I. Primary Researcher Name: Roy Baumeister WNMU Identification Number: W00123456 Title or Position: Student Researcher Phone: 575-8675309 E-mail: [email protected] Alternate e-mail: [email protected] Faculty Mentor Information Jennifer Johnston [email protected] II. Research Project Title of Research Project: Effects of Ego Depletion on Willpower as a Finite Resource Intended Time Period of This Research: January 1998 – December 1998 Research Assistant Information: The experiment will be assisted by students Frank Oznowicz and David Rudman. In addition to undergoing NIH certification in the protection of human research participants (attached), the two research assistants will also be instructed and closely monitored by the primary investigator, Roy Baumeister. Project Status: 1) This experiment represents independent research meant to further the student’s understanding. 2) The experiment will request a small amount of Student Research and Professional Development funds in order to purchase certain experiment-necessary supplies. 3) No other institutions will be involved in conducting or analyzing this research. Purpose and Objective of the Research: 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 disproportionately important to the long-term health, happiness, and success of the individual. The relatively few active, controlling choices by the self greatly increase the self's chances of achieving its goals, and if those choices by the self are important, then so is whatever internal structure of the self is responsible for it. In this experiment, we will be concerned with this controlling aspect of the self. Specifically, we will test a hypothesis of ego depletion, as a way of learning about the self's executive function. The core idea behind ego depletion is that the self's acts of volition draw on some limited resource, akin to strength or energy and that, therefore, one act of volition will have a detrimental impact on subsequent volition. We sought to show that a preliminary act of self-control in the form of resisting temptation would undermine self-regulation in a subsequent, unrelated domain, namely persistence at a difficult and frustrating task. Our research strategy was to look at effects that would carry over across wide gaps of seeming irrelevance. If resisting the temptation to eat chocolate can leave a person prone to give up faster on a difficult, frustrating puzzle, that would suggest that those two very different acts of self-control draw on the same limited resource. The psychological theory that volition is one of the self's crucial functions can be traced back at least to Freud (1923/1961a, 1933/1961b), who described the ego as the part of the psyche that must deal with the reality of the external world by mediating between conflicting inner and outer pressures. The notion that volition depends on the self's expenditure of some limited resource was anticipated by Freud. He thought the ego needed to have some form of energy to accomplish its tasks and to resist the energetic promptings of id and superego. Several modern research findings suggest that some form of energy or strength may be involved in acts of volition. Most of these have been concerned with self-regulation. Indeed, Mischel (1996) has recently proposed that the colloquial notion of will-power be revived for self- regulation theory, and a literature review by Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice (1994) concluded that much evidence about self-regulatory failure fits a model of strength depletion. Additional evidence for a strength model was provided by Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister (1998), whose research strategy influenced the present investigation. Muraven et al. sought to show that consecutive exertions of self-regulation were characterized by deteriorating performance, even though the exertions involved seemingly unrelated spheres. In one study, they showed that trying not to think about a white bear (a thought-control task borrowed from Wegner, 1989; Wegner, Schneider, Carter, & White, 1987) caused people to give up more quickly on a subsequent anagram task. In another study, an affect-regulation exercise caused subsequent decrements in endurance at squeezing a handgrip. These findings suggest that exertions of self-control do carry a psychic cost and deplete some scarce resource. To integrate these scattered findings and implications, we suggest the following: One important part of the self is a limited resource that is used for all acts of volition, such as controlled (as opposed to automatic) processing, active (as opposed to passive) choice, initiating behavior, and overriding responses. Because much of self-regulation involves resisting temptation and hence overriding motivated responses, this self-resource must be able to affect behavior in the same fashion that motivation does. Motivations can be strong or weak, and stronger impulses are presumably more difficult to restrain; therefore, the executive function of the self presumably also operates in a strong or weak fashion, which implies that it has a dimension of strength. An exertion of this strength in self-control draws on this strength and temporarily exhausts it (Muraven et al., 1998), but it also presumably recovers after a period of rest. Other acts of volition should have similar effects, and that is the hypothesis of the present investigation. Participants: Participants will be recruited from introductory psychology courses at Western New Mexico University. Participants will be compensated with course credit for their involvement. Students under the age of 18 will be excluded from the experiment, and offered an alternative extra credit assignment. Participants will also be screened for any potentially risky health conditions. No special populations will be used. The recruitment script will be the same for all students. Materials: During the course of the experiments, basic demographic information will be collected. Participants will be given the Brief Mood Introspection Scale (Mayer & Gaschke, 1988) and the Restraint Scale (Herman & Polivy, 1975), both of which have been included. As part of a stressor, participants will also be asked to complete a geometric line puzzle, modified from Glass, Singer, & Friedman (1969) so as to be impossible. Procedures: Participants will be recruited into what they believe is a study of taste perception, and randomly assigned to one of the conditions. After signing an informed consent, participants will be asked to schedule a time for the experiment to take place. Participants will be advised to skip one meal, and to have nothing to eat at least 3 hours before the experiment begins. Prior to the experiment, cookies will be baked in the laboratory in order to fill it with that aroma. When the participants are brought in, they will be seated in front of two foods: chocolate chip cookies, and radishes. The researcher will explain that these foods have been chosen both for their distinctive taste and familiarity, and they will then inform the participant which food they have been assigned. The researcher will ask the participant to only eat the food that he or she has been assigned, and ask them to promise not to eat any chocolate or radishes for the next 24 hours (for the sake of “sensation memory”). The researcher will then leave the room, and discreetly observe the participants to ensure compliance. After approximately 5 minutes, the researcher will return to the room, and ask the participants to fill out Brief Mood Introspection Scale and the Restraint Scale. Following the completion of the questionnaires, the researcher will inform the participants that they need to wait 15 minutes to allow the sensory memory to fade. During that that time, the participants will be asked to participate in an exercise to help compare the problem-solving abilities of high school students and college students. (This experiment will also include a foodless control group, which will proceed directly to filling out the questionnaires.) The researcher will briefly demonstrate the nature of the problem, a geometric line puzzle, and allow the participants to practice and ask questions. At this point, the participants will be given the main instrument, which is actually unsolvable, and told that they may end this study by ringing a bell. The instructor will the exit the room and time the participants. When the participants give up (or a 30-minute time limit reached), they will then be debriefed by the researcher, and the experiment ended. Although there may be some frustration associated with the unsolvable puzzles, this is expected to be only briefly experienced and pose no serious risk to the participants. Plan for Debriefing: Following the conclusion of the unsolvable puzzle portion, the experiment will be ended, and the research will then debrief all participants, informing them of the nature of the experiment, and explain the need for the deception used. Participants will be allowed to ask any questions at that time. Data Use and Storage: The information collected during this experiment will be kept confidential, stored in a secure location by the primary investigator. The information will be kept for a period of three years, and then destroyed. Any identifying information used in the dissemination of this research will be used only in aggregate. Changes: I agree to promptly bring to the attention of the IRB any changes in methods or procedures from those described above, or any unexpected consequences adversely affecting the subjects.