The Bitter Truth About Sugar and Willpower

Abstract

According to the law of conservation of energy, the total amount of energy of an isolated system can never increase. In the domain of psychology, the idea that energy is a limited resource originated with Freud (1923Freud ( /1961. Energy models have been little used in psychology since Freud, though, with the rare exception of the ego-depletion model developed by Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice (1998). According to this research, "the self's acts of volition draw on some limited resource, akin to strength or energy. . . , therefore, one act of volition will have a detrimental impact on subsequent volition" (Baumeister et al., 1998(Baumeister et al., , p. 1252. Research on ego depletion has substantial implications. It has been claimed that reliably exerting self-control, either actively doing something "good" or avoiding the temptation to act on "bad" impulses, can greatly reduce many of the major ills that affect society and people's personal lives, such as "crime, violence, unwanted pregnancy, drug addiction, venereal diseases, bankruptcy, and premature deaths" (Baumeister, Muraven, & Tice, 2000, p. 130). It is not surprising that the work of Baumeister et al. (1998) has had an impact on a number of disciplines, including advertising, behavioral economics, business, consumerism, law, management, marketing, and medicine. In fact, it is fair to say that this seminal article by Baumeister et al. has become a classic: At the time of this writing, it has more than 1,250 citations in the Web of Science.When ego depletion was first proposed, the idea of a limited resource was a convenient metaphor. Given how fundamental exerting self-control is thought to be, it is important to establish the energy source that is depleted and to provide a mechanism by which ego depletion occurs. The most popular explanation found in the literature involves glucose. Gailliot et al. (2007) presented nine studies supporting three main findings: (a) Blood glucose levels are reduced after performing a self-control 654911P SSXXX10.

Challenges to Ego-Depletion Research Go beyond the Replication Crisis: A Need for Tackling the Conceptual Crisis

“… 1 If the glucose-as-self-control-resources hypothesis (Gailliot et al, 2007) had received strong support, this would have resolved the circular-logic problem, but, given the growing evidence against this hypothesis (Beedie and Lane, 2012; Dang, 2016; Vadillo et al, 2016), the field still lacks independent, noncircular evidence for the domain-generality assumption.…”

Are you what you consume? Impact of food, soft drinks, and coffee on cognitive and non-cognitive test scores

“…The lack of impact from soft drinks and food on LOC is consistent with a recent meta study on the relationship between glucose and self-control. It demonstrated that the evidence on such a relationship is weak (Vadillo et al 2016).…”

Evaluating Effort: Influences of Evaluation Mode on Judgments of Task‐specific Efforts

“…The subjective value function for the single evaluation (SE) mode is presented as the solid line, whereas the function for the joint evaluation (JE) mode is presented as the dashed line. General evaluability theory proposes that subjective value functions are more linear in JE across values than in SE (adapted from Hsee & Zhang, 2010) Hockey, 2011 ;Inzlicht & Schmeichel, 2013Job, Walton, Bernecker, & Dweck, 2013;Kelly, Sünram-Lea, & Crawford, 2015;Lange & Eggert, 2014;Lurquin et al, 2016;Kurzban, 2010;Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable, & Myers, 2013;Raichle & Mintun, 2006;Vadillo, Gold, & Osman, 2016;Westbrook & Braver, 2015). Furthermore, whether or not similar systems underlie evaluation of both physical and cognitive effort remains to be determined (Westbrook & Braver, 2015;cf.…”