Kurzban et al. on opportunity cost models of mental fatigue and resource-based models of willpower

Possible explanations for opportunity costs of feeling too exhausted to do anything at all:

a) The best action you should be doing now is to sleep or at least to take a nap, so your brain would process the information it has now and prepare itself for new information.

b) You are censoring the best action from your thoughts because it does not fit your idea of what you should be doing now. For example you feel that you should work on your personal projects, but your brain thinks you should drink some beer with your friends. When you say you are too exhausted to do anything, you are actually lying, because you are not too exhausted to drink beer with your friends; it is merely outside of your set of acceptable answers.

c) Your brain is wrong. For reasons that might make sense living in a jungle millenia ago, your brain is convinced that you should do X, which in reality is not an option, or is a bad option. All meaningful options are penalized because your brain insists that you should do X instead.

For example, if your job made you too exhausted, your brain may think the best action is to prevent going to the same job tomorrow. Which may be not realistic, or merely not what you want to think about.

"Everything Is Crumbling: An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have just been debunked. How can so many scientists have been so wrong?"

A paper now in press, and due to publish next month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, describes a massive effort to reproduce the main effect that underlies this work. Comprising more than 2,000 subjects tested at two-dozen different labs on several continents, the study found exactly nothing. A zero-effect for ego depletion: No sign that the human will works as it’s been described, or that these hundreds of studies amount to very much at all.

(Tweet says paper is currently embargoed.)

...Evan Carter was among the first to spot some weaknesses in the ego depletion literature. As a graduate student at the University of Miami, Carter set out to recreate the lemonade effect, first described in 2007, whereby the consumption of a sugary drink staves off the loss of willpower. “I was collecting as many subjects as I could, and we ended up having one of the largest samples in the ego-depletion literature,” Carter told me. But for all his efforts, he couldn’t make the study work. “I figured that I had gotten some bad intel on how to do these experiments,” he said.

To figure out what went wrong, Carter reviewed the 2010 meta-analysis—the study using data from 83 studies and 198 experiments%20PB.pdf "'Ego Depletion and the Strength Model of Self-Control: A Meta-Analysis', Hagger et al 2010"). The closer he looked at the paper, though, the less he believed in its conclusions. First, the meta-analysis included only published studies, which meant the data would be subject to a standard bias in favor of positive results. Second, it included studies with contradictory or counterintuitive measures of self-control. One study, for example, suggested that depleted subjects would give more money to charity while another said depleted subjects would spend less time helping a stranger. When he and his adviser, Michael McCullough, reanalyzed the 2010 paper’s data using state-of-the-art analytic methods, they found no effect. For a second paper published last year, Carter and McCullough completed a second meta-analysis that included different studies, including 48 experiments that had never been published. Again, they found “very little evidence” of a real effect.

“All of a sudden it felt like everything was crumbling,” says Carter, now 31 years old and not yet in a tenure-track position. “I basically lost my compass. Normally I could say, all right there have been 100 published studies on this, so I can feel good about it, I can feel confident. And then that just went away.”

Not everyone believed Carter and McCullough’s reappraisal of the field. The fancy methods they used to correct for publication bias were new, and not yet fully tested. Several prominent researchers in the field called their findings premature.

But by this point, there were other signs of problems in the literature. The lemonade effect, for one, seemed implausible on its face: There’s no way the brain could use enough glucose, and so quickly, that drinking a glass of lemonade would make a difference. What’s more, several labs were able to produce the same result—restoration of self-control—by having people swish the lemonade around their mouths and spit it out instead of drinking it. Other labs discovered that a subject’s beliefs and mindset could also affect whether and how her willpower was depleted.

...In October 2014, the Association for Psychological Science announced it would try to resolve some of this uncertainty. APS would create a “Registered Replication Report”—a planned-out set of experiments, conducted by many different labs, in the hopes of testing a single study that represents an important research idea. Martin Hagger, who wrote the original 2010 meta-analysis, would serve as lead author on the project. Roy Baumeister would consult on methodology.

...The replication team ran that same experiment at 24 different labs, including ones that translated the letter e task into Dutch, German, French, and Indonesian. Just two of the research groups produced a significant, positive effect, says study co-author Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto. (One appeared to find a negative effect, a reverse-depletion.) Taken all together, the experiments showed no signs whatsoever of Baumeister and Tice’s original effect.

...He [Baumeister] still believes ego depletion is real. The tasks had failed, not the Big Idea. In his lab, Baumeister told me, the letter e task would have been handled differently. First, he’d train his subjects to pick out all the words containing e, until that became an ingrained habit. Only then would he add the second rule, about ignoring words with e’s and nearby vowels. That version of the task requires much more self-control, he says. Second, he’d have his subjects do the task with pen and paper, instead of on a computer. It might take more self-control, he suggested, to withhold a gross movement of the arm than to stifle a tap of the finger on a keyboard.

"Reckoning with the Past", Michael Inzlicht:

I have spent nearly a decade working on the concept of ego depletion, including work that is critical of the model used to explain the phenomenon. I have been rewarded for this work, and I am convinced that the main reason I get any invitations to speak at colloquia and brown-bags these days is because of this work. The problem is that ego depletion might not even be a thing. By now, many people are aware that a massive replication attempt of the basic ego depletion effect involving over 2,000 participants found nothing, nada, zip. Only three of the 24 participating labs found a significant effect, but even then, one of these found a significant result in the wrong direction!

There is a lot more to this registered replication than the main headline, and deep in my heart, it is hard to believe that fatigue is not a real phenomenon. I promise to get to it in a later post. But for now, we are left with a sobering question: If a large sample pre-registered study found absolutely nothing, how has the ego depletion effect been replicated and extended hundreds and hundreds of times? More sobering still: What other phenomena, which we now consider obviously real and true, will be revealed to be just as fragile?

As I said, I’m in a dark place. I feel like the ground is moving from underneath me and I no longer know what is real and what is not.

I edited an entire book on stereotype threat, I have signed my name to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States citing stereotype threat, yet now I am not as certain as I once was about the robustness of the effect. I feel like a traitor for having just written that; like, I’ve disrespected my parents, a no no according to Commandment number 5. But, a meta-analysis published just last year suggests that stereotype threat, at least for some populations and under some conditions, might not be so robust after all. P-curving some of the original papers is also not comforting. Now, stereotype threat is a politically charged topic and I really really want it to be real. I think a lot more pain-staking work needs to be done before I stop believing (and rumor has it that another RRR of stereotype threat is in the works), but I would be lying if I said that doubts have not crept in.

This is exciting and interesting stuff. A good one-sentence summary from the paper:

In sum, many experiences, particularly the more or less unpleasant sensations discussed here (e.g., effort, boredom, fatigue), can be profitably thought of as resulting from (1) monitoring mechanisms that tally opportunity costs, which (2) cause an aversive state that corresponds in magnitude to the cost computed, which (3) enters into decision-making, acting as a kind of "vote," influencing the decision ultimately taken.

I'm trying to get my head around ways I could use this to sustain better and longer levels of focus, reduce boredom, etc. Two questions come to mind, that as far as I can tell have not been investigated in detail yet, and to which I don't have answers:

1. What, exactly, are the sorts of things my brain decides are more important than what I'm currently doing? Is it things like "I'm not signaling the right things to the people around me", "need food", etc.?

2. What are good ways to "reset" my internal monitoring mechanisms and thus return to a non-aversive state? I presume the answer is some kind of reward or positive feedback?

Basically, is it possible to trick this internal cost-benefit analysis into being focused for long periods of time?

My computer doesn't need to use any more electricity in situations where it "decides" to do something as opposed to not doing something

Doesn't it? I thought that e.g. cpu-mining bitcoins would cost you more in electricity than it earns you in bitcoins. Or am I misinterpreting you?

This paper felt significant and promising, but 8 years later, there seem to be no real follow-up. Do we know why? Am I missing something?

In this talk, Kurzban highlights that attempts to replicate the Baumeister willpower model have failed dramatically.

I think there are plenty of things that can sometimes work as resources.

Take tension in your back. If you sit to long in an unergonomic position in front of your desk, parts of your back will tense up. It will take some time for relaxation to get rid of that tension.

I think similar effects happen when you suppress emotions. Just because you have finished a task doesn't mean that your brain isn't still dealing with the emotions that the task raised.