Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?
Roy E Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne M. Tice
Case Western Reserve University
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 choice to perform attitude-relevant
behavior caused a similar decrement in persistence. In Experiment 3, suppressing emotion led to a
subsequent drop in performance of solvable anagrams. In Experiment 4, an initial task requiring
high self-regulation made people more passive (i.e., more prone to favor the passive-response option).
These results suggest that the self's capacity for active volition is limited and that a range of
seemingly different, unrelated acts share a common resource.
Many crucial functions of the self involve volition: making
choices and decisions, taking responsibility, initiating and inhib-
iting behavior, and making plans of action and carrying out
those plans. The self exerts control over itself and over the
external world. To be sure, not all human behavior involves
planful or deliberate control by the self, and, in fact, recent work
has shown that a great deal of human behavior is influenced by
automatic or nonconscious processes (see Bargh, 1994, 1997).
But undoubtedly some portion involves deliberate, conscious,
controlled responses by the self, and that portion may be dispro-'
portionately important to the long-term health, happiness, and
success of the individual. Even if it were shown that 95% of
behavior consisted of lawful, predictable responses to situa-
tional stimuli by automatic processes, psychology could not
afford to ignore the remaining 5%. As an analogy, cars are
probably driven straight ahead at least 95% of the time, but
ignoring the other 5% (such as by building cars without steering
wheels) would seriously compromise the car's ability to reach
most destinations. By the same token, the relatively few active,
controlling choices by the self greatly increase the self's
chances of achieving its goals. And if those few "steering"
choices by the self are important, then so is whatever internal
structure of the self is responsible for it.
In the present investigation we were concerned with this con-
trolling aspect of the self. Specifically, we tested hypotheses of
ego depletion, as a way of learning about the self's executive
function. The core idea behind ego depletion is that the self's
acts of volition draw on some limited resource, akin to strength
or energy and that, therefore, one act of volition will have a
detrimental impact on subsequent volition. We sought to show
that a preliminary act of self-control in the form of resisting
temptation (Experiment 1 ) or a preliminary act of choice and
responsibility (Experiment 2) would undermine self-regulation
in a subsequent, unrelated domain, namely persistence at a dif-
ficult and frustrating task. We then sought to verify that the
effects of ego depletion are indeed maladaptive and detrimental
to performance (Experiment 3). Last, we undertook to show
that ego depletion resulting from acts of self-control would
interfere with subsequent decision making by making people
more passive (Experiment 4).
Our research strategy was to look at effects that would carry
over across wide gaps of seeming irrelevance. If resisting the
temptation to eat chocolate can leave a person prone to give up
faster on a difficult, frustrating puzzle, that would suggest that
those two very different acts of self-control draw on the same
limited resource. And if making a choice about whether to make
a speech contrary to one's opinions were to have the same
effect, it would suggest that that very same resource is also the
one used in general for deliberate, responsible decision making.
That resource would presumably be one of the most important
features of the self.
Roy E Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne M.
Tice, Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University.
This research was supported by National Institute of Health Grants
MH-51482 and MH-57039. Experiment 1 was the master's thesis of
Ellen Bratslavsky, directed by Roy E Baumeister. Some of these findings
have been presented orally at several conferences.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Roy E
Baumeister, Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University,
10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-7123. Electronic mail may
be sent to rfb2@po.cwru.edu.
Executive Function
The term
agency has been used by various writers to refer to
the self's exertion of volition, but this term has misleading
connotations: An agent is quintessentially someone who acts on
behalf of someone else, whereas the phenomenon under discus-
sion involves the self acting autonomously on its own behalf.
The term
executive function has been used in various contexts
to refer to this aspect of self and hence may be preferable (e.g.,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1998, Vol. 74, No. 5, 1252-1265
Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/98/$3.00
1252
EGO DEPLETION 1253
Epstein, 1973; see Baumeister, 1998). Meanwhile, we use the
term
ego depletion
to refer to a temporary reduction in the
self's capacity or willingness to engage in volitional action
(including controlling the environment, controlling the self,
making choices, and initiating action) caused by prior exercise
of volition.
The psychological theory that volition is one of the self's
crucial functions can be traced back at least to Freud (1923/
1961a, 1933/1961b), who described the ego as the part of the
psyche that must deal with the reality of the external world by
mediating between conflicting inner and outer pressures. In his
scheme, for example, a Victorian gentleman standing on the
street might feel urged by his id to head for the brothel and by
his superego to go to church, but it is ultimately left up to his
ego to start his feet walking in one direction or the other. Freud
also seems to have believed that the ego needed to use some
energy in making such a decision.
Recent research has convincingly illuminated the self's
nearly relentless quest for control (Brehm, 1966; Burger, 1989;
DeCharms, 1968; Deci & Ryan, 1991, 1995; Langer, 1975;
Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982; Taylor, 1983, 1989; White,
1959). It is also known that when the self feels highly responsi-
ble (accountable) for its actions, its cognitive and behavioral
processes change (Cooper & Scher, 1994; Linder, Cooper, &
Jones, 1967; Tetlock, 1983, 1985; Tetlock & Boettger, 1989).
Active responses also have more powerful effects on the self
and its subsequent responses than do passive ones (Allison &
Messick, 1988; Cioffi & Garner, 1996; Fazio, Sherman, & Herr,
1982). The processes by which the self monitors itself in order
to approach standards of desired behavior have also been studied
(Carver & Scheier, 1981; Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Wegner,
1994; Wegner & Pennebaker, 1993).
Despite these efforts, it is hard to dispute that understanding
of the executive function remains far more vague and rudimen-
tary than other aspects of self-theory. Researchers investigating
cognitive representations of self have made enormous progress
in recent decades (for reviews, see Banaji & Prentice, 1994;
Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Likewise, there has been considerable
progress on interpersonal aspects of self hood (e.g., Leary, 1995;
Leary & Kowalski, 1990; Schlenker, 1980; Tesser, 1988). In
comparison, understanding of the self's executive function lags
behind at a fairly primitive level.
power be revived for self-regulation theory, and a literature re-
view by Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice (1994) concluded
that much evidence about self-regulatory failure fits a model of
strength depletion.
An important early study by Glass, Singer, and Friedman
(1969) found that participants exposed to unpredictable noise
stress subsequently showed decrements in frustration tolerance,
as measured by persistence on unsolvable problems, t Glass et
al. concluded that adapting to unpredictable stress involves a
"psychic cost," which implies an expenditure or depletion of
some valuable resource. They left the nature of this resource to
future research, which has not made much further progress.
Additional evidence for a strength model was provided by
Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister (1998), whose research strategy
influenced the present investigation. Muraven et al. sought to
show that consecutive exertions of self-regulation were charac-
terized by deteriorating performance, even though the exertions
involved seemingly unrelated spheres. In one study, they showed
that trying not to think about a white bear (a thought-control
task borrowed from Wegner, 1989; Wegner, Schneider, Carter, &
White, 1987) caused people to give up more quickly on a subse-
quent anagram task. In another study, an affect-regulation exer-
cise caused subsequent decrements in endurance at squeezing a
handgrip. These findings suggest that exertions of self-control
do carry a psychic cost and deplete some scarce resource.
To integrate these scattered findings and implications, we sug-
gest the following. One important part of the self is a limited
resource that is used for all acts of volition, such as controlled
(as opposed to automatic) processing, active (as opposed to
passive) choice, initiating behavior, and overriding responses.
Because much of self-regulation involves resisting temptation
and hence overriding motivated responses, this self-resource
must be able to affect behavior in the same fashion that motiva-
tion does. Motivations can be strong or weak, and stronger im-
pulses are presumably more difficult to restrain; therefore, the
executive function of the self presumably also operates in a
strong or weak fashion, which implies that it has a dimension
of strength. An exertion of this strength in self-control draws
on this strength and temporarily exhausts it (Muraven et al.,
1998), but it also presumably recovers after a period of rest.
Other acts of volition should have similar effects, and that is
the hypothesis of the present investigation.
Ego Depletion
The notion that volition depends on the self's expenditure of
some limited resource was anticipated by Freud (1923/1961a,
1933/1961b). He thought the ego needed to have some form
of energy to accomplish its tasks and to resist the energetic
promptings of id and superego. Freud was fond of the analogy
of horse and rider, because as he said the rider (analogous to
the ego) is generally in charge of steering but is sometimes
unable to prevent the horse from going where it wants to go.
Freud was rather vague and inconsistent about where the ego's
energy came from, but he recognized the conceptual value of
postulating that the ego operated on an energy model.
Several modern research findings suggest that some form of
energy or strength may be involved in acts of volition. Most of
these have been concerned with self-regulation. Indeed, Mischel
(1996) has recently proposed that the colloquial notion of will-
Experiment 1
Experiment 1 provided evidence for ego depletion by examin-
ing consecutive acts of self-control. The study was originally
designed to test competing hypotheses about the nature of self-
control, also known as self-regulation. Clearly the control over
self is one of the most important and adaptive applications of
the self's executive function. Research on monitoring processes
and feedback loops has illuminated the cognitive structure that
1 These researchers also showed that an illusion of controllability
eliminated this effect. From our perspective, this implies that part of the
stress involves the threat or anticipation of continued aversive stimula-
tion, which the illusion of controllability dispelled. In any case, it is
plausible that the psychic cost was paid in terms of affect regulation,
that is, making oneself submit and accept the aversive, unpredictable
stimulation.
1254 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, MURAVEN, AND TICE
processes relevant information (e.g., Carver & Scheier, 1981;
Wegner, 1994), but the actual process by which an organism
alters its own responses or subjective states is far less well
understood. At least three different models of the nature of self-
regulation can be proposed. Moreover, these three models make
quite different predictions about the effectiveness of self-control
immediately after an exertion of self-control in some unrelated
sphere. Experiment 1 provided a test of these three competing
predictions by requiring participants to engage in two seemingly
unrelated acts of self-control.
One model views self-regulation as essentially a skill. In this
model, people gradually develop the skill to regulate themselves
over long periods of time. On any given occasion, however, skill
remains roughly constant across repeated trials (except for small
and gradual learning effects), so there should be little or no
change in effectiveness of self-control on two successive exer-
tions within a short time.
Another model portrays self-regulation as essentially a
knowledge structure. In this view, self-control operates like a
master schema that makes use of information about how to alter
one's own responses or states. On the basis of this model, an
initial act of self-regulation should prime the schema, thereby
facilitating subsequent self-control. Another version of this view
would be that the self-regulatory system is normally in a standby
or depowered mode until it is pressed into action by one act of
self-control. Once activated, the system would remain in opera-
tion ( "on" ) for a time, making further acts of self-control easier.
A third model states that self-regulation resembles energy. In
this view, acts of self-regulation involve some kind of exertion
that expends energy and therefore depletes the supply available.
Unless the supply is very large, initial acts of self-regulation
should deplete it, thereby impairing subsequent self-control.
Thus, the three models respectively predict no change, an
increase, or a decrease in effectiveness of self-control following
an initial act of self-control. Other models are possible, such as
the possibility that self-regulation involves a collection of do-
main-specific but unrelated knowledge structures, so that an
initial act of self-control should prime and therefore facilitate
self-control in the same sphere but produce no change in other,
unrelated spheres. Still, these three models provide sufficiently
conflicting predictions about the sequence of unrelated acts of
self-control to make it worth conducting an initial test.
In the present research, we used impulse control, which to
many people is the classic or paradigmatic form of self-control.
More precisely, we manipulated self-control by instructing some
hungry individuals to eat only radishes while they were faced
with the tempting sight and aroma of chocolate. Thus, they had
to resist the temptation to perform one action while making
themselves perform a similar but much less desirable action.
We then sought to measure self-control in an unrelated sphere,
by persistence at a frustrating puzzle-solving task. A series of
frustrating failures may often make people want to stop doing
the task, and, so, self-control is needed to force oneself to con-
tinue working.
If resisting temptation depends on skill, then this skill would
predict no change in persistence under frustration. If resisting
temptation involves activating a knowledge structure or master
schema, then priming this schema should facilitate self-control,
and people should persist longer on the puzzles. Finally, if re-
sisting temptation uses some kind of strength or energy, then this
will be depleted afterward, and subsequent persistence should
decrease.
Method
Participants. Data were collected in individual sessions from 67
introductory psychology students (31 male, 36 female) who received
course credit for taking part.
Procedure. Participants signed up for a study on taste perception.
Each participant was contacted to schedule an individual session, and
at that time the experimenter requested the participant to skip one meal
before the experiment and make sure not to have eaten anything for at
least 3 hr.
The laboratory room was carefully set up before participants in the
food conditions arrived. Chocolate chip cookies were baked in the room
in a small oven, and, as a result, the laboratory was filled with the
delicious aroma of fresh chocolate and baking. Two foods were displayed
on the table at which the participant was seated. One display consisted
of a stack of chocolate chip cookies augmented by some chocolate
candies. The other consisted of a bowl of red and white radishes.
The experimenter provided an overview of the procedures, secured
an informed consent, and then elaborated the cover story. She explained
that chocolates and radishes had been selected for the taste perception
study because they were highly distinctive foods familiar to most people.
She said that there would be a follow-up measure for sensation memory
the next day, and so she asked the participant to agree not to eat any
chocolates or radishes (other than in the experiment) for 24 hr after the
session.
Participants in the chocolate and radish conditions were then asked
to take about 5 min to taste the assigned food while the experimenter
was out of the room. In the radish condition, the experimenter asked
the participant to eat at least two or three radishes, and in the chocolate
condition, the participant was asked to eat at least two or three cookies
or a handful of the small candies. Participants were reminded to eat only
the food that had been assigned to them. The experimenter left the room
and surreptitiously observed the participant through a one-way mirror,
recording the amount of food eaten and verifying that the participant
ate only the assigned food. (To minimize self-awareness, the mirror was
almost completely covered with a curtain.)
After about 5 min, the experimenter returned and asked the participant
to fill out two questionnaires. One was the Brief Mood Introspection
Scale (BMI; Mayer & Gaschke, 1988), and the other was the Restraint
Scale (Herman & Polivy, 1975). Then the experimenter said that it was
necessary to wait at least 15 min to allow the sensory memory of the
food to fade. During that time, she said, the participant would be asked
to provide some preliminary data that would help the researchers learn
whether college students differed from high school students in their
problem-solving ability. The experimenter said that the participant would
therefore be asked to work on a test of problem solving. The problem
solving was presented as if it were unrelated to the eating, but in fact
it constituted the main dependent measure.
There was also a no-food control condition. Participants assigned to
this condition skipped the food part of the experiment and went directly
to the problem-solving part.
The problem-solving task was adapted from a task used by Glass et
al. (1969), adapted from Feather ( 1961 ). The puzzle requires the person
to trace a geometric figure without retracing any lines and without lifting
his or her pencil from the paper. Multiple slips of paper were provided
for each figure, so the person could try over and over. Each participant
was initially given several practice figures to learn how the puzzles
worked and how to solve them, with the experimenter present to answer
any questions. After the practice period, the experimenter gave the partic-
ipant the two main test figures with the instructions
You can take as much time and as many trials as you want. You
will not be judged on the number of trials or the time you will take.
EGO DEPLETION 1255
You will be judged on whether or not you finish tracing the figure.
If you wish to stop before you finish [i.e., solve the puzzle], ring
the bell on the table.
Unbeknownst to the participant, both these test figures had been prepared
so as to be impossible to solve.
The experimenter then left the room and timed how long the participant
worked on the task before giving up (signified by ringing the bell).
Following an a priori decision, 30 rain was set as the maximum time,
and the 4 participants who were still working after 30 min were stopped
by the experimenter at that point. For the rest, when the experimenter
heard the bell, she reentered the room and administered a manipulation
check questionnaire. When the participants finished, the experimenter
debriefed, thanked, and dismissed them.
Results
Manipulation check.
The experimenter surreptitiously ob-
served all participants during the eating phase to ascertain that
they ate the stipulated food and avoided the other. All partici-
pants complied with the instructions. In particular, none of the
participants in the radish condition violated the rule against
eating chocolates. Several of them did exhibit clear interest in
the chocolates, to the point of looking longingly at the chocolate
display and in a few cases even picking up the cookies to sniff
at them. But no participant actually bit into the wrong food.
The difficulty of the eating task was assessed on the final
questionnaire. Participants in the radish condition said that they
forced themselves in an effortful fashion to eat the assigned
food more than participants in the chocolate condition, F(1,
44) = 16.10, p < .001. They also rated resisting the nonassigned
food as marginally significantly mdre difficult, F( 1, 44) = 3.41,
p < .07. During the debriefing, many participants in the radish
condition spontaneously mentioned the difficulty of resisting the
temptation to eat the chocolates.
Persistence.
The main dependent measure was the amount
of time participants spent on the unsolvable puzzles. A one-way
analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated significant variation
among the three conditions, F(2, 64) = 26.88, p < .001. The
means are presented in Table 1. Pairwise comparisons among
the groups indicated that participants in the radish condition
quit sooner on the frustrating task than did participants in either
the chocolate condition, t(44) = 6.03, p < .001, or the no-food
(control) condition, t(44) = 6.88, p < .001. The chocolate
condition did not differ from the no-food control condition,
t< 1, ns.
It is conceivable that the time measure was affected by some-
thing other than persistence, such as speed. That is, the interpre-
tation would be altered if the participants in the radish condition
tried just as many times as those in the chocolate condition and
Table 1
Persistence on Unsolvable Puzzles (Experiment 1)
merely did so much faster. Hence, we also analyzed the number
of attempts that participants made before giving up. A one-
way ANOVA on these tallies again yielded significant variation
among the three conditions, F(2, 64) = 7.61, p = .001. The
pattern of results was essentially the same as with duration of
persistence, as can be seen in Table 1. Pairwise comparisons
again showed that participants in the radish condition gave up
earlier than participants in the other two conditions, which did
not differ from each other. 2
Moods.
The mood measure contains two subscales, and we
conducted a one-way ANOVA on each, using only the radish
and chocolate conditions (because this measure was not admin-
istered in the no-food control condition). The two conditions
did not differ in valence (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant) of mood,
F(1, 44) = 2.62,
ns,
nor in arousal, F < 1,
ns.
Dieting.
The analyses on persistence were repeated using
dieting status (from the Restraint Scale) as an independent vari-
able. Dieting status did not show either a main effect or an
interaction with condition on either the duration of persistence
or the number of attempts.
Fatigue and desire to quit.
The final questionnaire provided
some additional evidence beyond the manipulation checks. One
item asked the participant how tired he or she felt after the
tracing task. An ANOVA yielded significant variation among the
conditions, F(2, 64) = 5.74, p < .01. Participants in the radish
condition were more tired (M = 17.96) than those in the choco-
late (M = 11.85 ) or no-food (M = 12.29) conditions (the latter
two did not differ). Participants in the radish condition also
reported that their fatigue level had changed more toward in-
creased tiredness (M --- 6.28) than participants in either the
chocolate (M = -0.90) or no-food (M = 1.76) conditions,
F(2, 64) = 5.13, p < .01.
Participants in the radish condition reported that they had felt
less strong a desire to stop working on the tracing task than had
participants in the other two conditions, F(2, 64) = 4.71, p <
.01. Yet they also reported forcing themselves to work on the
tracing task more than participants in the other two conditions,
F(2, 64) = 3.20, p < .05. The latter may have been an attempt
to justify their relatively rapid quitting on that task. The former
may indicate that they quit as soon as they felt the urge to do
so, in contrast to the chocolate and no-food participants who
made themselves continue for a while after they first felt like
quitting.
Discussion
These results provide initial support for the hypothesis of
ego depletion. Resisting temptation seems to have produced a
psychic cost, in the sense that afterward participants were more
inclined to give up easily in the face of frustration. It was not
that eating chocolate improved performance. Rather, wanting
chocolate but eating radishes instead, especially under circum-
Condition Time (min) Attempts
Radish 8.35 19.40
Chocolate 18.90 34.29
No food control 20.86 32.81
Note.
Standard deviations for Column 1, top to bottom, are 4.67, 6.86,
and 7.30. For Column 2,
SDs
= 8.12, 20.16, and 13.38.
2 As this article went to press, we were notified that this experiment
had been independently replicated by Timothy J. Howe, of Cole Junior
High School in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, for his science fair proj-
ect. His results conformed almost exactly to ours, with the exception
that mean persistence in the chocolate condition was slightly (but not
significantly) higher than in the control condition. These converging
results strengthen confidence in the present findings.
1256 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, MURAVEN, AND TICE
stances in which it would seemingly be easy and safe to snitch
some chocolates, seems to have consumed some resource and
therefore left people less able to persist at the puzzles.
Earlier, we proposed three rival models of the nature of self-
regulation. These results fit a strength model better than a skill or
schema model. If self-regulation were essentially a knowledge
structure, then an initial act of self-regulation should have
primed the schema, thereby facilitating subsequent self-regula-
tion. The present results were directly opposite to that predic-
tion. A skill model would predict no change across consecutive
acts of self-regulation, but we did find significant change. In
contrast, a strength or energy model predicted that some vital
resource would be depleted by an initial act of self-regulation,
leading to subsequent decrements, and this corresponds to what
we found.
It is noteworthy that the depletion manipulation in this study
required both resisting one impulse (to eat chocolate) and mak-
ing oneself perform an undesired act (eating radishes). Both
may have contributed to ego depletion. Still, the two are not
independent. Based on a priori assumptions and on comments
made by participants during the debriefing, it seems likely that
people would have found it easier to make themselves eat the
radishes if they were not simultaneously struggling with re-
sisting the more tempting chocolates.
Combined with other evidence (especially Muraven et al.,
1998), therefore, it seems reasonable to infer that self-regulation
draws on some limited resource akin to strength or energy and
that this resource may be common for many forms of self-
regulation. In Experiment 1, we found that an initial act of
resisting temptation (i.e., an act of impulse control) impaired
subsequent persistence at a spatial puzzle task. Muraven et al.
found that an act of affect regulation (i.e., trying either to stifle
or amplify one's emotional response) lowered subsequent stam-
ina on a physical task, that an initial act of thought suppression
reduced persistence at unsolvable anagrams, and that thought
suppression impaired subsequent ability to hide one's emotions.
These various carryovers between thought control, emotion con-
trol, impulse control, and task performance indicate that these
four main spheres of self-regulation all share the same resource.
Therefore, the question for Experiment 2 was whether that same
resource would also be involved in other acts of choice and
volition beyond self-regulation.
Experiment 2
Experiment 2 addressed the question of whether the same
resource that was depleted by not eating chocolate (in Experi-
ment 1) would be depleted by an act of choice. For this, we
used one of social psychology's classic manipulations: High
choice versus low choice to engage in counterattitudinal behav-
ior. Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) showed that people change
their attitudes to make them consistent with behavior when they
have been induced to act in ways contrary to their attitudes.
Linder et al. (1967) showed that this effect occurs only when
people have been led to see their own (counterattitudinal) be-
havior as freely chosen, and many studies have replicated these
effects.
Our interest was not in the attitudinal consequences of count-
erattitudinal behavior, however. Rather, our hypothesis was that
the act of making the choice to engage in counterattitudinal
behavior would involve the self and deplete its volitional re-
source. As an index of this ego depletion, we measured frustra-
tion tolerance using the same task that we used in Experiment
1, namely persistence at unsolvable puzzles. The puzzles, of
course, had nothing to do with our independent variable (next
year's tuition), and so in all direct ways the two behaviors were
irrelevant.
Dissonance research has provided some evidence consistent
with the view that making a choice involves an exertion by the
self. The original article by Linder et al. (1967) reported that
participants in the high-choice (free-decision, low-incentive)
condition spent about half a minute deciding whether to engage
in the counterattitudinal behavior, even though all consented to
do it, whereas low-choice participants did not spend that amount
of time. This is consistent with the view that the self was engag-
ing in some effortful activity during the choice exercise. More
generally, Cooper and Scher (1994; see also Cooper & Fazio,
1984; Scher & Cooper, 1989) concluded that personal responsi-
bility for aversive consequences is the core cause of cognitive
dissonance, and their conclusion puts emphasis on the taking
or accepting of personal responsibility for one's actions--thus
an active response by the self.
The design of Experiment 2 thus involved having people
make a counterattitudinal speech (favoring a large tuition in-
crease, to which most students were opposed) under high- or
low-choice conditions. Because our focus was on the active
choice making by the self, we also included a condition in
which people chose to make a proattitudinal speech opposing
the increase. Choosing to engage in a proattitudinal behavior
should not cause dissonance (see Cooper & Scher, 1994; Coo-
per & Fazio, 1984; Festinger, 1957; Linder et al., 1967), but it
should still deplete the self to some degree because it still in-
volves an act of choice and taking responsibility. We did not
have any basis for predicting whether choosing to engage in
counterattitudinal behavior would deplete the self more than
choosing to engage in proattitudinal behavior, but we expected
that there should still be some depletion.
Me~od
Participants. Participants were 39 undergraduate psychology stu-
dents (25 male, 14 female). They participated in individual sessions.
They were randomly assigned among four experimental treatment condi-
tions: counterattitudinal choice, counterattitudinal no choice, proattitudi-
nal choice, and no speech (control). To ensure that the issue was person-
ally relevant to all participants, we excluded 8 additional potential parti-
cipants who were either graduating seniors or who were on full
scholarship, because preliminary testing revealed that next year's tuition
did not matter to students in these categories.
Procedure. The experimenter greeted each participant and explained
that the purpose of the study was to see how people respond to persua-
sion. They were told that they would be making stimuli that would be
played to other people to alter their attitudes. In particular, they would
be making an audiotape recording of a persuasive speech regarding
projected tuition increases for the following academic year. The topic
of tuition raises was selected on the basis of a pilot test: A survey had
found that students rated the tuition increase as the most important issue
to them.
The experimenter said that all participants would record speeches that
had been prepared in advance. The importance of the tuition increase
issue was highlighted. The experimenter also said that the university's