Challenges to Ego-Depletion Research Go beyond the Replication Crisis: A Need for Tackling the Conceptual Crisis

摘要

One important line of self-control research concerns the phenomenon known as ego-depletion, the negative effect of performing a self-control task (Task 1) on performance on a subsequent self-control task (Task 2). Although a 2010 meta-analysis reported a moderate effect size (d = 0.62) for this phenomenon (Hagger et al., 2010), its replicability has since come under scrutiny with the publication of some replication failures (Xu et al., 2014; Lurquin et al., 2016), including a high-profile study involving 23 laboratories (Hagger et al., 2016). Some researchers even suggest that the ego-depletion effect might not be real and that the reported results primarily reflect publication bias (Carter and McCullough, 2014). This replication crisis has prompted a call for additional replication attempts involving large sample sizes and preregistration (Carter et al., 2015).