience, bias, and so on. I guess in this case it’s hard because I imagine there are some people who continue to have faith in empirical facts which you and I both agree are probably wrong, and the people who still believe those facts do so in virtue, at least in part, of hanging on to bad theory. But, yes, I take the point and I appreciate the comment!
This is a tangent, but wait -- aren't domesticated bananas (what most people think of when you say "banana") _very_ different than wild bananas both in size and shape, precisely because of selective breeding by humans? I can imagine a similar, plausible story for domesticated horses: perhaps not their overall shape, but the details of their temperament, shyness, etc., have surely been subject to strong selection by human breeders. No? Anyway, I agree with your point about the theory of evolution being useful because it constrains and regularizes the class of hypotheses in biology, but your specific illustrations, paraphrasable as "surely bananas and horses are not as they are to please humans," fall flat given the fact of prolonged, deliberate selective breeding of those things by humans.
I agree that for those species that have been artificially selected, as opposed to naturally selected, we should expect those species to have traits good for us (people), rather than for them. No argument there. It would have been better for me to indicate that I intended to exclude species that have been artificially selected. Fair.
So I just read through the Beumeister et al paper and to the layperson atleast, they appear to be able to marshall quite a lot of evidence for ego depletion. Now I know enough to know that you can't just tally up the number of studies and then say "ha! see,...I win!" but many of them look - again, to the layperson - to be reasonably well designed.
They have evidence for the usefulness of the concept in multiple real life situations (sports, workplace, etc) and they say critics focus on the failures to replicate and ignore the success stories.
If I hadn't read yours and Dr Inzlicht article, I'm pretty sure I would've been left thinking that actually, ego depletion is very solid and the criticisms haven't done enough to debunk the concept.
Yes, I agree that it can look confusing. My view is that this is a more general problem about science, at this point. It can be extremely hard to determine who is in the right. This problem is exacerbated by the entry of politics into science, which has undermined trust. But the problem is not limited to that because scholars win to the extent they can persuade others they are correct. Just a few points. First, I would say that the meta-analyses and the enormous replication effort constitutes the most important evidence. Those efforts help to arbitrate the overall quality of the evidence. Second, I would be cautious about claims regarding the usefulness of the concept. It can be true that people’s ability to persist over time on certain tasks declines and, at the same time, that the resource explanation on offer is incorrect. So the issue isn’t exactly whether or not the ideas are useful, it’s whether they are useful compared to other explanations. Overall, though, I take your point. My view is the one I put in the “Critics, Clowns, and Helpful Vulcans” post. You can get famous in science by being wrong and doing good marketing. That’s just not helpful to other people.
Damn this is a great review of a weird moment.
Might have to bookmark this one and link to it for a piece on dual-process decision theory.
> The ego depletion theory should have never made it to the experimental stage.
Glucose thing was absurd, but idea that there's some sort of depleting resource isn't. That resource could be an input in calculations.
I love the irony that ego depletion theory is being kept alive by a fragile ego.
And my brain runs better on fat than glucose.
Have you read about what Robert Epstein is setting out to prove? I believe he's correct. I've heard several artists say "I dont create anything, Im just an antenna" or a conduit.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/your-brain-is-not-a-computer-it-is-a-transducer
If I’ve understood you correctly, I’m not sure if I agree with the overall point. It seems like sometimes there can be paradigm shifts of existing theory that wouldn’t be explored if everyone had to stick to existing theories. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 500 years, science is guided by a more nuanced form of evolution theory that may generate different hypotheses than the current form of evolution theory
Thanks for the comment, and of course you're welcome to disagree! But I'm not sure we disagree. Towards the end of the piece, I wrote, "Sure, sometimes it makes sense to publish papers that present anomalous findings. Data that don’t fit with existing explanations can stimulate additional theory," linking to an entry for Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." So in that sense, I agree. I would just say there's anomalies and there's anomalies, and a task of a scholar/editor is to try to discern the difference.
Yea I don’t think the disagreement is significant haha. I think the crux of the disagreement might boil down to how much a culture of expecting new data to be anchored to current explanations (no matter whether the data validates or falsifies the explanation) might decrease the proposal of new good explanations. Intuitionally, I feel like once you have operated within the current paradigm, there are assumptions that then become really difficult to shed later. Early stage scientists seem uniquely positioned here to not have those assumptions, and propose alternative paradigms that may be at least interesting to think about. I think having a culture of having to anchor data to current explanations might lose out on the benefits of a clean slate. I’m not sure if this argument is as true for later stage scientists though. Also not sure whether this is equally true in different scientific disciplines. I also say this as an early stage scientist and am therefore very biased in thinking this haha
Learning styles was born way before 1998. It became popular in the 80s, at least
I found this whole argument fascinating - even though I admit I didn’t understand all of it. For example, when you give the example of a slow computer and say the explanation cannot be based on resources (electricity), but shouldbe based on some computational aspect ( the functioning of the chip) : isn’t RAM/working memory a “resource” as well?
Yes, I think it makes sense to think of those as "resources." But they are not resources that run out, as in glucose, or water in a reservoir. They are computational resources that can be deployed in some limited fashion per unit time. This distinction is crucial for the claim I am making about the nature of the cause of task performance reductions.
Thank you. I will read your paper to understand your argument better.
"the field has resisted with all of its willpower the idea that explanations need to be disciplined by the evolutionary approach"
I see multiples debates about validity of evolutionary psychology/darwins evolutionary theory, what is your reasoning behind emphasizing its importance?
The best account of why an evolutionary analysis is required, rather than optional, is still, in my opinion, The Psychological Foundations of Culture in The Adapted Mind. We tried to lay out our assumptions here on this Substack in the post called Living Fossils Overview. That short piece has some useful sources and links.
surely it competition between computational allocations that's the issue, or is that just another form of ego depletion.... my ego now dissapates
This reminded me of the Generalizability crisis article by Yarkoni that was published a few years back: an incredible amount of effort and resources are spent on replicating stuff that is not useful fiction (e.g. ego depletion) or just plain irrelevant (the example Yarkoni uses is "verbal overshadowing effect"). Paul Meehl used even more examples of the "psychological debris" in his classic 1978 article. These things stay alive because, at some point, some critical mass of people adopted them and ran with them. And because theories in psychology are undetermined by the data (several theories can fit to the same data), if you push long and hard enough - bonus points for being "distinguished" in the field like Roy Baumeister or Daryl Bem - you can make almost anything a "thing" in the psychological literature. I am not sure whether you'll bring psychologists to refer to evolutionary theory in their quest to unveil ever more concepts (possibly because the curricula are filled with statistics and not theory-testing methods?), but maybe cybernetics (William Powers) could be a better working paradigm? (haven't read the book yet). Good article, thanks!