Thank you for your helpful inputs Prof. Locke and Prof. Robinson!

Prof. Robinson, I will definitely look into this method. Thank you.

Prof. Locke, you make a very valid point. Hagger and colleagues (2010) published a meta-analysis on ego depletion in which they address subjective fatigue's role as a mediator of ego depletion, as well as other alternative explanations (link below, p. 61-65). 

"Present findings provide clear evidence that the impairment of task performance observed in ego-depletion experiments coincides with increased perceptions of fatigue, difficulty, and effort."

Motivation:

"Present findings indicate that incentives or raising the importance of task goals reduced the deleterious effect of ego depletion on self-control task performance. Motivation therefore provides a viable explanation for the decrements in task performance observed in ego-depletion experiments."

And negative affect:

"Present results revealed that negative affect is significantly related to ego depletion, with a small, homogenous effect size."

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It seems to me ego depletion is different than simple fatigue in that it combines a cognitive appraisal of effort exertion with emotion (This task is tiring, it is difficult, and I see no point in it).

I think this comes into play at work not in day-to-day task execution, but when employees need to override a well learned, dominant response. If the payoff, both intrinsically and extrinsically, of this effort is very low, then we should be able to see ego depletion at work (maybe in free-riding, cheating, voicing negative emotional responses, poor performance on the new task etc.).

What are your thoughts on this?

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/136/4/495/

I am very suspicious of the ego depletion studies--if a person can be depleted in 5 minutes, how could they ever hold a job where they work for 8 hours?

Michelle vanDellen, has used a variant of that ego depletion task onine (using mTurk).

You can see some of her studies here:

vanDellen, M. R., Shea, C. T., Davisson, E. K., Koval, C. Z., & Fitzsimons, G. M. (2014). Motivated misperception: Self-regulatory resources affect goal appraisals. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 118-124.

My understanding is that they ask participants to retype a passage of text from an image file -- either straightforwardly (control condition) or not using the space bar or the letter 'e' (ego depletion condition).

They seem to have had good success with it.

We need to see what mediates depletion--it simply cannot be simple fatigue--there is something fishy here-

Thank you for your helpful inputs Prof. Locke and Prof. Robinson!

Prof. Robinson, I will definitely look into this method. Thank you.

Prof. Locke, you make a very valid point. Hagger and colleagues (2010) published a meta-analysis on ego depletion in which they address subjective fatigue's role as a mediator of ego depletion, as well as other alternative explanations (link below, p. 61-65). 

"Present findings provide clear evidence that the impairment of task performance observed in ego-depletion experiments coincides with increased perceptions of fatigue, difficulty, and effort."

Motivation:

"Present findings indicate that incentives or raising the importance of task goals reduced the deleterious effect of ego depletion on self-control task performance. Motivation therefore provides a viable explanation for the decrements in task performance observed in ego-depletion experiments."

And negative affect:

"Present results revealed that negative affect is significantly related to ego depletion, with a small, homogenous effect size."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

It seems to me ego depletion is different than simple fatigue in that it combines a cognitive appraisal of effort exertion with emotion (This task is tiring, it is difficult, and I see no point in it).

I think this comes into play at work not in day-to-day task execution, but when employees need to override a well learned, dominant response. If the payoff, both intrinsically and extrinsically, of this effort is very low, then we should be able to see ego depletion at work (maybe in free-riding, cheating, voicing negative emotional responses, poor performance on the new task etc.).

What are your thoughts on this?

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/136/4/495/

Dear question followers,

I found a couple more sources for online ego depletion methodologies.

Please see links below (Derrick, 2013, study 1; K.C. Yam et al., 2014, study 1)

These studies used a writing task to deplete online participants.

Depleted participants wrote a paragraph without using high frequency letters (a/n/i, depending on the study).

Control participants either wrote a a paragraph without any limitations or without using low frequency letters (x/y).

Hope this thread was helpful for you!

Atar

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597814000284

http://spp.sagepub.com/content/4/3/299.short

Atar:

Very interesting--so would you say that people get tired in the face of conflict--is that the core cause of depletion?

This brings up lots of possibilities because conflict is a very broad abstraction.

Conflict, indeed, is too broad of an abstraction in my opinion.

The meta analysis sums it up quite nicely - They define depletion as a decrease in the capacity for effortful control over dominant responses.

Where core causes are concerned, the key definitions I have seen refer simply to using up this finite source of self control.

So when we are forced to use our self control resource, controlling our dominant responses (e.g., 'don't think of a white bear', controlling emotional responses, overriding impulses) - we become depleted of this energy.

We become a specific type of 'tired' - a type that has trouble with self-control. The outcome is that we will likely do worse on a subsequent self-control task.

I have more experience person to person that online, but I can attempt it, I suppose...

check out a really good book by Baumeister & Tierney (Willpower). We did a combination of really difficult anagrams and an annoying noise (vs. no noise and easy anagrams). I do believe that ego depletion exists (as my students can attest to at the end of the semester).

Reduction in capacity cannot be right if incentives and goals can vitiate the effect

well maybe but it could also be satiation--if it is general depletion that it should affect all tasks and be independent of incentives--

I hope such theories are research based--I have learned over the decades not to have confidence in theories that are not--

I think ego depletion may be largely baloney--a recent meta analysis showed it had no effect--you cannot really deplete yourself after working for 15-50 minutes--otherwise you could not even hold a job-be very suspicious of this whole idea--

We've had success using persistence on unsolvable anagrams after completing a task designed to induce fatigue (as have other researchers). We interspersed solvable and unsolvable anagrams and used time on unsolvables as an indicator of cognitive depletion. We used this as part of an online survey. Tasks that are theorized to be more fatiguing lead to lower persistence on the anagrams. That said, IMHO its not clear that lack of persistence = cognitive depletion; more work is needed to establish that convincingly. I'm happy to be corrected on this last point, would help with a paper that I'm working on.   

Maybe the term ego depletion should be abandoned--what exactly is being depleted?If it is just fatigue, difficulty and loss of interest then we already have terms for that--it seems pretentious to call it by some other name--especially because ego is a very broad concept that seems different than situationally induced changes in effort that can occur in 10 minutes!