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The ego depletion effect story is interesting to me for numerous reasons, some of which are statistical/inferential, some of which are more theoretical, and some of which are kind of personal or anecdotal (I know the author of the blog post in question and our research overlaps in important ways, although not with regard to the ego depletion effect in particular; I don't research it). I kind of think Brent could have gone further with some of the implications of the ED effect size being so small. To me, it's interesting that it is basically zero (I don't think it's even .08, based on Bayesian prior choice effects, which is another interesting angle on this story). Why? Because I think it's a fairly intuitive idea that gets applied by people in everyday life over and over again, and has broader implications. For example, you are in a situation where you're tempted by something, have to resist temptation, and experience it as exhausting. You go home from work and are tired and need to relax, ostensibly because you're tired by being on your best behavior all day. There's recent very cogently argued public health literature arguing that diets don't work largely because it's too hard (read: too fatiguing, too effortful) to resist our favorite foods, either in the short term or over the long term. In short, I think there are a lot of people who would be surprised that the ego depletion effect is so close to zero. Maybe not everyone, but a lot of people. It also raises the question of why it's difficult to resist temptations over a sustained period, and how to model that process more accurately (my reading of the ego depletion literature is that a lot of the effect can be explained by sustained negative emotional state or heightened attention, rather than resource depletion, but that's a different issue; another explanation is with reward prediction models, but I think those are predicting a different aspect of behavior). I guess I'm agreeing with you, but I think the magnitude of the effect size being zero or close to it is important for a lot of reasons aside from meta-scientific issues pertaining to replicability and trustworthiness of results. |