What is proposed instead
90 min
Two hosts talk the lesson through. The voices are synthetic; the script was written from this lesson and checked against it, and asserts nothing the lesson does not.
- State what the process account proposes, in its proponents' own terms, and name the two shifts it describes
- Explain what the account keeps and what it gives up compared with the resource model, and why its authors say the trade is worth making
- Apply both accounts to a described case of self-control failing, and say what would distinguish them
Lesson 5 left a gap. The resource model lost most of the evidence that supported it, and something still needs explaining, because things really do feel harder after a hard morning. That experience is not in dispute and it's what the model was invented for.
This lesson is the leading proposal for what is going on instead. It is a proposal rather than a finding, its authors say so, and being clear about that difference is half of what this lesson teaches.
The proposal
Inzlicht and Schmeichel, writing in 2012, propose what they call a process model. Their statement of it's one sentence: exerting self-control at Time 1 "causes temporary shifts in both motivation and attention that undermine self-control at Time 2".1
Two shifts, and they describe each one.
The first is a shift in motivation. In their words, it is "a shift in motivational orientation away from suppressing and inhibiting desires and toward approaching and gratifying them". Unpacked, and also in their words: "initial acts of control lead people to become less motivated to engage in further deliberative control and more motivated to engage in things that are more personally rewarding, interesting, and enjoyable".1
The second is a shift in attention, and it runs alongside the first: "a shift in attention away from cues signaling the need to exert control and toward cues signaling gratification".1
And the two feed each other. The model "assumes that motivation and attention each affect the other".1
What that means on a Tuesday afternoon
Strip the vocabulary off and the proposal is this. After a morning of holding yourself to something, two things change, and neither of them is that you have less of a substance.
What you want changes. Not what you want in general, and not what you'd say if asked about your goals. What is appealing right now moves towards the rewarding and away from the effortful.
And what you notice changes. The things that would have prompted you to exercise control, the signs that you are off track, become less salient, and the things that promise a reward become more so.
That second one's the part the resource metaphor has no room for, and it is worth dwelling on, because it is a different kind of failure. On the resource account you see the biscuit, you want to resist, and you can't. On this account you may simply not register that resisting was on the table.
A new account replacing an old one usually claims to be better in some way. Before reading on: what do you think this one gives up, and what does it claim in exchange?
Show the answer
Worth a guess, because the answer is not the usual one and the authors say it themselves.
What it does not give up is the phenomenon. Both accounts agree that something happens between the first task and the second, and a replacement that denied that would be answering a different question.
What it gives up is how easy the old account was to say. That is a real cost and the next section is about why. A course that let you think a better theory is always the one that explains itself faster would be teaching you to pick by comfort.
What it keeps and what it gives up
This is where the lesson earns its place, because the authors are unusually direct about the trade.
What it keeps is the phenomenon. They are not saying nothing happens between Time 1 and Time 2. The whole paper is an attempt to say what.
What it gives up is the metaphor, and they say so themselves: "Though the process model of depletion may sacrifice the elegance of the resource metaphor, it paints a more precise picture of ego depletion and suggests several nuanced predictions for future research."1
Read "elegance" as a real loss rather than as false modesty. A limited resource is a wonderful idea: everybody's met a battery, the metaphor explains itself in four words, and it generates obvious advice. Two shifts that feed each other explains itself in nobody's four words and generates advice that is harder to state.
What they claim in exchange is precision, and precision means testability. A metaphor can absorb almost any result you give it. A claim about motivation shifting predicts specific things, including things the resource account cannot accommodate, which the next section is about.
Here is the test of whether the two accounts genuinely differ or whether one is a relabelling of the other. Imagine an experiment: people do a demanding first task, and then, before the second task, half of them are offered money for doing well on it. What does each account predict?
Show the answer
The process account predicts the effect can go away. If what happened was a shift in motivation towards the rewarding, then supplying a reward acts directly on the thing that shifted. The account is about what you want, and an incentive is about what you want.
The resource account's simplest version predicts it cannot. If the first task spent a store, then money before the second task does not refill it, and you might expect people to try harder and still do worse.
But that simplest version is not the one its defenders hold, and this is the part worth learning. The resource model was stretched years ago to say that initial acts of self-control only partially deplete the resource, and that what looks like depletion is people being unwilling to draw further on what is left.1 That is called an energy-conservation account, and on it an incentive is exactly the sort of thing that would make a person willing to spend. So a defender predicts the effect can go away too, and the incentive experiment does not separate the two accounts as cleanly as the setup suggests.
Which is why this block is a caution rather than a test. The reasoning above is this course's own, from the two accounts as stated,3 and the paper proposing the process account says the experiment has not been run: of the studies that used motivational incentives, none offered them for the first task.1 They put it forward as an avenue for future research, which is what it still is.
Worked: one evening, read twice
Nadia is constructed.3 She spends her working day on a task that requires constant care, gets home, intends to spend an hour on her Open University course, and spends it on her phone instead.
On the resource account. The day's careful work drew down a limited store of self-control. By the evening there was not enough left to override the easier option. The prediction that follows is about quantity: a lighter day should leave more, a rest before the evening should help, and there is a finite budget to be spent wisely.
On the process account. Two things happened. Her motivation shifted away from deliberative control and towards what is rewarding, so the course became less appealing relative to the phone than it would have been at nine in the morning. And her attention shifted: the reminders that she is behind on the course were less salient, the phone more so. She may not have experienced a struggle at all, which is worth noticing, which is a specific prediction, and on the resource account is harder to explain.
Notice which account describes what she would report, and this is an observation of this course's own rather than a finding anybody has measured.3 People in Nadia's position, in this course's experience of how they talk about such evenings, do not usually describe a fight they lost. They describe the evening going, which is closer to the second description than the first.
That's a point in the process account's favour and it is not evidence, which is the distinction this course keeps making. What people report is a thing to explain, and not a thing that settles an explanation.
Where the evidence actually stands
Be careful here, because the temptation is to treat the new account as established simply because the old one lost its evidence.2
The process account is a proposal. Its authors describe the paper as highlighting "evidence in support of this model" but also "where evidence is lacking, thus providing a blueprint for future research".1 A blueprint for future research is not a result, and they chose that phrase.
And this course hasn't read all of it.1 What was read is the abstract, the section setting out the process model, the section on motivation, the conclusion and one footnote; the rest of a fourteen-page paper has not been opened. Every passage quoted in this lesson was read in the original and checked word by word, and the parts not read are the evidence review and the attention half, so the lesson's account of where the evidence stands rests on the authors' own summary of it rather than on this course having weighed it.
So the honest position is the one the quiz ends on. The phenomenon is better attested than either explanation of it. Things get harder after a hard morning, and that isn't in doubt. Why, is.
Somebody objects that the process account is just saying people stopped wanting to try, dressed up in vocabulary. It sounds to him like a judgement about character wearing a lab coat.
Show the answer
It is a fair objection, it's the commonest one, and answering it properly needs two moves.
The first is that the shift is described as something that happens, not something chosen. The proposal is that exerting control causes the shift. Nobody in the model decides to become less motivated, any more than somebody decides a biscuit looks appealing. Motivation in this sense is a state that moves, not an effort a person elects to make, and the whole force of the objection comes from reading the word the second way.
The second's the attention half, which the objection leaves out entirely. "You stopped wanting to try" is a description of motivation alone. The account pairs it with a shift in what you notice, and that half is not a story about wanting at all. It predicts the cue to exercise control becomes less salient, which is a claim about perception.
And there is a reason to hold this carefully rather than to dismiss it. The objection has real force against a sloppy version of the account, the version that says "you just did not want it enough". If you meet the process model stated that way, in a book or an article, the objection is correct against that version, and the authors' own statement is not it.
Four things people get wrong here
"The resource account is dead, so the process account is right." These are two separate questions. One model losing evidence does not confirm another, and the process account's own authors describe theirs as a blueprint.
"It is just motivation, so try harder." The account describes a shift that happens rather than an effort withheld, and "try harder" is advice aimed at the thing the account says has moved.
"The science reversed itself, so nothing is known." Lesson 5 answered this and it is worth repeating: what is known is that things get harder after exertion. What is contested is why.
"Self-control and habit are the same thing." They're nearly opposites in this course's structure. A habit removes the need for the decision. Self-control is what happens when a decision is required, and the whole reason lessons 1 to 4 came first is that the most reliable way to need less self-control is to need fewer decisions.
Practice
Take 25 minutes.
Take one occasion in the last fortnight when your own self-control failed. Something small and real: the evening that went, the thing you said, the purchase.
Write it twice.
- In resource terms. What had you spent the day doing? What was the store you were drawing on, and what would have refilled it? Be specific about what the account would predict.
- In process terms. What did you want at the moment it happened, as opposed to what you wanted that morning? And what were you not noticing? The second question is harder and is the one worth the time.
Then two more lines.
- Which reading fits what you actually remember? Not which one sounds better. Whether you remember a struggle you lost or an evening that went.
- What would have distinguished them at the time? If somebody had offered you twenty pounds to do the thing, would you have done it? You cannot run that experiment retrospectively, and answering honestly is still informative.
Take 20 minutes.
Now that you have both accounts, go and find one piece of writing about willpower and work out which it is using, if either.
Write down the passage, then answer three questions.
- Which account is it using? Resource, process, something else, or a mixture that does not notice it is one.
- If it uses the process account, is it the authors' version or the sloppy one? The tell is the attention half. A version that talks only about wanting has dropped half the proposal and is fairly open to the objection in the checkpoint above.
- Which half is doing the work? If the passage is using the process account, is its advice aimed at motivation, at attention, or at both? Most popular versions aim at motivation alone, and an account whose second half is never used is one the writer has not understood.
Connections
Back. Lesson 5 is the necessary setup: what was claimed, and what testing it did to the claim. This lesson is what the same field proposes in its place, and the pair is the honest shape of a scientific dispute rather than a debunking. Lesson 1's definition is what makes the last misconception above intelligible: habit and self-control are different mechanisms, and the course put habit first deliberately. From earlier Core courses: Logic and Argument lesson 5 is what the predict block uses, on what distinguishes two explanations of the same phenomenon.
Forward. Lesson 7 is the last one. It takes the whole subject's numbers, the three that travel and the one that did not survive, and asks you to read a claim about your habits, including the claims this course has made.
Go deeper
- What Is Ego Depletion? Toward a Mechanistic Revision of the Resource Model of Self-Control (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012). This course has read the abstract, the overview of the process model, the motivation section, the conclusion and footnote 2. A copy is posted on the first author's own site, which is where this course read it. The section worth a reader's time, on the strength of the abstract's own description, is wherever the paper marks where evidence is lacking, because authors who write that section are worth reading.
- A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016). Lesson 5's source, and the reason this lesson exists. This course has read its abstract and limitations section.
Sources
- Michael Inzlicht and Brandon J. Schmeichel, "What Is Ego Depletion? Toward a Mechanistic Revision of the Resource Model of Self-Control", Perspectives on Psychological Science 7(5), 2012, pages 450 to 463. Read in part on 2026-09-19, from the copy the first author posts on his own site: the abstract, the "Brief Overview of the Process Model" section, the motivation section, the conclusion and footnote 2. The rest of the paper was not opened, and the body says so. Supports: the quoted one-sentence statement of the process model; the quoted description of the motivational shift and its unpacking; the quoted description of the attentional shift; the quoted assumption that motivation and attention affect each other; the quoted sentence about sacrificing the elegance of the resource metaphor; the quoted description of the paper as highlighting where evidence is lacking and providing a blueprint for future research; the energy-conservation statement of what the resource model's defenders propose, which is in this paper's footnote 2 and is attributed there to Baumeister and Vohs, 2007; and the authors' statement that no study using motivational incentives has offered them for the first task.
- M. S. Hagger, N. L. D. Chatzisarantis and others, "A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect", Perspectives on Psychological Science 11(4), 2016. Abstract and limitations read verbatim. Cited here only for the standing point, established in lesson 5, that the resource account lost most of the evidence that supported it.
- Nadia is constructed, and so is every detail attached to her; the lesson says so where she appears. The incentive experiment in the predict block is a distinguishing test this course has reasoned out from the two accounts as stated, not a study anybody has reported to this course, and the block says so. The Tuesday-afternoon restatement of the two shifts is also this course's own paraphrase of the quoted passages above it.
Check your understanding
This lesson has a 6-question quiz. Pass it and the questions come back on a schedule in Review, so what you learned stays learned. Your progress is saved in your browser; no account needed.