Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 147. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

And, gee, oh, oh, and, oh, Back in episode 32 of this podcast about three years ago we covered a psychological concept

called ego depletion.

Now to catch you up on what that is, it's a pretty old model in psychology that categorizes what we call

willpower as a finite and depleteable resource. If you stay your hand from the cookie jar for

too long, you eventually give out. You give in. You wear out. You lose the psychological energy to stay your hand any longer.

Or if you don't give into the cookies, you're more likely to give up on some other task later

on that would have required the willpower that you've spent trying to not eat

the cookies. Now I mentioned cookies so much because that's how ego depletion was discovered.

In 1998, psychologist Roy Balmeister and his colleagues had subjects

skip a meal and then hungry sit in front of a plate of cookies.

And then they were told,

Don't you eat those cookies.

So there was a little toaster oven or something in the lab and they would they

would bake the cookies there and there'd be this delicious smell of fresh baked

cookies around. That's journalist Dan Inber who wrote an article about

ego depletion for Slate magazine. And then there'd be a plate of red and white

radishes. That's right, radishes. Each person sat down in front of a plate of cookies and a bowl of radishes, but they each received different instructions.

One was told they could not eat the cookies, and the other was told they could eat all the

cookies they wanted. They told the subjects they were studying taste perception and

to take note of the sensations for follow-up questions the next day. A third group, a control group, they skipped a step and just went on to the next part.

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