Triggering Conservation of the Self's Regulatory Resources

Three experiments investigated people's motivation to conserve the self's limited regulatory resource after it is depleted by initial self-control exertion. Across the experiments, the results supported the idea of a conservation process. In Experiment 1, depleted participants' subsequent performance decreased when expecting to engage in a future self-regulation task compared to engaging in no task at all. In Experiments 2 and 3 we employed the oend-effecto pattern found in past vigilance research to further examine conservation. In Experiment 2, depleted and nondepleted participants who knew the study ran for 30min performed similarly following 20min of self-regulation, whereas 3min or 10min of self-regulation produced typical depletion effects. Likewise, the findings from Experiment 3 revealed this same conservation pattern using a shortened 6-min initial task. Specifically, when depleted participants believed the study was finished their task performance was better compared to those who believed the study would run for another 20min. In short, the current findings support the idea of conservationdecrements in self-regulatory performance may represent an adaptive inclination to conserve the self's diminished resources rather than an inability to wield further self-control.