I’m late to this party, but Baumeister’s responses and comments in the recent journal article are horrifying.
Having mentored several dozen budding researchers as graduate students and postdocs, I have seen ample evidence that people’s ability to achieve success in social psychology varies. My laboratory has been working on self-regulation and ego depletion for a couple decades. Most of my advisees have been able to produce such effects, though not always on the first try. A few of them have not been able to replicate the basic effect after several tries. These failures are not evenly distributed across the group. Rather, some people simply seem to lack whatever skills and talents are needed. Their failures do not mean that the theory is wrong.
This has been my default reference for the past few years:
https://replicationindex.com/2016/04/18/is-replicability-report-ego-depletionreplicability-report-of-165-ego-depletion-articles/
It’s from 2016, so I don’t actually know where things are right now. But presumably not that much has changed.
I’m late to this party, but Baumeister’s responses and comments in the recent journal article are horrifying.
wat ;(
For those of you following along at home, this post has a section “What Ego-Depletion Studies Are Most Likely to Replicate?”