Pathetic

UPDATE: And of course the second thing I see on the Internet this morning is this interview with Professor Ego Depletion himself.   (The first thing was this rabbit.)

Wow, this has been a really pathetic month for blogging.  We stand at 3 weeks short of the end of the semester.  In addition to normal week-to-week stuff (today my officemate and I pulled our hair at the prospect of reading, as one of five papers for Monday's class, a 73-page paper about how people react to frequency versus percentage information), and a monster data analysis I started today, I have two 20-page papers (research proposals) and a research proposal presentation to put together in my spare time.  It's kind of scary.

You can see why I don't have a lot of time for blogging, and that the time I do have I don't want to spend writing about school when I could be reading REAMDE.

So instead, let us briefly (not 73 pages worth) consider a favorite EQ topic - ego depletion.

This past Saturday, I read the book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite by the evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban.  Like me (and many others), he does not believe that the performance deficits observed in the second task that follows the initial "depleting" task result from the actual depletion of a resource (though, interestingly, we have different intuitions and a somewhat different evidence base for that belief).  In his discussion of the ego depletion model, he makes the following (meticulously referenced) observations about the idea that glucose in the brain is the limiting factor for effortful self-control based on studies that show different performance from people who drink a glass of sugary lemonade versus a glass of Splenda-sweetened lemonade

"Consider that the entire brain uses about .25 calories per minute.  If we suppose that the "self-control" task increases overall brain metabolism by 10%--a very large estimate--then the brains of subjects who do one of these tasks for five minutes, who are categorized as "depleted," have consumed an extra 0.125 calories.  Does it seem right that you need 100 calories from lemonade to compensate for a tenth of a Tic Tac?" (p. 175).

I thought the glucose idea made a lot of intuitive sense but ... yeah.  When you start looking at actual research into brain physiology, not so much.  I think the resource metaphor is so immediately plausible and appealing that it's almost "too good to check," even to a lot of psychologists.

I am pretty much convinced by the current evidence base that "depletion" is about motivation, not any actual lack of ability (at least in the typical ego depletion lab experiment - perhaps in some very extreme cases a person could truly not continue a task, though whether that is willpower "depletion" or some other kind of physical or mental fatigue would be hard to distinguish).

It's a strange case: it's a terrifically interesting phenomenon that has been studied a lot, and applied in a lot of different domains of psychology, and yet we don't really know what it is.  I guess that means there's lots of work left to be done to understand what's really going on.  Stay tuned.

Anyway, next time you're feeling depleted, don't reach for a sugary snack - my best guess is that most any "reward" should do the trick.  May I suggest looking at a fuzzy bunny with a Groucho-esque moustache?

My friend in the next cage is so depleted he's flopped.  Boring.  Are you interesting?