The researchers wanted to see which group would work on the task longer, and anticipated that the people in the radish group - who would have spent significant reserves of energy trying not to eat the cookies - would give up on the puzzle sooner. Unbeknownst to the participants, the puzzle was designed to be impossible to finish. Next, the researchers gave both groups a puzzle to work on. The thinking was that the group allowed to eat only radishes would have to expend serious willpower to resist eating the cookies. Each group was allowed to eat from only one plate but not the other. One plate held fresh-baked cookies and the other red and white radishes.
In the study, the researchers asked two sets of subjects to wait in a room where there were two plates of food. Even worse, holding on to the idea that willpower is a limited resource can actually be bad for us, making us more likely to lose control and act against our better judgment.Įgo depletion received scientific support in the late 1990s, when the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University conducted an experiment that has since been cited over three thousand times by their academic peers.
This theory would seem to perfectly explain my after-work indulgences.īut recent studies suggest that we’ve been thinking about willpower all wrong, and that the theory of ego depletion may not be true. The theory is that willpower is connected to a limited reserve of mental energy, and once we run out of that energy, we’re more likely to lose self-control. Psychological researchers have a name for this phenomenon: ego depletion. Even though I knew that eating ice cream and sitting for a long time were probably bad ideas, I told myself that relaxation was my well-deserved reward for working so hard. Not so long ago, my post-work routine looked like this: After a particularly grueling day, I’d sit on the couch and veg for hours, doing my version of “Netflix and chill,” which meant keeping company with a pint of ice cream.
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