Michael Inzlicht || The Replication Crisis

we have doctor Michael Inslct on the podcast. Doctor Insluct is a Research Excellence Faculty scholar at the University of Toronto. His primary appointment is as professor in the Department of Psychology, but he is also cross appointed as professor at the Roman School of Management and a research fellow the Behavioral Economics and Action Group. Michael conducts research sits at the boundaries of social psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Along with

the yoel Inbar, he hosts the podcast Two Psychologists for Beers. Michael, I'm really excited to chat with you today. Yeah, well, I'm excited as well. Thank you for having me on.

I'm really like your podcast. I'm a fan of your podcast and well of all these sort of topics you cover on there, as well as the very informal, sort of chatty kind of feel of it, you know, and so let's like, I know the age of the replication crisis, but let's replicate that sort of feel sure on this podcast and see if the replication holds and works in a different context. Sorry, I'm so you know, I'm so nerdy. That was such a nerdy joke, wasn't it. It's a

pretty good one, though. You know. One thing that really helps with the fluidity of our podcast is ours is a beer themed podcast. So we're drinking beers, sometimes more than two, so that helps with the the banter, you know. It's it's more in the morning here. I don't drink beer. I make a rule not to before noon, so I'm strictly coffee this morning. Yeah, I'm on coffee right now as well. But you know, it's an interesting idea for

me to try that someday on the podcast. I can't have beer because of my dietaristrictions, but wine sounds good. Just straight shots of Jack Daniel. That's what we did for the last episode. Oh boy, Well, maybe I'll try that sometime. I think it depends on the guest that's right. And how much we can riff, Well, we can. I already know that we can riff, and you know, we can really just let this conversation unfold. I really don't have a strong structure for this. I have some potential topics.

I thought we could start out with, like the most obvious kind of elephant in the corner, which is the replication crisis, because you've been on the forefront of this topic. You were on the forefront of this topic before. Not to like stroke your ego at all, but like before, the phrase replication crisis was like a thing. I feel like you were standing up. You were saying, I, look, everyone, we need to take a step back and look to see if our biases are creeping into this. Is that right?

Would you admit that I'm not saying you're the only one. I'm not saying the only one. Yeah, I mean, you know what, I'm not sure I'm one of the early early adopters. But I think because you know, it's kind of weird to think of myself as more senior, I'm forty six years old, but I suppose I've been around

for you know, twenty years now doing this. So I think I'm you know, there are a handful of more senior people been standing up and saying, hey, guys, let's you know, let's slow down, and let's rethink what we've been doing and also ask ourselves some serious questions. You know, have we made errors? Have we made mistakes? And I think that's really hard to do when you're a bit more senior, because you've got something on the line now.

I think so. In other words, I think it's easy to point the finger at bad science when it's not your own science, when it's someone else who's doing the science. I think it's a lot harder when you've got some experience under your belt to say, hey, you know, we made mistakes. And when I say we, I'm also talking about myself. And I think perhaps I was one of the earlier ones to do that, to look at myself

in the mirror. And I did that on purpose. I did that, you know, I pointed the finger at myself and blamed myself for some of the mess that we're in because at least before I kind of waited in, I'd seen a lot of people pointing fingers at other people, saying, hey, you over there, sure you're doing something wrong, and you know, invariably what happened then was people got their backs up, people got defensive, and I thought it would be perhaps more productive, it'd be a way forward if I didn't

blame anybody else except for myself and say, listen, I've contributed to the mess, and I'm responsible partly for this mess, and I've got to clean things up. Well. What was particularly remarkable and shocking, because most of us have never seen anyone do that before, was this article you wrote kind of denouncing your work on stereotype threat. And it wasn't just you, I mean, you would colleagues, You had collaborators on that project. You potentially could have taken heat

from your collaborators who didn't say that. Now, did you get any heat you know, the back channel for that? Yeah, that's a really really good question. I think sometimes I don't think things through. I mean I knew, I mean, I knew I was taking a risk, and I knew I was, I guess potentially butting the hand that fed me. So in this blog post that you're referring to, I actually was pointing at really two areas of work that

I engaged in. So one area, as you mentioned, Stereotype Threat, But really that was a secondary player in that blog post. The bigger player was its work I'd done on ego depletion and self control, and that had been kind of more prominently in the spotlight with regards to having replication problems and Stared Up Threat. You know, there have been whispers, and if you're paying attention, it's more than whispers. You're you're you're seeing, You're seeing people even screaming about it.

And yeah, I was worried about it because I was worried about, you know, suggesting there might be problems with Stereotype Threat, because again, I mean, these are personal friends, these are mentors, These are people who it's not a doubt in my mind that without their help, without their support, financial and otherwise, I would not be here today. So yeah, you know, to suggest that some of that work might not be a solid I mean I was. It was

disloyal of me. And I struggled with whether I should even point the finger at Stared Up Threat, because you know, I'm indebted to some of these people and I'm thinking most you know, most closely about my postdoc supervisor, Josh Aronson, who is nothing but amazing to me, and also just a mention of a person, a great person. He's a friend of mine as well. Yeah, yeah, so I just I'm worried about it. And I know that he was

a bit upset with me after that blog post. I know he wished that I had spoken to him about it before I had published it. But you know, I'm in this weird position, you know, like I'm a human being, I'm a friend, I'm loyal to my to the people who were I consider my friends and mentors. But at the same time, I've got this other cap, which is a scientist. And as a scientist, I think my job is foremost to you know, speak about truth, you know, to small t truth you know as I see it.

You know, speak about you know, the lay of the land as I see it. And what I saw and still see are problems problems with stereotype threat. You know, it's not specific to staradep threat. I think there are problems written large in the field. But I know what I know, and I know startup threat, and I think some of the there are problems. Now, I don't think the problems is stared up threat are as mature as let's say, in other areas and that's because we haven't

had this big, massive replication attempt yet. But I think that's on the way and we'll see what happens. Yeah, thanks for your honesty about that. You know, you point to a good issue that I wanted to discuss with you. I mean, the social human aspect of science sometimes cannot be removed from the criticism aspect of I mean, some people do remove it, and they come across as assholes,

you know. But if you're a human and you don't want to come across an asshole, but you want to be productive and move the field forward, it sometimes puts people scientists in a tough position if they have deep respect for you know, humanity and the fellow scientists who

put in such hard work. I think, you know, science is so freaking hard, Like people don't really really I mean the people who like in the public who aren't scientists, who write these headlines like you know, this study proves this what I mean, I don't think they really fully understand just how like hard it is to you know, you can go through years and years collecting data from

like sixty participants. If it's like a longitunal like really detailed, like say a diary study or something, and then like if it doesn't replicate, you know, it's fair to like talk about I mean, we want to talk objective about this, but at the same time, we don't want to devalue the real humanity of that researcher who And I'm assuming good intentions. I'm assuming there wasn't data fabricated. I'm saying

it just didn't work out scientifically. Fabrication is a whole different issue, right, But you know, just a human side of like someone an earnest attempt to get at the truth about something and let's say it doesn't replicate or whatnot, and then the media kind of makes it is means sometimes about it, like you know, like almost with Glee and some you know, like with Glee, like look, this didn't work out, you know, like isn't that exciting in a way, But let's not forget that, like that person

really put in bood sweat and tears into that. You know. Yeah, I mean I agree with your assessment. I think sometimes the human side gets lost, you know, I think you were right to bracket out fraud. I mean, you know, I think fraud is incredibly serious and important, but in my estimation, it's probably a small problem and it's still real. Yeah,

it's real, but I suspect it's small. But I think, you know, the replication issues are not in that arena of fraud for the most part, I believe they're in the arena of researchers trying their best to conduct good science and I think, you know, making mistakes. And I think right we're experiencing now is a massive field correction where we're realizing en mass as a group, we might have been playing a bit loose and fast with our

inferential tools. And also maybe we didn't have it as deep of an understanding of the limits of our inferential tools. And I'm talking here about stats. But in the last I think people have you know, for the most part, researchers do have the best of intentions. They're trying to do good work. I honestly believe that, And because of that, I think you have to give researchers to the benefit

of the doubt. Now that doesn't mean if mistakes are found, if there are error is intentional or not, it doesn't mean we can't call those out. But I think it's important to when you do call them out, remember there's a human being on the other side, and try to not inform motives, try not to infer you know something, you know something beyond what you can't see. Talk about what you can see, which is the data and the

infrises that are being made. And I think if you stick to that and again realizing there's a human on the other side, I think you're a bit safer. And I still think we're going to have this correction going on, but we're less likely to be assholes, as you said. But that being said, even if you are kind and polite and realize there's a human on the other side, I still think that we have really tough time as humans,

as scientists dealing with criticism. So even if someone critiques you gently and kindly and politely, I still think that sometimes we overreact and sometimes we personalize criticism that's not personal, and that's because we are so invested in our own science. We're so invested in our work that we can't help but feel personally attacked. So I have no doubt that sometimes people have felt personally attacked, they even felt bullied, when that hasn't necessarily been the intention or hasn't even

necessarily happened. So I think we had to grow a thicker skin as scientists as well. So yes, we need to be polite, but we also have to realize, hey, we're all trying to seek our truth here, and if we get it wrong, it's actually better for the collective enterprise if someone tells us that we're wrong and we have a thicker skin about it. Yeah, for some people listening to that who may have gone through it might disagree or even be offended by you saying thicker skin.

I'm trying to think of better from every perspective in the world right now. You know, like you can imagine, like I saw this feature piece on Amy Cuddy, right, and I was like, and it was painted as like a gender thing, you know, like really dominant males bullying the female scientist, and you know, like, do you think that does happen in certain instances? Like is it possible in certain inces that some people are seeing it that way? But it's not actually the truth. We're truth seekers, So

what do you think the truth is? Yeah, so, I mean there's and there are a few issues there. So so if ify want to hone in, I mean hype picking on Amy. So I know Amy personally, and you know, I know she's gone through a hard time, so that is legit. There is legit bullying, you know. Well, no, let's let let's kind of let's unpack a little bit. So I know for sure that Amy is going through a hard time. I know she's personally experiencing distress and anxiety,

and and she certainly experiences bullying. But then the other other then we have to ask, Okay, but why you know she might experience that, but was there actually bullying? You know, from my perspective, I you know, if we can't bullying as piling on, you know, persistent and consistent criticism, I think for sure. I mean I think you know someone you know, you know, Andrew Gellman for example, someone who's you know, I believe, just down the street from

where you are. Yeah, totally, Yeah, So I think he, like you know, named her, I don't know, hundreds of times in a blog post, and maybe anyone mentioned wasn't bad, but it's just like the persistent and consistent. So yeah, that might be kind of piling on, and one could construe that is bullying. I do think that's possible. And how do you see it? Along gender lions? Have you noticed or witnessed that at all. So, I mean, at

first of all, I've heard the claim. I've heard the claim that there's some of the critiques are more likely to be leveled against women, and maybe especially more junior women. You know, it's tough for me to say, I don't I don't have any data in front of me. It seems to me, like, you know, clearly Amy is a prominent woman who's been critiqued. But I've also seen lots of prominent men who've been critiqued. So Roy Baumeister, he's been savagely critiqued, John Barge. I know he does care.

I know he's been Yes, he does care, that's true, that's by the critiques, and he's also been again, you know, criticis has been a lot of people, you know, Brian Wansink. So I don't know. I mean, I would want to see data before I make claims of there's being a gendered element. You know, I recognize that this is possible, and I recognize that people have made this claim. I

just don't know how the data behind it. Yeah, I appreciate that, you know, I want to see the data, and that can get you in trouble sometimes some people want you to take a certain stance on something a very hot political issue or a hot ideological issue. And if you're the type of person who responds to questions like you just responded, that doesn't make you friends with everyone. It actually makes you friends with no one in a sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

that's true. I mean I guess hard sometimes to say, like, look, i'd rather wait to see what the bigger picture looks like. Well, I mean, I think there are times when you don't need to wait because it's clear already the evidence is already out there. So for example, it's like last week or two weeks ago, I saw some without mentioning any names, is in the political arena, not in the science arena. Someone you know, some another controversial thing happened in the US.

It seems to happen every week now, and so it said, hey, hold on, you know the progressive element here, you know, maybe it's not what you think, Maybe it's something else. So actually this is like I can give the example here. This is like, you know what when almost pipe bombs are being sent last week and I saw some you know, some you know more centris quote unquote centrists people saying hey, this is possible. This is not you know, some right

wing nationalists doing this. It could be a false flag attack. And I'm like, really, like, think of the priors of that, Think of the priors of that. You know, it's sure, it's possible, this is happening. You know, I'm not going to die. This is this is this is not possible.

But the prior yeah, it's just not probable. So I'm going to draw my conclusion based on my priors here, So you know, I think we can we can have these priors and and but again with the case of the gender nature of these attacks, the evidence I see is like it seems like prominent men and women are being attacked. And for me, I don't see the genderate element. But I don't deny that's possible or even the gendered

aspect of the style of the criticism. Like, I mean, there are gender differences in antagonism as a personality trait, you know, agreeableness versus agreeableness. I mean, women on average tend to score higher on agreeableness, right, So I wonder if sometimes that plays a more nuanced role in communication science communication between genders. You know what, I'm trying to

talk to you about here is. But I'm trying to bring in the human side of it, of science and just illustrate in this conversation how it's hard to separate like science from the human response. Yeah, I mean absolutely. I mean there's so many there's so many factors that go into the response. I mean, the fact that they're go into the response. You know, so again being criticized and what's your response to it. But also there are

factors that go into the act of criticizing. And so you mentioned agreeableness or lack of agreeableness, and you know, on average, women tend to be less a story, I tend to be more agreeable than men, and I think you might see that being played out on who is

more likely to be a critic. So again, I don't have to see more data, but I believe my impression is that, you know, men are more vocal, more vocal critics online, it seems like, and they're more likely to be you know, again loving this critiques and maybe also loving them sometimes in less polite tones, I believe. But that's a slightly different question than you know, the so that's gendered maybe in the side of the critiquer of

the critic. And yeah, for sure. Yeah, but I'm not sure about the about the side of the target, Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I was just talking about the critiquer. I was specifically talking about the critiquer because and then within critiquers, you know, it's interesting to think, like, can we ever become really good at distinguishing like an academic bully versus a well intentioned critique like James Coyn has been getting a lot of blowback finally, you know, for his manner

of disightfully and I do think rightfully. Yeah, absolutely, That's why I said finally. You know, it's like, you go that many years being an academic bully, you know it's going to catch up to you, right, But can't you sort of tell as well, like the difference, Like I can I feel like there's a certain style and tone that seems like, oh, that's a reasonable critique. If the other person's offended, well that's more their problem because they took it personally. But I can tell when something is

a pretty reasonable critique. For being an academic bully, you have a good barometer for that as well. I mean, I have my own barometer, and I think I suspect mine is probably consistent with yours. So there are a handful of people who I've seen, you know, engage in criticism, you know, James Coin would be one of them where I'm like, this is off bound, this has crossed the line, or multiple lines. I think it's maybe a handful of people like that. So yeah, I mean I certainly see them,

and I react negatively to them. You know, when I first joint Twitter, I was, you know, let's say, you know, there are two camps. It's kind of slightly thing of camps. But I was maybe more on camp status quo, like, oh, I think, you know, yeah, we got some problems here that might not be as deep as some people claim. So I was kind of more defending, and I was really reacting negatively against people who I thought were criticizing,

you know, politely or just just being assholes essentially. Yeah, But as I've kind of seen more the response of people who are denying the problems, I'd be started to be like, no, I think the problems are deeper than people are saying, because like, why is there this reluctance to say, hey, there are problems here? And also the evidence, you know, every week it seemed, you know, it's calmed

down out quite a bit. But a few years ago, every week it seemed like another big paper wasn't being replicated. You know, multiple lab things weren't working out, statistical analyses suggesting this is bad. So it's just like, wow, okay, like how can you maintain your opinion of the status quo. Yeah, And but also it seems particularly in social psychology though, like I wouldn't say in my field of personality psychology, like it's like, oh, we didn't replicate the Big five.

You know, like if you have very very large samples and you have reliable and valid psychometric tests, I find less of a replication crisis. It might be never the ephemeral nature of social psychology experiments that make it more prone to replicated. I don't know, I'm just putting that forward. I'm thinking about it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and there's lots of reasons. But yeah, personality I believe in a lot better place, I think for multiple reasons, the bigger

samples also working. If you mentioned the Big five, so working in a strong tradition where everyone's kind of working on similar or not everyone, but a lot of people working on similar problems, where it seems like psychology is you know, is plagued by small samples. It's also plagued by bad theory or lack of theory. So hey, I've got an idea. Let's try this, and then you try it and you try to be ten times and you publish the two that work or something like that. So

I just think, yeah, there are multi multiple reasons. But I don't think it's only social psychology. I think any field that relies you know, it doesn't initially have a strong theoretical basis, have small samples, that relies on between subjects analysis especially, and that's you know, largely problematic. But you know, so I think developmental psyche might be problematic. I think clinical psych is most certainly problematic within psychology.

Then you can talk about other areas that's out of psychology. Cool, I have problems too. Cool. So I've really been enjoying reading your recent research in preparation for this interview, and I thought for the rest of our chat today we could talk about some of your most recent findings. Let's talk about self control. Is the one most closely linked to what we've just been discussing was the replication crisis. Can you tell me. You wrote this paper called is

ego Depletion Real? And analysis of arguments? Can you kind of summarize some conclusions you came to from that article? Yeah, that's so, this is a paper that's impressed. Now the first author's Malt to Freeze and really the main movement shaker of that paper. But I've contributed a lot to it as well. That's why I've been out there. But essentially, I think the idea behind this paper is we wanted to take what appeared to be a really heated debate

that was happening largely online. It was happening largely on social media with academics, you know, really arguing and debating back and forth with one another, but also you know, commenting on trends and recent publications, you know, what is

the state of the field of egodopletion. So kind of to give a little background ego depletion, the idea of ego depletion is an idea put forward by Y Baumeister and as students back in let's say mid to late the nineteen nineties, where they propose this phenomenal of you get a polation, you get to plation. Is the phenomena whereby you essentially feel tired, you've engage in some sort of cognitive effort, and because you've engaged in cognitive effort at time one, you have less of it at time too.

So it relies on a kind of a couple of central ideas. The first is that self control is a central resource that many many different things that appear different on the surface actually beneath its surface rely on controlled processing. So for example, you know, eating healthy, if you're trying to restrict your food intake, that would be require self control. If you're trying to get yourself to the gym, that requires self control. If you're trying to study for a test,

that might require self control as well. They all are kind of different skills or different behaviors that they all might require this kind of effortful deliberation, maybe pushing back certain predispositions or desires for the sake of some long term goal. So that's proposition one. Propacist number two, and the central one is that this self control relies on

a limited resource. So not only is it central, but it's limited and it runs out so much like fuel that runs your car, you've got this self control fuel that powers your brain your mind and when you use it you lose it. If you use it to control your impulse for you know, something a time one, you'll

have less of it a time too. And anyway, so the central goal of this paper was to say, hey, like, what is the evidence in favor of the existence of this phenomenon, this notion that we are fatigable and when we are our behavior is affected afterwards. So what's the evidence in favor of it, and what's the evidence suggesting otherwise?

And we went through, you know, a long series of arguments in favor, long series of arguments you know, not in favor, and I mean the really short conclusion is that, you know, despite this being studied now for twenty years, despite their the accounts are vary, but you know, anywhere between four hundred and six hundred separate empirical studies of

the ego deopletion phenomena. Despite having you know, these six hundred or so studies, and despite there being twenty years of research and lots of theorizing, despite capturing the imagination of multiple fields, despite best sellers being written about it, it's not clear whether the phenomenon is real. Row That was my Scooby doo what row. Yeah. So, now, to be clear, we're not saying we have evidence that it's not real. Okay, at least at least our actions the

existence of God that you're making the same argument. You're like, I'm not saying God doesn't exist, but I am kind of saying it's nine nine percent probable he doesn't or she doesn't. Well, I wouldn't go as far as that, I would say it. I would say it's more that it's inconclusive. So it's it's more like, you know, we cannot affirm the positive. We can't say here's the phenomenon, just because there's so many questionable pieces of evidence in there.

So the existence of publication bias, the existence of peace hacking that we know that affects the published record, you know, failures to replicate, massive failures to replicate. But also the evidence isn't so so strong that it doesn't exist either, right, So we're like, hey, our conclusions like we're just not sure which is is damning as well. I mean it's like, hey, after all this stuff, we just don't know. It's as

if we're in square one essentially. Yikes. So let's say, okay, let's say that the truth is that it isn't real. Let's think it through these implications. So what explains like the feeling that it's real? Like I certainly, after a taxing day of exerting lots of self control, I feel exhausted for exerting any more self control. It's like I'm much more susceptible, at least it seems to me at eating the cookies. You know, Right, that's a great question,

and it's actually one that I think puzzles me as well. So, you know, to kind of rephrase your question, it's like, how is it possible that all these studies cannot find positive evidence for something that we clearly know is true the quality just I can tell you my quality makes it true. Right, So I think there's a couple of answers there. So the first answer is that, well, maybe we just haven't captured that phenomena in the lab. Okay.

So the typical lab demonstration is you get people to work hard on some cognitive task for you know, I think the modal amount of time is about five minutes. Okay, So you work on something hard for five minutes and then you kind of test your level of self control after that five minute period. Well, guess what, you know, maybe five minutes just not long enough. Maybe we wouldn't have escaped the savannah if we couldn't you know, think through, think hard for five minutes. Maybe you know the kind

of experience you're talking about is hours, all day long. Yeah, all day long. Right. So there's I think a brilliant paper published a couple of years ago now in PNAS, so the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences, and it showed or demonstrated, well, they could not find it a depletion effect within an hour. They didn't find it within two hours or within three. They found it emerged at about hour four, so, which is kind of a crazy study. So they had people and this is also

an fMRI study. They had people in the lab. Yeah, in the SMI machine for six hours. Yeah, I mean, you know, period would bring in there, but yeah, the p to eat. But they found deficits only at emerging at hour four and then obviously getting a lot bigger at our six but the first four hours. And I find that remarkable because I find that almost too long. I feel like after I give a one hour lecture, I feel like I'm drained and I feel like I don't want to. I can't I talk about as post

talk blindness. I just can't think. I can't, like really, you know, answer questions very well after an hour of speaking. Have they ever conducted any meta analyses that looked at individual difference moderators, see if there's any robust sort of personality moderators there. I think there are a number of studies that would include individual difference variables. I'm not sure if they included things like the Big Five, but they

started to include things that relate to conscientiousness. Right, So trade self controls a bunch of these trade self control measures out there that all kind of are highly correlated with one another, and they'll correlate with the conscientiousness. But the problem is that there's no consistent evidence in one in one direction or the other for trade self control. But the problem is that the lab paradigms are just not strong enough to evoke fatigue, is what I'm saying.

It's nothing to moderate, is the problem. If you're you know, I remember I've seen a paper quote unquote depleted someone by having them do twenty incongruent groop trials. We're talking

about a minute a minute of just naming colors. I mean that's yes, it's taxing in a really really minor way, but that's not going to lead to downstream consequences, So that's not the same thing as me downing you know, like five hundred cookies at once, right, or restraining Yeah, I should have said I should restrain cavigated my face and restraining it. Yeah, Yes, I just think the lab

paradigms were not strong enough. And you know, when people have gone and done stronger manipulations, they're finding more, they're more like going to find out and it's consistent with the idea. But even then that's just not enough of them,

so there's nothing to moderate. Yeah. And also, I don't know if you see this as big of a problem, but I see a really really big problem with this kind of research, the fact that self report measures of self control are really not very small correlation with more performance oriented measures of self control like the stroop task

that you just said. And I know you did a really cool Bayesian analysis of that, but I was worrying if you could first of all discuss that paper a little bit why a Bayesian analysis can add more perspective on that, and then also let's talk through the implications of this finding for maybe why we're not finding the ego depletion effect and the methods we're currently using. Yeah,

so there's a couple of things in there. So in this paper that you mentioned, so you know, ess as you were examining the relationship descriptively, the relationship between trade self control as reported by individuals so SEFT reports and then behavioral supposedly behavior on measures of control, and what we found is essentially there is zero association between those two. Found that in my own research as well. Yeah, yeah, and I was very surprised by this. Maybe I shouldn't

have been, because other people have found this. You know, Angela Duckworth conducted at analysis that included, I forget how many suities on that specific question, but you know, a decent number, and her estimate was, I then closer to a correlation of point one, so pretty small, but still there.

Whereas we found that that that estimate was closer to I think point oh three or point oh four, depending on what metric you want to use, and also, you know, more consistent with a knull than with the alternative there

being an association. So I was surprised because these two, at least in theory, should be getting at you know, some of the same things, right, So people who so Roy Bama is for example, he defined self control as you know a number of things, but were the main driver was the ability to restrain you know, dominant impulses, the ability to kind of suppress your you know, prepotent tendency and to replace it with some other so you know, pushing away the food impulse, you know, the eat the

cookies impulse and eat the salad and replace that with you know, eat salad instead. And so that's what's supposedly being captured by well, that's what the contract is supposed to measure. And then he came along and with Junetagni proposed this highly used self control trait measure, and that's supposed to capture you know, those sorts of things as well.

But then we have these behavioral indices. These are indiciries, you know, looking at people's you know, reaction time in terms of how they perform on trials, on tasks that involve what we think involve more inhibition, more restraint, or less restraint. And these are the I can get in what these things get at. But essentially there are people call them to you know, they get a intentional control or inhibitory control. They're supposedly behavioral indices of that thing.

So now we've got two measures. One of the self report that at least in part is supposed to get at restraint. And then you've got this behavioral measure that again is supposed to get at restraint. But then when you look at their association there, we found they're zero. It's it's more consistent with zero than with not zero, and we use the Bayesian. The Bayesian analysis allowed us to say something about it's you know, how much it's like the null you know, the null distribution versus like

an alternative distribution. In other words, we can affirm a null, which you can't necessarily do. You can do it sometimes but with some extra kind of procedures, but typical frequent the statistics, you can't necessarily affirm a null. You can only reject the null hypothesis. You can't say, you know, you can't affirm the not lipothesis. With Bayesian you're more likely to get there. So that's why we use basin. Essentially, we could say, you know, what is this more like?

Is it's more like a null distribution or an alternative distribution. So that's what you know. In essentially, we're saying, hey, this looks like the zero association, but the implications of that are kind of wild. They're like, well, hold on, wait one second. Here, you're telling me these two things that are supposed to be measuring the same thing are not,

and you know, and this is maybe the truth. Yeah, so that's you know, what the real one is one, but also another one is like, you know, the implication might be. You know, now this is controversial a little bit because I think people are still arguing and debating about what the STROOP task actually measures, which is, you know, that's going to have for fifty years, we still don't fully have a resolved, you know, answer about what it's

actually measuring. But you know, I think this consensus that it is getting out of intentional control may be inhibitory control. So does that then mean that the self report scale is not getting at that, it's not associated, it's not getting at the restraint aspect of control. And if so, then I think it offers interesting clues. The reason it offers interesting clues is because those self report scales are really really important. Right If they predict all kinds of

things later in life. They seem to be more powerful than the behavioral measures in the sense of their predictive validity. They can predict things far with far better fidelity than the behavioral measures can. But now it suggests, well, why why is you know, for example, traite conscientiousness or self control predicting life outcomes you know, to tenty thirty years later. Why is that doing that? And it might not be because those people who are high in trade self control

aren't necessarily restraining themselves. They might be doing something else to achieve the good life. So we know, for example that you know, people high in trade self control have lived better lives in almost every dimension. You know, trade conscientious is a great trait to have you you know, if you have children, you want them to be conscientious. Right, So what's positive about conscientiousness or what's positive about trade self control might not be that they have a better

ability to restrain themselves. Instead, they might achieve those positive outcomes through different means. Okay, this is so important, and you've set me off in twenty directions. But I want to say that I did this analysis, which personality traits are most or which character traits are most predictive of

well being? And I looked at, you know, all these twenty four character traits, and I found that if you do a rank or a correlation of like all these character strengths and their relative strength of prediction to a very robust measure well being in life, you find it the very very bottom is prudence or self restraint, you know, and self control. These things are actually the very bottom of the list in terms of what leads to a

life well lived. Look, this is very paradoxical because on the one hand, so much of life really is self control, is self regulation, and so that's why I think maybe an important distinction here between self control and self regulation.

And I like the way this distinction has been made by various researchers like Blair n Yu, you know, a Clancy Blair, because you know, he wrote this paper saying, well, look, I mean what's more important is that we have the capacity to inhibit it when we want to, but not that we consistently reliably do it. Maybe that's an important distinction. Yeah,

I think it is. I think it's very important. I think distinguished between self controltile again would define as kind of this power to restrain yourself versus other means to achieve your goals. So for example, planning simply thinking about your goals in the future, that's a very effective way. Goal setting is a very effective way of meeting your goals.

And you could goal set and not necessarily restrain yourself when you, for example, face temptations and it turns out that's the goal setting that's really critical and the restraint might not be as critical. But now I have a question for you. I want to turn it around a bit on you. This analysis that you just mentioned, we rank ordered, we know what predicts the good life. I mean you said that restraint was kind of at the bottom.

Did you have other facets of conscientious did they rise more to the top or or am I completely off there? Now this is using the Via Character Trends survey, which is not the Big five, so there's no like consciousness is not one of the twenty four you know, character strengths.

But what I think is an interesting pattern of data is that the weakest weakest correlation was judgment and prudence, and the top two where gratitude and love and things like creativity, self expression, you know, self actualization, is not the life of prudence, you know, necessarily overall. So first of all, did I answer question there? Because yeah you

think yeah, I think you did. Although you're predicting a well being, so subjective well being a very broad measure well bringing that included a composite of connection meaning in life purpose health, you know, like a composite health well being scoring. Yeah, I see, Okay, So I'm typically when I examine these things, I'm typically looking at more I mean, while being is certainly one of them, but I guess I'm interested in more performance based kinds of things. So,

you know, grades in school. Beautiful paper pubbi and twenty eleven by Moffitt examining you know, a life outcome of children who have been assessed in terms of their levels of self control, and then follow them twenty thirty forty years later. This is the New Zealand sample and I Dunity example, and they find that those kids who are rated as having high self control as kids were more likely to have money in the bank twenty years later.

They're more likely to do they're less likely to be in prison, they're more likely to be healthy, they're less likely to abuse drugs. So all the good stuff you know they have, and then of course there's tons of research on you know, trade. Conscientious is looking at longitudinally, cross sectionally, finding all that you know relates to, you know, relationship satisfaction, likelihood of you know, uh, you know, being married,

not being divorced, all that other stuff. So those the kinds of things, and from my analysis at least, it seems like consciences would be extremely important. But again maybe not the restraints side, maybe more the good yeah, you know, situations to latch, you know, a planning, you know, seeing things through. That's a good point. You know, these character strengths, like I said, none of them I think can be reduced to conscientiousness. There's some of them show correlations with

various Big five and our papers on that. But I think, you know, consciousness is you know, Brent Roberts has done this beautiful job mapping the herochical train of consciousness and self control is a lower level, you know, like restraint is a lower it was like a third in the hierarchy, you know, like, and then you have more proactive aspects

of conscientiousness. I suspect the more proactive elements are the ones that are most predictive of the good life and you know, like industriousness and just like you said, goal setting, well goals, I think seems to be a prolac development, right, because you're taking control, you feel in control of your life. Like if you're constantly self controlling, but you don't feel like you're in control of your life, I feel like that would lead unhappiness. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

I think you got it exactly right there. And Rett Roberts, by the way, it's like one of my gods. I mean, I think he's like the absolute best work and self

control period. But yeah, and this is really cool. Analysis by Denise de Ritter and Will Hoffman is showing something something a parallel finding suggesting that those who are high in trade self control and you're going to place trade self control with trade conscientious is because they're so highly correlated here, they actually in the moment are actually using less state self control. So people high in trade self control are not actually controlling themselves in the moment more,

they're controlling themselves less, which is right. It's kind of a paradox. And that's because what we mean by state self control is, you know, this kind of willpower like pushing things away. Those who have high trade self control. You know, it seems like they're designing their lives such that they face fewer temptations to begin with and therefore don't need self control. And what happens when they actually

face temptations is actually they do worse. But they just set their lives so they don't have that any temptations to begin with. They tie themselves to the mask more. Yes, that's right. Yeah, I love that. Cool. So let's let's we I mean, we could talk about self control for eons, but let's move on to some of your recent research. You published call through the paper they angela Duckworth recently, right that I just saw. Yeah, that's right. So that's

hopefully one day published. It's a it's a pre print that it's a working paper. You's a working paper, the whole paper. Oh, thank you, thank you. Yeah, that was a paper. Really again that the I feel like I'm you're're naming all these papers that are like my brilliant you know, collaborators have done most of the work for so it's in this case, uh yeah, my my brilliant former postdoc and now you know is a professor at

Carlton University. Her name is Marina Milievskaya, and Brian Gala, who is Angels Yes, that's right, is at the same time at Pennause office was right across from mind. Oh that's awesome. Yeah, oh that's great. Yeah. So I like angela lotch is delightful and so like so energetic and yeah,

so many ideas. It's wonderful. Yeah. So we had this one paper again hopefully it'll be will be a paper now which is a working paper where we you know, so I'm a social psychologist, but i also have a cognitive psychology hat, and I'm really interested in effort and interested in what's called it's been around this law of least work. You know, psychology, you've got very very few laws, but one of them is the law of least work. And that's this notion that organisms, you know, as low

as you know, crickets and grasshoppers up to humans. We show this pattern where whereby if you give us a choice between earning the same equivalent reward, but one requires more effort, one requires less effort by effort that could be physical efforts that the grasshopper has to hop like you know, five versus one hop or the rat has got to go you know, one meter versus ten meters, or the human has got to do ten strip trials to think through something, or one strip trial to get

the reward. Invariably, after you learn the contingency, all these animals will choose the less effortful thing. Can that makes sense? We're lazy. Yeah, that was going to say that's the lazy I thought this is. Yeah, so we're lazy physically and mentally, so, you know, I believe it was Susan Fisk and Shelley Taylor coined the terump cognitive misers. So we tend to given the option, we'd rather kind of save our cognitive resources. I can't believe I just use

the term cognitive resources. I hate that term. But by that I mean we just don't want to We just don't want to think things through. Sometimes you want to take the lazy approach. So that's a law, very robust. You were lazy. It was ironic you were lazy to use that term. The reason I hate that term is because I've got this you know, yeah, I got this this paper. I'm kind of you know, criticizing Roy Bammeister

resource model. So you literally criticize that idea. No, I totally get why it was funny about the used it because I was the path of least you know, like it was most salient in your schema at the moment. Yeah, that's right, it's exactly what I was. Lazy. I know, it's actually a word that that kind of like it captures what we want to say. But I just also feel they run empty word. I know. Yeah. So anyhow, so we have this, you know, this, this is law

of least work, law of least effort. And but we thought and this is you know, I'm really I'm marine and Brian's idea that like there's there's more there. I mean that there are some people. I mean, clearly people are willing to work, and people are clearly people are willing to think things through. We like some of us, for example, like to read really complex books, and we do that. We pay to we pay for the book, and some of us do Sudoku puzzles, which are essentially

cognitive effort. Video games, Yeah, there's there is rewards of video games, but it's also cowdly difficult, and in fact, the better you get at the game, the more difficult the game gets. And that and we like it more so, we wondered, if you know something as simple as like, to what extent are you interested? To what extent are you intrinsically motivated for a task that clearly is going to uh shape your willingness to engage effort and tasks.

And that's essentially what we find. So it's not not a you know, crazy idea, but we centually find that people who are interested in X. In our case, I believe, we mostly looked at mathematics and we found this in a lab setting and a kind of you know, a

sterile lab setting. Those are my contributions or Marina and mind contributions or richer kind of field context in schools would be Brian and Angel's contributions and where they actually went into schools in inner city of Philadelphia, I believe, And we find that again when we give students or participants an option between doing a hard math task or an easy math task, generally people will will will pick the easier one, or in let's say, in the school setting,

we give them a math task or some attractive kind of I believe it's a social media feed or it could have been even a video game. Those you know, fed into them and they could choose what they want to do. People will typically choose easier one. But if you're interested in math, if you you uh pick that more. So you pick the harder math, i'ms more, you pick math over your social media feed more. And what's interesting is not necessarily It's not necessarily related to how good

you are at it. So yes, if you're good at it, you will tend to do it more, but that's not a consistent effect really about interest. But then I think the more interesting finding is that, Yeah, the more interesting finding is that not only are you more likely to pick the thing if you are interested in it, you are less tired doing it. So even though you're doing the more difficult thing, the more demanding thing, you actually feel less tired than those people who don't like that.

So if I like math, I do a bunch of math, I don't feel cognitively drained by doing that math. Someone does less math than me but still does it occasionally they feel more tired. So it speaks to the I think it speaks to the subjective nature of fatigue. So I think to someone say, we think fatigue is like, oh, it's a readout of how hard we've worked, and I

think that's one input to feeling tired. But a separate input is again our subjective enjoyment of the task and how much we like it, how good we think we're at it, so on and so forth. So you know, actual feelings of a tea are not purely based. It's not a direct output of how hard we worked. That's really cool research. Did you cite Paul O'Keeffe at all in that paper? I am not sure. I kind of went down with the preprint right now and see if

you did so, I just sent you. What I did is I sent you in your chatbox a prior study done by Okeef finding very similar findings. He's a friend of mine. I know he's been really interested in this research. And yeah, he's not cited in that paper, and I actually think that is unfortunate. There's still time. It's a working paper. Good to it. Good, please please do because I know he was very excited to share that his

work with Angela about this. But and I wonder how much influenced it, because this paper found that those who had more interest in a task when they then did like a hand grip task like a traditional performance measure of self control, they had more self control, they had more They put it in terms of resources self control resources. But even if that's not true, they demonstrate more performance self control if they're more interested in a task before

it if they were uninterested, attacked them more. And they actually they did another study, you know, showing that, Yeah, just interest fuel effortless engagement in tasks, like the subjective feeling of effort was much reduced, you know, when you were interested in it. So I actually think that was a really seminal kind of prior study. Oh, we definitely decide that. I mean that's I please do, Please do. Yeah, yes, essentially, very I mean I'm sure we got it in different ways,

but it sounds like we're saying the same thing. Yeah. Cool. So I respect the fact that most of the studies I mentioned here or not, you're not like first author on and I appreciate you bringing that up. So why don't we end here on boredom because I think that is a topic that you're more a lead on those studies. And you also say that you personally are the kind of person who gets more easily. Is that right? Yeah, that is true. I am boredom prone. Yeah, so I

made this joke like a dozen times. I'm gonna make it again. I find boredom fascinating. That's so funny. Yeah, I mean, it's just one of these things where like, Okay, let's we hear talk about boredom. I mean, is that gonna be exciting or boring? Well, I find daydreaming fascinating if that's related at all, what it might be? I mean, I wonder I suspect boredom would contribute to people daydreaming,

you know, it might be an input to to people daydreaming. Yes, I think boredom is fascinating, and there are now not a lot of people studying this, but there are a number of people acting more cognitive psychology who look at boredom, and I would say they look more at trait boredom, So people tend to be boredom prone more generally. It's interesting work, for example, showing that I'm not sure if you knew this. I didn't know this until I learned

about it. That a very very common. It might be one of the more common symptoms of suffering traumatic brain injury is feeling boredom, feeling and maybe related feelings of apathy. So it's it's kind of a persistent complaint of people who go, you know, and they may and they might recover, they will cover eventually from the boredom and they're covered, well, some of them will cover from their full function, but the boredom is what's really really aversive to them. So

I find that interesting. But I'm more interested in state boredom. So being in a position where you know, you're might be engaged in something and then all of a sudden you're just you know, your engagement wanes. And why I'm interested in it is because part of me wonders if what we think of as fatigue or ego depletion might be more akin to boredom, or at least partly boredom. And that is like, so think of the typical egodopletion study.

You have people come into a lab who's something laborious, difficult, effortful for like I said, about five minutes. But those tasks are also typically not interesting, right, They're typically not meaningful for the participants. So doing a you know, five ten minutes of a strip task, it might be interesting for the first minute or so, but then you get used to it and then it's like oh god, another you know, it's a mind numbing task. Yeah, that's right.

So to some extent, I wonder if some of the after effects that you know, again we might have seen with some of these depletion studies. It's simply like a means to regulate your boredom. Right, So I'm you know, I'm doing this task. It's not meaningful. It's also really really hard for me. Or conversely, it's too easy for me. Both of those things. And something is meaningless, and it's either beyond my capacities or way way under my capacities

that will lead to boredom. And this is actually I'm borrowing now from work done by this brilliant young a psychologist named Aaron Westgate, who's I believe a postdoc now at Ohio State, worked with Timothy Wilson, and she has this brilliant paper. I think it's either impressed or already published in Psychic Review, I believe, on state boredom. And she puts his model boredom out there, and in essence, I just I simply think it might be contributed to

a lot of the more phenomena that we might think. So, for example, here's a controversial one and it's possible that a lot of fMRI studies, long fMRI studies, you get people lying down, you're doing these tasks. Are we just like having is this you know, our fMRI studies, the study of disengaged participants? Right? Can you have four question one more time? Yeah? So you you know, put yourself

in this position. You're in this you know, you're lying down and a super noisy, maybe uncomfortable scanner and okay, maybe the first few minutes you're you're engaged. After a while, it's like, Jesus, how many times are going to ask me this kind of same question? Or imagine having imagined doing this thing over and over again after a while,

you were bored. And I suspect your number one motivation in a study, not just f f RI studies, but other studies too, is I want to get out of here, I want to be done, and I want to go eat lunch or I want to meet my friends. So you're kind of already in a low engagement state. So are many of those studies you know, kind of partially you know effect yeah, or polluted by you know, boredom. Yeah, is what I wonder. Yeah, we're all right. The ceiling

of boredom there. Yeah, that's right. And so what's interesting about bored them as well is that, you know, so we talked about the antecedence of it, but the consequences of boredom are you know, are actually very similar to the consequences of fatigue. So when you're boord just like when you're fatigued. So there are these functional theories of both those emotions. And you know, from what I've seen

is that they both act as stop signals. They both act as like, hey, stop what you're currently doing, you know, scan the environment and do something else, like I you know, you know what's the number one motivation when you're bored or tired is do something else. Now, sometimes you think fatigue the only thing you want to do is sleep.

That's not necessarily the case. That's sleepiness. Sometimes when you're fatigued, I know, I know some people when they're tired, and this sounds weird, they want to go jogging, they want to exercise. Okay, when they're mentally drained, they want to go do exercise, which again shows you the kind of the subjective nature of fatigue. But what it's doing, it's saying stop, what you're currently doing. You got other goals

to maintain happy, in full and complete life. Go do these other goals now, and boredom might do the same thing. Boredom might essentially be like, I'm not engaged with this, and there are many other things I could be doing. Let's I want to be doing that other thing right now. Gosh, so interesting here, this linkage with the ego depletion is brilliant and kind of like takes us back to the

beginning of this conversation. So many of these things are linked, and the linkage there to my own research, is clear because I've been interested in distinguishing between mind wandering and productive daydreaming. You know, some people lump all daydreaming into the same category of like its idleness, but that's not true.

I mean, the default mode network is associated with compassion, It's associated with imagination, you know, things that can be very productive, you know if we harness it with our executive attention network. So maybe a good reconciliation. A lot of this is not viewing the executive attention network in

isolation from these other brain networks. You know, if you want to get neuroscience perspective, it really matters what we're pairing it with, you know, is it paired with rumination processes or is it paired with positive imagination and a hopeful you know, construction simulation of your future self. You know, that's the level of distinction. I think we need to make these things, and some of those contents are going to be more boring than others. Yeah, I think you're

absolutely right. Think it's productive and not not productive daydreaming or mind wandering and yeah, and I think I think, you know, fatigue and boredom both might lead to mind wandering, some of which might be productive so much literally might be. Okay, I'm in this boring study. I fulfilled my obligation to the experimenter, and I'm just kind of going to walk through this. I'm going to kind of sleep walk through the rest of the study. And then that gives the

appearance of me not having self control. Right, I'm now doing poorly on a strip task. I'm reaching for the you know, the cookies now because I'm thinking about something else. But it's not because I've lost self control or necessarily even lost motivation. You know. It's more that I'm like starting to engage with other tasks like preparing to meet to prepare for my class, or thinking about my class, or preparing for an assignment in my mind. And yeah,

it's not necessarily lost of self control at all. It could be a whole host of other things. Cool. Well, hey, Michael, want to be inspective of your time. I just want to thank you so much for being on the podcast today, and I hope you found this chat just as interesting and unboring, non boring whatever the word is the correct anton in there as I did. Yeah it was, Yeah, it was. It was really a bit exciting. Thank you for having me on. I did not find it boring whatsoever.

Hopefully your your viewers, well your listeners have to say, well, I will agree, hopefully hopefully, but they tend to be just as geeky as I am, so I think you'll get a still sizeable proportion of our listeners who will be right on board with this excellent Well, thank you for having me on. Thank you thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the

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