A Multilab Replication of the Ego Depletion Effect

There is an active debate regarding whether the ego depletion effect is real. A recent preregistered experiment with the Stroop task as the depleting task and the antisaccade task as the outcome task found a medium-level effect size. In the current research, we conducted a preregistered multilab replication of that experiment. Data from 12 labs across the globe (N = 1,775) revealed a small and significant ego depletion effect, d = 0.10. After excluding participants who might have responded randomly during the outcome task, the effect size increased to d = 0.16. By adding an informative, unbiased data point to the literature, our findings contribute to clarifying the existence, size, and generality of ego depletion

Facing Emotional Politicians: Do Emotional Displays of Politicians Evoke Mimicry and Emotional Contagion?

Emotional displays of politicians can be persuasive. According to prominent psychological theories, we can easily ``catch'' the emotional displays of others through mimicry and emotional contagion. Do these processes work for politicians too, or is it conditional on what voters think of the politician making the display? In a pre-registered within-subjects laboratory experiment, participants observed images of neutral and manipulated emotional displays of politicians. We measured emotional mimicry (facial electromyography) and emotional contagion (self-reports). We do not find evidence for the matched motor hypothesis. Our findings are in line with the emotional mimicry in social context model. Namely, we find that the happy displays of in-party politicians elicit congruent facial activity (a positive facial index). Furthermore, the displays of the out-party politicians do not elicit mimicry, but instead our findings suggest a reactive response: participants smiled in response to angry out-party politicians. The self-reported emotions indicated a small effect of emotional contagion. Taken together, our study provides insights in how voters are emotionally affected by politicians' emotional displays and highlights that our polarized prior beliefs color our emotional responses to politics

Replicating and extending Soroka, Fournier & Nir (2019): negative news increases arousal and negative affect

The negativity bias hypothesis in political communication contends that people are more aroused by negative vs. positive news. Soroka, Fournier and Nir (2019, SFN) provide evidence for this negativity bias in a study in 17 countries across 6 continents. We replicate and confirm SFN's central finding that negativity causes an increase in physiological arousal in a conceptually close, well-powered, and preregistered replication. We extend SFN in three ways. (1) We theorize, test, and confirm that negative (vs. positive) news causes negative affect as captured by the activity of the corrugator major muscle above the eyebrow using facial Electromyography. (2) We find that people self-report that negative news is causing negative affect but find that positive (instead of negative) news increases self-reported arousal. (3) We test SFN's argument in another context, the Netherlands. Our paper confirms that negative news is arousing but also shows that negative news is, especially, causing negative affect. Doing so, we contribute to the negativity bias argument in political communication research and, at the same time, show the importance of replication in empirical communication research

A Multilab Replication of the Ego Depletion Effect

status: publishe

A Multilab Replication of the Ego Depletion Effect

10.1177/1948550619887702SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PERSONALITY SCIENCE12114-2

Multi-Lab Replication Reveals A Small but Significant Ego Depletion Effect

There is an active debate regarding whether the ego depletion effect is real. A recent pre-registered experiment with the Stroop task as the depleting task and the antisaccade task as the outcome task found a medium level effect size. In the current research, we pre-registered a multi-lab collaborating project to replicate that experiment. Data from twelve labs across the globe (N = 1775) revealed a small but significant ego depletion effect, g = 0.12, CI95 = [0.02, 0.21]. The data also provided some evidence in support of a moderating effect of individual differences in lay theory about willpower, such that participants with an unlimited-resource theory evinced a weaker depletion effect. Finally, a series of auxiliary analyses provided important implications for future studies investigating the robustness of ego depletion, such that strictly controlled experimental settings and outcome tasks with medium difficulty might be better for observing a stronger depletion effect