Essay on Ego
Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?
Roy E Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne M. Tice
Case Western Reserve University Choice, active response, self-regulation, and other volition may all draw on a common inner resource. I n Experiment 1, people who forced themselves to eat radishes instead of tempting chocolates subsequently quit faster on unsolvable puzzles than people who had not had to exert self-control over eating. In Experiment 2, making a meaningful personal choice to perform attitude-relevant behavior caused a similar decrement in persistence. In Experiment 3, suppressing emotion led to a subsequent drop in performance of solvable anagrams. In Experiment 4, an initial task requiring high self-regulation made people more passive (i.e., more prone to favor the passive-response option). These results suggest that the self 's capacity for active volition is limited and that a range of seemingly different, unrelated acts share a common resource.
Many crucial functions of the self involve volition: making choices and decisions, taking responsibility, initiating and inhibiting behavior, and making plans of action and carrying out those plans. The self exerts control over itself and over the external world. To be sure, not all human behavior involves planful or deliberate control by the self, and, in fact, recent work has shown that a great deal of human behavior is influenced by automatic or nonconscious processes (see Bargh, 1994, 1997). But undoubtedly some portion involves deliberate, conscious, controlled responses by the self, and that portion may be dispro- ' portionately important to the long-term health, happiness, and success of the individual. Even if it were shown that 95% of behavior consisted of lawful, predictable responses to situational stimuli by automatic processes, psychology could not afford to ignore the remaining 5%. As an analogy, cars are probably driven straight ahead at least 95% of the time, but
Roy E Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne M. Tice
Case Western Reserve University Choice, active response, self-regulation, and other volition may all draw on a common inner resource. I n Experiment 1, people who forced themselves to eat radishes instead of tempting chocolates subsequently quit faster on unsolvable puzzles than people who had not had to exert self-control over eating. In Experiment 2, making a meaningful personal choice to perform attitude-relevant behavior caused a similar decrement in persistence. In Experiment 3, suppressing emotion led to a subsequent drop in performance of solvable anagrams. In Experiment 4, an initial task requiring high self-regulation made people more passive (i.e., more prone to favor the passive-response option). These results suggest that the self 's capacity for active volition is limited and that a range of seemingly different, unrelated acts share a common resource.
Many crucial functions of the self involve volition: making choices and decisions, taking responsibility, initiating and inhibiting behavior, and making plans of action and carrying out those plans. The self exerts control over itself and over the external world. To be sure, not all human behavior involves planful or deliberate control by the self, and, in fact, recent work has shown that a great deal of human behavior is influenced by automatic or nonconscious processes (see Bargh, 1994, 1997). But undoubtedly some portion involves deliberate, conscious, controlled responses by the self, and that portion may be dispro- ' portionately important to the long-term health, happiness, and success of the individual. Even if it were shown that 95% of behavior consisted of lawful, predictable responses to situational stimuli by automatic processes, psychology could not afford to ignore the remaining 5%. As an analogy, cars are probably driven straight ahead at least 95% of the time, but
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Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 12, 530-538. Received November 11, 1996 Revision received June 10, 1997 Accepted June 16, 1997 •