Bored into depletion? Towards a tentative integration of perceived self-control exertion and boredom as guiding signals for goal-directed behavior

During the past two decades, self-control research has been dominated by the strength model of self-control which is built on the premise that the capacity for self-control is a limited global resource that can become temporarily depleted, resulting in a state called ego depletion. The foundations of ego depletion have recently been questioned. Thus, although self-control is among the most researched psychological concepts with high societal relevance, an inconsistent body of literature limits our understanding of how self-control operates. Here, we propose that the inconsistencies are partly due to a confound that has unknowingly and systematically been introduced into ego depletion research: Boredom. We propose that boredom might affect results of self-control research by 1) placing an unwanted self-control demand, and 2) signaling that one should explore behavioral alternatives. To account for boredom in self-controlled behavior, we provide a working model that integrates evidence from reward-based models of self-control and recent theorizing on boredom to explain effects of both self-control exertion and boredom on subsequent self-control performance. We propose that task-induced boredom should be systematically monitored in self-control research to assess the validity of the ego depletion effect.