I'm going to make what is, perhaps, an ill-advised and poorly thought out venture into the ego depletion world today that ventures beyond the already very excellent threads others have put together... I know, I know...

ego depletion is a harbinger of the validity crisis https://twitter.com/hardsci/status/1331653105289629696
what the ongoing saga with ego depletion highlights, to me, is not the replication crisis.

I mean, sure, the stuff just does not replicate

But the notion that self-control is a limited resource? Are we sure that isn't true? (I know this is oversimplifying)
The notion that exhaustion depletes our ability to make good choices? Are we sure that's not true? (again, oversimplifying, I know).

Of course people make worse decisions when tired.

But, I think the entire premise of almost all ego depletion paradigms are laughably false.
The issue that has consistently stood out to me with ego depletion literature is one that is characteristic of a **ton** of research.

Psych research keeps taking obvious and somewhat intuitive ideas and then getting all "felt cute, might delete later" with it.
Working in clinical psychology, I think there's clear evidence of something similar to ego depletion.

People slip back into an addiction more easily when exhausted; prolonged stress makes it harder to avoid unhealthy eating habits.

There are countless more examples.
But, do you know what is not even remotely related to those examples? Crossing out every third "e" in a paragraph, or reading a boring book, or doing monotonous word-searches. Those cute "ego depletion" paradigms don't tell us shit about actual lapses in self-control.
So much of the ego-depletion literature was built on these cutesy little designs and folks were rewarded for being "clever" and then p-hacking their way into full-professorships.

But what did any of those studies teach us about the limits of self-control?
Again, I think this ultimately an issue of validity. We, as a field, create tasks that are invalid and unrelated to the actual phenomena of interest and then measures that are invalid to quantify the effect of the invalid tasks and then build a research program on it.
Now, like I said at the beginning of this thread, this might be an ill-advised take and it's certainly not elegantly thought out, but this fundamental lack of validity that underlies sooooooo much of our field is something we are still struggling to grapple with, at all.
There is good work being done on validity, but until we genuinely and deeply grapple with validity (and this, as much as it pains me to say it, means getting much better at qualitative methods), we will never move forward as a science
and, at the end of the day, more than all that rant above, this is what makes me angry.

bad science comes at a very real personal cost for many people https://twitter.com/hardsci/status/1331663521537355776?s=20
and I'll add that there are already some good papers on this stuff! https://twitter.com/daveschester/status/1331677820750356482?s=20
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