The Effect Of EGO Depletion On Time Awareness

The self-control ability is one of the most important factors for a person to adapt to the society and have a better life because everyone must follow the norms of the society and control their impulses and desires. But in days when the materials and information are extremely expanded, controlling oneself successfully is becoming more and more difficult.in order to explain why people are always fail in self-control, Baumeister and his partners develop the strength models based their years of researches.in this model, self-control is a kind of limited resource and decreases when executive self-control behaviors. It can be depleted If the former behaviors use too much resource, causing it difficult to control the latter behaviors. This called ego depletion. While time awareness is defined as the perception and judgement of the length of time and its changes without using any timing tools.it contains the estimation of long time and short time. People’s time awareness can affect the maintenance of self-control behavior. So in the contrary, whether the ego depletion affect people’s time awareness? We design two experiments to study this question on the base of the analysis of previous studies.The first experiment is a Single-factor between-groups design. Its research technique is verbal estimation. The subjects of experimental group should complete depleted tasks while the subjects of control group complete non-depleted tasks. After that, both of the two groups have to estimate the time of their tasks. Then calculate the ratio of the estimation time and the actual time, according the difference of the ratio between two groups, we see the estimation of the experimental group is significantly higher than the control group.it means that ego depletion makes people to feel longer and this result confirms the hypothesis.The second experiment brings in the time interval as a new variable.it is a two-factor mixed design and uses time generation technique to study the relationship between ego depletion and time awareness. The experiment uses 2s as the short time interval and 5s as the longer, the researchers measure the result both before and after the depleted tasks.the final result suggests that there are significant differences between the two groups only in 5s condition and the estimation of the experimental group is significantly higher than the control group. This result is in keeping with the first one.The overall conclusion of this study can be summarized as ego depletion can affect time awareness in long time interval. This research deepened our understanding about ego depletion and time awareness and their relationship.