Ego-depletion increases selfish decision making, but may also increase self-conflict and regret about those decisions

ABSTRACT

The effect of ego-depletion on self-control conflict identification is the subject of ongoing debate with only limited and indirect empirical assessment. The present research used behavioral and self-report measures to test if ego-depletion affects self-control conflict identification across two studies: in an economic social dilemma game and a probe reaction task. In the social dilemma game, ego-depleted participants acted more selfishly, but also reported feeling more conflicted about their decisions and were more likely to go back and change choices they had made earlier in the game. These results replicated and extended earlier findings on ego-depletion and prosocial behavior. Study Two tested the effect of ego-depletion on self-control conflict identification using a probe recognition task designed to measure goal conflict accessibility, but found no significant effects of ego-depletion.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-control
• ego-depletion
• prosocial behavior
• goal conflict
• conflict identification
• replication

View correction statement:

Correction

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/45mxw/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/45mxw/

Notes

1. Data and study materials for both studies are available on the Open Science Framework: Osgood, J. M. (2018b, June 16).

2. These 13 are not included in the public dataset as no data were collected from them.

3. The three health prompts were: “Why would you want to eat a healthy diet?”, “How do you stay healthy?”, and “Write three alternate ways of saying ‘a healthy diet is important’”.