Ego depletion
Agotamiento del ego
- Date
- 1998 · confidence low
- Place
- Cleveland, Ohio, United States
- Credited to
- Roy F. Baumeister
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
A psychological theory holding that self-control and willpower draw on a limited mental resource that becomes depleted with continued use, impairing self-control on later tasks; proposed by social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister.
The effect has been challenged by large-scale replication studies (e.g. Hagger et al. 2016), which failed to consistently reproduce it.
What it led to
- Boost to experimental research on self-control and willpower
- Later debate over the effect's replicability (replication crisis)
- Applications in the psychology of decision-making and behavioral economics