The ego depletion effect seems intuitively surprising to me. Science is often unintuitive. I do know that it is easier to make forward-thinking decisions when I am not tired so I dont know.
I don't like Giancotti's claims. He wrote: >This post is a compact reference list of the most (in)famous cognitive science results that failed to replicate and should, for the time being, be considered false.
I don't agree with Giancotti's epistemological claims but today I will not bloviate at length about the epistemology of science. I will try to be brief.
If I understand Marco Giancotti correctly, one particular point is that Giancotti seems to be saying that Hagger et al. have impressively debunked Baumeister et al.
The ego depletion "debunking" is not really what I would call a refutation. It says, "Results from the current multilab registered replication of the ego-depletion effect provide evidence that, if there is any effect, it is close to zero. ... Although the current analysis provides robust evidence that questions the strength of the ego-depletion effect and its replicability, it may be premature to reject the ego-depletion effect altogether based on these data alone."
Maybe Baumeister's protocol was fundamentally flawed, but the counter-argument from Hagger et al. does not convince me. I wasn't thrilled with Baumeister's claims when they came out, but now I am somehow even less thrilled with the claims of Hagger et al., and I absolutely don't trust Giancotti's assessment. I could believe that Hagger executed Baumeister's protocol correctly, but I can't believe Giancotti has a grasp of what scientific claims "should" be "believed."
That might be true, but this article's comment section isn't a good place for it because it doesn't seem like the article is entirely fair. I would not call it dishonest, but there is a lack of certainty and finality in being able to conclude that these papers have been successfully proven to not be replicable.
I think that can be subtly confused by people thinking you can't get better at self control with practice? That is, I would think a deliberate practice of doing more and more self control every day should build up your ability to do more self control. And it would be easy to think that that means you have a stamina for self control that depletes in the same way that aerobic fitness can work. But, those don't necessarily follow each other.