Implicit theories of willpower and “ego depletion”

Abstract

The goal of this research was to check, if personal theories about the nature of willpower will moderate depletion of self-regulating ability in Estonian and Russian-Estonian school environment. In computer environment high school participants (age 16-18) filled out questionnaires about implicit theories of willpower, personality traits and positivity, then completed two self-control demanding tasks: stop signal task and Stroop task. There was no significant effect of implicit theories on self-control depletion during the experiment. We also did not observe ego depletion in our participants, but instead got a reverse effect: participants from self-control demanding condition performed at Stroop task better than control group. The nature of self-control and ego depletion need more research before studying the influence of implicit theories on self-regulation.