Changes

The abstract for the 2017 journal article ''Reverse Ego-Depletion: Acts of Self-Control Can Improve Subsequent Performance in Indian Cultural Contexts'' published in the journal ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology'' indicates:

{{Cquote|The strength model of self-control has been predominantly tested with people from Western cultures. The present research asks whether the phenomenon of ego-depletion generalizes to a culture emphasizing the virtues of exerting mental self-control in everyday life. A pilot study found that whereas Americans tended to believe that exerting willpower on mental tasks is depleting, Indians tended to believe that exerting willpower is energizing. Using dual task ego-depletion paradigms, Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c found reverse ego-depletion among Indian participants, such that participants exhibited better mental selfcontrol on a subsequent task after initially working on strenuous rather than nonstrenuous cognitive tasks. Studies 2 and 3 found that Westerners exhibited the ego-depletion effect whereas Indians exhibited the reverse ego-depletion effect on the same set of tasks. Study 4 documented the causal effect of lay beliefs about whether exerting willpower is depleting versus energizing on reverse ego-depletion with both Indian and Western participants. Together, these studies reveal the underlying basis of the ego-depletion phenomenon in culturally shaped lay theories about willpower.<ref>[https://www.krishnasavani.com/CV_files/Savani_Job_2017.pdf ''Reverse Ego-Depletion: Acts of Self-Control Can Improve Subsequent Performance in Indian Cultural Contexts'']. ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology''. 2017, Vol. 113, No. 4, 589 – 607</ref>}}

The New Scientist article

{{Cquote|Baumeister recently revised his theory to take this into account. In a book chapter published last year with his colleague Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota, he argues that while there is a limited resource behind self-control, it rarely, if ever, runs dry. According to the revised theory, whether we are able to maintain self-control comes down to our judgement about how much willpower juice we have left and how we choose to allocate these reserves. As with physical effort, in which our muscles feel tired long before they are close to collapse, how long we can keep going is all about how much energy we think is left...

Savani and Job wanted to see if the cultural belief that effort is energising would influence the way ego depletion works in India. If prompting people to think of exerting self-control as energising eliminates the ego-depletion effect, as Job’s earlier research showed, then perhaps people in India might be immune to ego depletion. In fact, when they repeated Baumeister’s experiments with hundreds of Indian participants, they actually showed a “reverse ego depletion” effect. When the first task was harder, they tended to perform better on the second task. Savani concluded that ego depletion is by no means an inevitable feature of human psychology.

“We no longer have an excuse for being lazy, saying ‘Oh, I have worked so hard, I need a break’,” he says. “No matter how mentally tired you are, you always have mental capacity to concentrate on and work on a given task.” For his part, Baumeister told us that this new “profoundly important” research from India is “truly fascinating” and he acknowledged that “if born out by further work [it] could really bring about major revisions to our understanding”.