Challenges to Ego-Depletion Research Go beyond the Replication Crisis: A Need for Tackling the Conceptual Crisis

One important line of self-control research concerns the phenomenon known as ego-depletion, the negative effect of performing a self-control task (Task 1) on performance on a subsequent self-control task (Task 2). Although a 2010 meta-analysis reported a moderate effect size (d = 0.62) for this phenomenon (Hagger et al., 2010), its replicability has since come under scrutiny with the publication of some replication failures (Xu et al., 2014; Lurquin et al., 2016), including a high-profile study involving 23 laboratories (Hagger et al., 2016). Some researchers even suggest that the ego-depletion effect might not be real and that the reported results primarily reflect publication bias (Carter and McCullough, 2014). This replication crisis has prompted a call for additional replication attempts involving large sample sizes and preregistration (Carter et al., 2015). Although such replication efforts are undoubtedly important, we submit that, unless some fundamental conceptual (and related methodological) issues are more satisfactorily addressed, attempts to evaluate the ego-depletion effect would unlikely be successful. In this article, we outline what we call the conceptual crisis for the ego-depletion literature, explain how these limitations undermine replication attempts, and suggest possible ways to alleviate these problems. We do so by noting some parallel problems that have faced cognitive psychologists studying attention, working memory (WM), and executive functions (EFs), in the hope that such insights might contribute to theoretical and empirical development in ego-depletion research.