Bored Into Depletion? Toward a Tentative Integration of Perceived Self-Control Exertion and Boredom as Guiding Signals for Goal-Directed Behavior.

Wolff, Wanja; Martarelli, Corinna S. (2020). Bored Into Depletion? Toward a Tentative Integration of Perceived Self-Control Exertion and Boredom as Guiding Signals for Goal-Directed Behavior. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 15(5), pp. 1272-1283. Sage 10.1177/1745691620921394

[img]
Preview
Text
1745691620921394.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial (CC-BY-NC).

Download (197kB) | Preview

During the past two decades, self-control research has been dominated by the strength model of self-control, which is built on the premise that the capacity for self-control is a limited global resource that can become temporarily depleted, resulting in a state called ego depletion. The foundations of ego depletion have recently been questioned. Thus, although self-control is among the most researched psychological concepts with high societal relevance, an inconsistent body of literature limits our understanding of how self-control operates. Here, we propose that the inconsistencies are partly due to a confound that has unknowingly and systematically been introduced into the ego-depletion research: boredom. We propose that boredom might affect results of self-control research by placing an unwanted demand on self-control and signaling that one should explore behavioral alternatives. To account for boredom in self-controlled behavior, we provide a working model that integrates evidence from reward-based models of self-control and recent theorizing on boredom to explain the effects of both self-control exertion and boredom on subsequent self-control performance. We propose that task-induced boredom should be systematically monitored in self-control research to assess the validity of the ego-depletion effect.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Education > Educational Psychology

UniBE Contributor:

Wolff, Wanja

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 370 Education

ISSN:

1745-6924

Publisher:

Sage

Language:

English

Submitter:

Wanja Wolff

Date Deposited:

14 Apr 2022 14:12

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:49

Publisher DOI:

10.1177/1745691620921394

PubMed ID:

32697921

Uncontrolled Keywords:

boredom ego depletion psychoneurophysiological approach self-control value-based models

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/154567

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/154567

Actions (login required)

Edit item Edit item
Provide Feedback