Commentary: a??Misguided Effort with Elusive Implicationsa?? and a??A Multi-Lab Pre-Registered Replication of the Ego Depletion Effecta??

摘要

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR; Hagger et al., 2016) was conducted to examine the ego depletion effect first reported by Baumeister et al. (1998) by replicating Sripada et al.'s (2014) study in 23 international laboratories. Participants completed either an easy or difficult version of a letter “e” task (i.e., Depletion Condition) followed by a multi-source interference task (MSIT) in which participants' reaction time (RT) and reaction time variability (RTV) were recorded as they made congruent and incongruent responses (see https://osf.io/v79xp/ for complete protocol). Ego depletion theory predicts that a sufficiently depleting letter “e” task should result in poorer self-regulation on incongruent MSIT trials (i.e., greater RTs and RTVs). Hagger et al. (2016) found that the ego depletion effect was trivial in effect size and not significantly different from zero. This has called some to question the verisimilitude of ego depletion theory (e.g., Engber, 2016). Yet, several commentaries have also argued that Hagger et al's procedures may be an invalid test of ego depletion (e.g., Baumeister and Vohs, 2016; Sripada et al., 2016; c.f., Hagger and Chatzisarantis, 2016 for an eloquent reply).