“The replication team ran that same experiment at 24 different labs, including ones that translated the letter e task into Dutch, German, French, and Indonesian. Just two of the research groups produced a significant, positive effect, says study co-author Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto. (One appeared to find a negative effect, a reverse-depletion.) Taken all together, the experiments showed no signs whatsoever of Baumeister and Tice’s original effect.”
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“Meta-analyses are fucked,” Inzlicht warned me. If you analyze 200 lousy studies, you’ll get a lousy answer in the end. It’s garbage in, garbage out.
To add an update from 2016.
Apparently some recent attempts to replicate, making sure to avoid the file drawer effect have not been able to replicate many of the older results.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/03/ego_depletion_an_influential_theory_in_psychology_may_have_just_been_debunked.single.html
https://osf.io/92dhr/wiki/home/
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