Self-control resources can be defined in terms of "energy." Repeated attempts to override desires and impulses can result in a state of reduced self-control energy termed "ego depletion" leading to a reduced capacity to regulate future self-control behaviors effectively. Regular practice or "training" on self-control tasks may improve an individual's capacity to overcome ego depletion effective...

The resource model of self-control casts self-control as a capacity that relies on some limited resource that exhausts with use. The model captured our imagination and brought much-needed attention on an important yet neglected psychological construct. Despite its success, basic issues with the model remain. Here, we ask six questions: (i) Does self-control really wane over time? (ii) Is ego de...

This paper presents a model of real effort provision in conjunction with rational social preference theory to predict how individuals exert effort to replace an exogenously determined ‘‘state of the world’’ with a preferred social outcome. Binary dictator games and real effort tasks are used to examine whether individuals exert effort in a manner that is consistent with their revealed preferenc...

The idea behind ego depletion is that willpower draws on a limited mental resource, so that engaging in an act of self-control impairs self-control in subsequent tasks. To present ego depletion as more than a convenient metaphor, some researchers have proposed that glucose is the limited resource that becomes depleted with self-control. However, there have been theoretical challenges to the pro...