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Publications (87)
Ego depletion theory proposes that self-regulation depends on a limited energy resource (willpower). The simple initial theory has been refined to emphasize conservation rather than resource exhaustion, extended to encompass decision making, planning, and initiative, and linked to physical bodily energy (glucose). Recent challenges offered alternat...
We identify points of conflict and consensus regarding (a) controversial empirical claims and (b) normative preferences for how controversial scholarship—and scholars—should be treated. In 2021, we conducted qualitative interviews ( n = 41) to generate a quantitative survey ( N = 470) of U.S. psychology professors’ beliefs and values. Professors st...
Social psychology findings have fared poorly in multi-site replication attempts. This article considers and evaluates multiple factors that may contribute to such failures, other than the "crisis" assumption that most of the field's published research is so badly flawed that it should be dismissed wholesale. Low engagement by participants may reduc...
Social psychology findings have fared poorly in multi-site replication attempts. This article considers and evaluates multiple factors that may contribute to such failures, other than the "crisis" assumption that most of the field's published research is so badly flawed that it should be dismissed wholesale. Low engagement by participants may reduc...
Multisite (multilab/many-lab) replications have emerged as a popular way of verifying prior research findings, but their record in social psychology has prompted distrust of the field and a sense of crisis. We review all 36 multisite social-psychology replications (plus three articles reporting multiple ministudies). We start by assuming that both...
Self-protection can have psychological and behavioral implications. We contrast them with the implications of a self-enhancement strategy. Both self-enhancement and self-protection have costs and benefits as survival strategies, and we identify some of the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral tradeoffs associated with the differential preferences f...
‘To learn about X, observe what happens to the system when X is removed.’ What happens to the higher education student experience when, during a pandemic, so many of the avenues for building a sense of belonging are radically and fundamentally disrupted? How should we respond as individuals, a collective and a sector, to redress this? The national...
Three studies demonstrated that situational uncertainty impairs executive function on subsequent unrelated tasks. Participants were randomly assigned to either uncertain situations (not knowing whether they would have to give a speech later, Studies 1-2; uncertain about how to complete a task, Study 3) or control conditions. Uncertainty caused poor...
Sometimes even dieters with the best self-control overindulge. Uncertain situations may undermine the self-control of even well-controlled eaters. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that uncertainty increases unhealthy snacking. Participants were either told that they would be giving a speech, that they would be listening to a speech, o...
The strength model of self-regulation uses a muscle analogy to explain patterns of ego depletion, conservation of willpower, and improved performance after frequent exercise. Our 2007 overview of the literature has been well cited, presumably because of the phenomenon’s importance to theories of selfhood and a wide assortment of applied contexts, i...
People have the ability to make important choices in their lives, but deliberating about these choices can have costs. The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that writing about conflicted personal goals and values (conflict condition) would impair self-control on an unrelated subsequent task as compared to writing about clear persona...
High trait self-control has been traditionally described as a keen ability to resist temptation. The present research suggests that high trait self-control is linked to avoiding, rather than merely resisting, temptation. People high in trait self-control reported engaging in behaviors thought to minimize (or avoid) temptation to a greater extent th...
The current research tested the hypothesis that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. Drawing from a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function, the authors hypothesized that decision making depletes the same resource used for self-control and active responding. In 4 laboratory studies, some participants made ch...
Abstract We examined the relationship between physical self-esteem and claimed self-handicapping among athletes by taking motives into consideration. In Study 1, 99 athletes were asked to report their tendency to engage in claimed self-handicapping for self-protective and self-enhancement motives (trait measures). Low self-esteem athletes reported...
Pain, whether caused by physical injury or social rejection, is an inevitable part of life. These two types of pain-physical and social-may rely on some of the same behavioral and neural mechanisms that register pain-related affect. To the extent that these pain processes overlap, acetaminophen, a physical pain suppressant that acts through central...
Three studies show that the psychological presence of family provides a temporary in self-control. In Study 1, participants (n = 79) subliminally primed the names of their family members subsequently performed better at an ended language task relative to participants primed with neutral words. 2 ruled out two plausible alternative interpretations o...
In the last decade, there has been a tremendous surge of research on the mechanisms of human action. This volume brings together this new knowledge in a single, concise source, covering most if not all of the basic questions regarding human action: what are the mechanisms by which action plans are acquired, mentally represented, activated, selected...
The current research tested the hypothesis that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. Drawing from a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function, the authors hypothesized that decision making depletes the same resource used for self-control and active responding. In 4 laboratory studies, some participants made ch...
Self-control is a central function of the self and an important key to success in life. The exertion of self-control appears to depend on a limited resource. Just as a muscle gets tired from exertion, acts of self-control cause short-term impairments (ego depletion) in subsequent self-control, even on unrelated tasks. Research has supported the str...
The need to belong is a powerful motivational basis for interpersonal behavior, and it is thwarted by social exclusion and rejection. Laboratory work has uncovered a destructive set of consequences of being socially excluded, such as increased aggressiveness and reduced helpfulness toward new targets. Rejected persons do, however, exhibit a cautiou...
Past research indicates that social rejection predicts a wide range of psychological problems (e.g., depression), but laboratory studies examining self-reports of negative affect after social rejection have reported inconsistent results. Salivary cortisol was measured before and after a social rejection/acceptance manipulation for objective assessm...
Previous work has shown that acts of self-regulation appear to deplete a psychological resource, resulting in poorer self-regulation subsequently. Four experiments using assorted manipulations and measures found that positive mood or emotion can counteract ego depletion. After an initial act of self-regulation, participants who watched a comedy vid...
The present work suggests that self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source. Laboratory tests of self-control (i.e., the Stroop task, thought suppression, emotion regulation, attention control) and of social behaviors (i.e., helping behavior, coping with thoughts of death, stifling prejudice during an interracial interaction) showed th...
ONE WAY in which emotions can affect decisions is by making people think and behave irrationally. In this view, emotion is the direct opposite of reason, causing people to make all sorts of bad decisions. For example, when people are jealous, they may commit crimes of passion, and when they are angry, they express road rage (Loewenstein 1996). Henc...
ABSTRACT In two experiments we investigated the causes of low preparatory effort (minimal practicing for an upcoming event that is to be evaluated), a possible form of self-handicapping Experiment 1 found that people with high self-esteem practiced less than people with low self-esteem, although a prior experience of success eliminated this differe...
A model is proposed in which the goal of people with high self-esteem is to cultivate personal strengths in order to excel, whereas the goal of people with low self-esteem is to remedy personal deficiencies in order to become adequate In two experiments, subjects received initial outcome feedback of either success, humiliating failure (internal att...
ABSTRACT A metatrait is the trait of having versus not having a trait It refers to whether a given trait dimension or construct can be used to describe a particular personality Using attitudes as an analog to traits, we argue that the study of personality may benefit from considering metatraits Implications for the nature of traits and for the form...
The-present research examine individuals' responses to major self-esteem threat. It was predicted that following a major threat to self-esteem individuals would experience ego-shock-a temporary "freezing" of. consciousness and emotional numbness. Fifty-two participants wrote a narrative describing a situation where they received a major threat to t...
Social exclusion was manipulated by telling people that they would end up alone later in life or that other participants had rejected them. These manipulations caused participants to behave more aggressively. Excluded people issued a more negative job evaluation against someone who insulted them (Experiments 1 and 2). Excluded people also blasted a...
Social exclusion was manipulated by telling people that they would end up alone later in life or that other participants had rejected them. These manipulations caused participants to behave more aggressively. Excluded people issued a more negative job evaluation against someone who insulted them (Experiments 1 and 2). Excluded people also blasted a...
Why do people's impulse controls break down during emotional distress? Some theories propose that distress impairs one's motivation or one's ability to exert self-control, and some postulate self-destructive intentions arising from the moods. Contrary to those theories, Three experiments found that believing that one's bad mood was frozen (unchange...
Understanding how emotion regulation is similar to and different from other self-control tasks can advance the understanding of emotion regulation. Emotion regulation has many similarities to other regulatory tasks such as dieting, and abstaining from smoking, drugs, alcohol, ill-advised sexual encounters, gambling, and procrastination, but it diff...
Making choices, responding actively instead of passively, restraining impulses, and other acts of self-control and volition all draw on a common resource that is limited and renewable, akin to strength or energy. After an act of choice or self-control, the self's resources have been expended, producing the condition of ego depletion. In this state,...
R. F. Baumeister's (2000) article on erotic plasticity was criticized by B. L. Andersen, J. M. Cyranowski, and S. Aarestad (2000) for not being biological enough and by J. S. Hyde and A. M. Durik (2000) for being too biological. Both critiques were based on drawing a polarized caricature of R. F. Baumeister's actual view, although the two caricatur...
R. F. Baumeister's (2000) (see record 2000-15386-001) article on erotic plasticity was criticized by B. L. Andersen, J. M. Cyranowski, and S. Aarestad (2000) (see record 2000-15386-003) for not being biological enough and by J. S. Hyde and A. M. Durik (2000) (see record 2000-15386-002) for being too biological. Both critiques were based on drawing...
Procrastination (the lack of time spent practicing before an upcoming target task) may be conceptualized as a behavioral self-handicap. In two studies, participants (Study 1, 40 women and 19 men; Study 2, 48 women and 40 men) rated themselves on a measure of chronic procrastination in a general testing session. When participants reported individual...
This study examined the results of repeated exercises of self-control in relation to self-regulatory strength over time. A sample of 69 U.S. college students spent 2 weeks doing 1 of 3 self-control exercises: monitoring and improving posture, regulating mood, or monitoring and recording eating. Compared with a no-exercise control group, the partici...
Choice, active response, self-regulation, and other volition may all draw on a common inner resource. In Experiment 1, people who forced themselves to eat radishes instead of tempting chocolates subsequently quit faster on unsolvable puzzles than people who had not had to exert self-control over eating. In Experiment 2, making a meaningful personal...
If self-regulation conforms to an energy or strength model, then self-control should be impaired by prior exertion. In Study 1, trying to regulate one's emotional response to an upsetting movie was followed by a decrease in physical stamina. In Study 2, suppressing forbidden thoughts led to a subsequent tendency to give up quickly on unsolvable ana...
Procrastination is variously described as harmful, innocuous, or even beneficial. Two longitudinal studies examined procrastination among students. Procrastinators reported lower stress and less illness than nonprocrastinators early in the semester, but they reported higher stress and more illness late in the term, and overall they were sicker. Pro...
Subjects wrote (free-format) descriptions of themselves and of their romantic partners. Self-esteem and publicness moderated these descriptions. In addition to a tendency of high self-esteem subjects to avoid self-derogatory statements more than low self-esteem subjects, qualitative differences in favourable self-presentation were observed. While h...
For both intellectual and practical reasons, it behooves personality psychology to adopt a broad self-definition, which should include interdisciplinary activity. The broad, interdisciplinary status of personality psychology was an important cause of its prominence for several decades, but the field has not maintained this in recent years. We sugge...
Although most interpersonal interactions take place between people who know each other, most self-presentation research has focused on self-presentation to strangers. Five studies showed that self-presentational favorability differed as a function of whether the interaction partner was a friend or a stranger. Studies 1 and 2 found that self-present...
In "Losing Control," the authors provide a single reference source with comprehensive information on general patterns of self-regulation failure across contexts, research findings on specific self-control disorders, and commentary on the clinical and social aspects of self-regulation failure. Self-control is discussed in relation to what the "self"...
The tendency for people with high self-esteem to make inflated assessments and predictions about themselves carries the risk of making commitments that exceed capabilities, thus leading to failure. Ss chose their performance contingencies in a framework where larger rewards were linked to a greater risk of failure. In the absence of ego threat, Ss...
Low self-esteem people have always been a puzzle to researchers. For years, many theorists began with the plausible yet probably false assumption that people with low self-esteem were generally the opposite of those with high self-esteem; by this reasoning, if people with high self-esteem want to succeed and be liked, then people with low self- est...
Studies 1 and 2 showed that identical behaviors had greater impact on the self-concept when performed publicly rather than privately. That is, the self-concept is more likely to change by internalizing public behavior than by internalizing behavior that is identical but lacks the interpersonal context. The self-concept change extends even to behavi...
Four studies sought to differentiate between self-enhancement and self-protection as motivations self-handicapping. High-self-esteem participants self-handicapped to enhance success, whereas low-self-esteem participants self-handicapped to protect against the esteem-threatening implications of failure. This was supported with 2 different forms of s...
This article elaborates a view of anxiety as deriving from a basic human need to belong to social groups. Anxiety is seen as a pervasive and possibly innately prepare form of distress that arises in response to actual or threatened exclusion from important social groups. The reasons groups exclude individuals (incompetence, deviance or immorality,...
Discusses the interpersonal motivations associated with different levels of self-esteem (SE). Although SE refers to an intrapsychic attitude, SE scales often measure self-presentational orientation. High SE scores are associated with a tendency to present one's self in a self-enhancing fashion characterized by willingness to accept risks, focus on...
This research investigated the effects of deliberate self-presentation on one's memory for the interaction, on one's attributions about one's interaction partner, and on the partner's behavior. Prior to a dyadic interaction, some subjects (protagonists) were induced to present themselves either favorably or modestly, while others (naive partners) r...
Many researchers studying individual differences conduct studies in which they ask a large number of individuals to complete a questionnaire designed to measure a specific trait. The researchers then examine whether the individuals receiving a high score on the trait measure will perform differently on a behavioral measure, or other questionnaire,...
Past work has shown that bystanders often fail to help a victim in an emergency, because responsibility for helping diffuses over all the bystanders there. In the present experiment, subjects were exposed to a simulated emergency (a choking fit) that occurred in the course of a structured group interaction. Subjects who had been designated as subor...
Two studies examined the association between newscasters' facial expressions and the voting behavior of viewers. In Exp I, with 45 undergraduates, the facial expressions exhibited by network newscasters while referring to the 1984 presidential candidates prior to the election were investigated. Results indicate that 1 of the 3 newscasters exhibited...
In this chapter, we present an outline of self-presentation theory: the basic units, the main motives, and the causal processes. We propose, first, that there are two types of self-presentational motive, one aimed at impressing or manipulating the audience, the other aimed at claiming a certain public identity and reputation. Second, we distinguish...
In order to outline a model of identity crisis, it is necessary to distinguish two types In an identity deficit (“motivation crisis”), the individual experiences a lack of guiding commitments but struggles to establish personal goals and values In an identity conflict (“legitimation crisis”), the person has several commitments which prescribe confl...
Tested 4 competing hypotheses (masculinity as enhancer, femininity as enhancer, interactive, masculinity as inhibitor) regarding the potential effects of dispositional sex-role orientation on bystander intervention in emergencies. 20 undergraduates, classified on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, participated in a simulated group discussion via headphone...
In Exp I, private expectancies of success were manipulated by having 38 male and 26 female undergraduates complete a confidential preliminary test that was rigged to cause either success or failure. Ss furnished confidential self-reports of expectancies and were informed that their audience expected them to succeed in an anagram-solving task. Resul...
The independent variables for all studies published in odd-numbered volumes of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology were recorded. The variables were then sorted on the basis of resemblance into an emerging scheme of categories. This procedure resulted in a list of 51 categories; this list arguably contains all dimensions of situational...
In 3 experiments, 114 undergraduates performed counterattitudinal behaviors under choice or no-choice conditions in which the behaviors were public or private and anonymous. Results indicate that self-presentation and choice should be considered as sufficient but not necessary causes of cognitive dissonance. In the absence of self-presentation (pri...
In two experiments, the effects of different stimulus presentation orders and trait labels on observers' ratings of performance anxiety were examined. In Experiment 1, 60 college students viewed, in one session, ten 3-min videotapes of a man speaking while displaying a variety of the behavioral manifestations of anxiety. The tapes varied linearly i...
discuss several commonly mistaken assumptions about the mental control of anger / consider processes of regulating the emotional state of anger, based on research involving self-reported techniques for escaping, generating, and prolonging anger / discuss the problems and strategies of justification that surround anger, noting in particular that the...
Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. Mode of access: World Wide Web. Advisor: Dianne M. Tice, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Psychology. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 20, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 46 pages. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 200...