41–50 of 89 posts
According to marines, will power depletion is bs. This is anecdotal, sure, but I believe in momentum. If you have momentum, at some point, you don't want to fail at any will power task, because you are on a winning streak.
According to marines, will power depletion is bs. This is anecdotal, sure, but I believe in momentum. If you have momentum, at some point, you don't want to fail at any will power task, because you are on a winning streak.
Also, if you transform what you want, you reduce need for will power.
I always get the feeling from reading academic material on psychology that people are trying to apply the scientific method on top of unscientific principles. It feels rather like alchemists trying to explain fire via phlogiston: an attempt to quantify high-level phenomena when you don't understand any of the lower levels. All the data comes from psychology students at a college in the US who either were able to use…
How do you think that we arrived on those lower-level phenomena that you're lauding? It wasn't by getting an electron microscope and a particle collider from God and starting from there.
And we disproved phlogisten without use of lower-level principles either -- just better measurement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ego depletion isn't real.
To me, this is an interesting statement because it highlights the difference between true and useful. For several years, since I read the book Willpower (an intro piece to ego depletion), I've meditated on the idea. I've decided that even if it's not scientifically true, it can be useful to me. Some may see it as self-help tripe ("Eat your frogs in the morning!"), but it's a useful mental model for me to push myself…
I think this also applies to beliefs like the 10,000 hour hypothesis. I strongly doubt it is true, but some people really like it as a motivational tool. I have no reason to burst their bubble.
The only time I am bothered is if people argue in favor of unverified beliefs to people who are seeking real truth, or especially if people try to legislate such beliefs.
ELI5?
Ego depletion isn't real.
In other words, if someone is trying to stop eating candy, why do they draw from the candy bowl in some cases but not others?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ego-depletion is mentioned, not always by name, in hundreds productivity and focus related articles and books published in the last 5 years or so. Steve Jobs is often used as an example because he wore the same outfit to work every day, purportedly so he would not have to waste any crucial willpower early in the day on such a trivial task as choosing what to wear.
>> Steve Jobs is often used as an example because he wore the same outfit to work every day, purportedly so he would not have to waste any crucial willpower early in the day on such a trivial task as choosing what to wear. That was to free up time and free himself from an extra decision. Mental exhaustion is not the same as ego depletion. The later claims that "self control" is a limited resource, but picking your ou…
I have observed it in myself, time and time again. If not it directly, something similar enough. Even at a glucose level, various studies have shown relation between our blood sugar and ability to tolerate frustration and make decisions.
So while the accuracy of ego-depletion may be in question, I can still benefit from reasoning it to be true and challenging my emotions and expectations with that. if/when a better model or perspective comes around i'll surely adopt it.
But of course, if this news in some way helpful or freeing for you, by all means ride that wave. Success matters more than truth.
I've observed that psychology will sometimes split hairs - arguing over whats true and whats truer. Overall this is good - but it's helpful to consider the proliferation of blatant non-truths out there and how far we've come. Sometimes "good enough" is good enough. Fill in the blanks with the facts you can find today and be willing to swap them out for better ones tomorrow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, there is no reason to mention "bayesian" in the title other than using it as a hype term like "blockchain" or "deep learning". Also, the real difference is whether they test a "null hypothesis" vs testing an "actual hypothesis". Like almost all psych, this falls in the first category.
You say this but then you go read a paper with a cruddy t-test and then injure your eyes with the spasmodic rolling that it induces, like I did. It's kinda remarkable how many people don't actually use modern bayesian analysis techniques, which is why it's such a policy war. It's the difference between "older statistical methods uninformed by the glut of modern processing power" and "things which require a computer t…
>"A Bayesian analysis was performed to test the relative likelihood of observing our results given the null hypothesis (i.e., the absence of any depletion effect) versus the likelihood of observing our results given the alternative hypothesis (the presence of a nonzero effect)."
I mean that I have no interest in the result of this "test" at all. First of all, they are not directly testing for the existence of a "depletion effect". From the paper:
>"Participants in both conditions were provided with a lengthy passage of text. Those in the Control condition simply crossed out with a pencil all occurrences of the letter ‘e’ in a passage of text, whereas those in the Depletion condition were given the following instructions: ‘cross off the letter “e” every time it appears with the following exceptions: 1. Do not cross out the “e” if it is adjacent to another vowel (e.g., friend); 2. Do not cross out the “e” if it is one letter away from another vowel (e.g., vowel); 3. Do not cross out the “e” if the word has 6 letters (e.g., “there”); 4.Do not cross out the “e” if it is the third to last letter (e.g., customers); 5.Do not cross out the “e” if there are double letters in the word (e.g., “hello”)’. Participants were asked to continue the writing task for six minutes, after which the experimenter instructed participants to discontinue.
[...]
Participants were given a sheet on which 30 anagrams were listed. Participants were asked to complete as many anagrams as they could within five minutes. After the anagram task, participants were asked to refer to a Likert scale to rate the difficulty of the initial crossing-out letters task (1 = not at all difficult; 7 = very difficult). The number of correctly completed anagrams was recorded for each participant."
So "depletion effect" means "got fewer anagrams correct after inspecting text closely for 6 minutes". How about their eyes just got tired from squinting closer at the page? Or they were primed to think/write slower since they had to cross out fewer e's? I'm sure you can come up with more alternatives.
Second of all, who is actually predicting exactly zero effect of crossing out the letter e more or less often on filling out anagrams? It seems totally implausible to me there is no effect, especially if you go for longer than 6 minutes. Because that is what they are comparing: exactly zero effect vs any other size effect. This is not "small effect" vs "large effect". Literally any way they can mess up the experiments will tend toward non-zero effect. It is only a matter of sample size.
Bayes factors vs p-values is irrelevant to the actual problems with these studies.
I always get the feeling from reading academic material on psychology that people are trying to apply the scientific method on top of unscientific principles. It feels rather like alchemists trying to explain fire via phlogiston: an attempt to quantify high-level phenomena when you don't understand any of the lower levels. All the data comes from psychology students at a college in the US who either were able to use…
It might not seem as clear cut as other natural sciences (which also get fuzzy once you go into the details) but there is credibility in psychological reasoning. The mechanisms that cause a certain behavior are represented as models in psychological research. Such models must, by design, simplify the real mechanisms. But, as opposed to the real mechanism, they can be discussed and disproven, which is what apparently…
Any "fuzziness" in the other natural sciences (thinking biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc.) is usually limited by current technology or measurement methods. Newton's classical mechanics were observably true for a long time before their flaws started showing. In most situations, classical mechanics is all you need to accurately model a system. Is there any such well accepted theory that semi-accurately predicts psychological phenomena in a similar fashion?
I agree that sometimes psychological findings seem credible because they align with our personal models of how we think people work, but this gives you nothing in terms of the scientific method. Just because a model is intuitive doesn't mean that it is any more true.
>Such models must, by design, simplify the real mechanisms.
What model? They essentially have a single claim backed by evidence. I don't see what predictive power their conclusion brings. We don't understand what "ego-depletion" is, how can we pretend to measure it? How can this "measurement" of something that we don't understand give us any more information about human psychology?
What real mechanism have they suggested as an explanation for this phenomenon? I didn't see one.
I always get the feeling from reading academic material on psychology that people are trying to apply the scientific method on top of unscientific principles. It feels rather like alchemists trying to explain fire via phlogiston: an attempt to quantify high-level phenomena when you don't understand any of the lower levels. All the data comes from psychology students at a college in the US who either were able to use…
By your reasoning no sciences should exist until we completely understand the mechanisms at a lower level.
Plenty of phenomena are observed and even experimentally manipulated all the time without understanding mechanisms. This happens in lots of biology all the time--infectious disease being one prominent example but there are thousands of other examples you could pick. This also happens with various phenomena in physics and chemistry as well, and is routine in astronomy (minus the experiments perhaps).
The undergrad student example is an armchair criticism, but think about it carefully: if the process you're studying shouldn't vary across populations, in a fundamental way, why does it matter if you use undergrads or 40 year old engineers?
Ego depletion is not such an unreasonable hypothesis. People perceive many things as effortful, and become exhausted. Try running a marathon for example, and tell me there's no such thing as fatigue.
A similar thing is also reported and observed for temptation. This is extremely common, so much so that people here are variously posting that the presence of the effect is obvious, and its absence is obvious. It's a bedrock idea invoked by all sorts of people all the time in explaining unhealthy behavior. It's also not unreasonable to assume, for example, that glucose in the brain is a limited resource, and that certain pathways are involved in certain types of tasks more, and might need rest. But you don't need to study the brain to examine whether depletion exists as a phenotype.
The effect in question is about the depletion idea, period, not about the mechanism. And you don't need a mechanism to study whether or not it exists.
Your final sentence betrays the problem in your reasoning: various lines of reasoning, including this paper but not limited to it, and involving all sorts of behavioral tasks, suggest that the depletion effect does not exist. So what insight is there to have in a mechanism that is not present? It's an illusion. This seems nontrivial to me.