Some complex thinking requires active guidance by the self, but simpler mental activities do not. Depletion of the self’s regulatory resources should therefore impair the former and not the latter. Resource depletion was manipulated by having some participants initially regulate attention (Studies 1 and 3) or emotion (Study 2). As compared with no-regulation participants who did not perform such exercises, depleted participants performed worse at logic and reasoning (Study 1), cognitive extrapolation (Study 2), and a test of thoughtful reading comprehension (Study 3). The same manipulations failed to cause decrements on a test of general knowledge (Study 2) or on memorization and recall of nonsense syllables (Study 3). Successful performance at complex thinking may therefore rely on limited regulatory resources. A major purpose of the self is to exert control over responses, ranging from overt behavior to inner processes. As the agent or executive function, the self is responsible for acts of volition, including making choices, overriding incipient responses, being active instead of passive, and replacing one response with another. Recent findings have suggested that active self-control can be

Self-presentation may require self-regulation, especially when familiar or dispositional tendencies must be overridden in service of the desired impression. Studies 1–4 showed that self-presentation under challenging conditions or according to counternormative patterns (presenting oneself modestly to strangers, boastfully to friends, contrary to gender norms, to a skeptical audience, or while being a racial token) led to impaired self-regulation later, suggesting that those self-presentations depleted selfregulatory resources. When self-presentation conformed to familiar, normative, or dispositional patterns, self-regulation was less implicated. Studies 5–8 showed that when resources for self-regulation had been depleted by prior acts of self-control, self-presentation drifted toward less-effective patterns (talking too much, overly or insufficiently intimate disclosures, or egotistical arrogance). Thus, inner processes may serve interpersonal functions, although optimal interpersonal activity exacts a short-term cost. The attentive pupil who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything. —John Paul Sartre One of the most vital skills in human social life involves

Self-perception theory posits that people sometimes infer their own attributes by observing their freely chosen actions. We hypothesized that in addition, people sometimes infer their own attributes by observing the freely chosen actions of others with whom they feel a sense of merged identity—almost as if they had observed themselves performing the acts. Before observing an actor’s behavior, participants were led to feel a sense of merged identity with the actor through perspective-taking instructions (Study 1) or through feedback indicating that their brainwave patterns overlapped substantially with those of the actor (Studies 2-4). As predicted, observers incorporated attributes relevant to an actor’s behavior into their own self-concepts, but only when they were led to feel a sense of merged identity with the actor and only when the actor’s behavior seemed freely chosen. These changes in relevant self-perceptions led observers to change their own behaviors accordingly. Implications of these vicarious self-perception processes for conformity, perspective-taking, and the long-term development of the self-concept are discussed.

This paper examines how power influences human behavior. We consider evidence from diverse literatures relating elevated power to approach and reduced power to inhibition. Specifically, power is associated with (a) positive affect, (b) attention to rewards and to features of others that satisfy personal goals, (c) automatic information processing and snap judgments, and (d) disinhibited social behavior. In contrast, reduced power is associated with (a) negative affect, (b) attention to threat and punishment, to others’ interests, and to those features of the self that are relevant to others ’ goals, (c) controlled information processing and deliberative reasoning, and (d) inhibited social behavior. The potential moderators and consequences of these power-related behavioral patterns are discussed. Social Power 3 Power, Approach, and Inhibition The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense that Energy is the fundamental concept in physics... The laws of social dynamics are laws which can only be stated in terms of power (Russell, 1938, p. 10) What do exhilaration, stereotyping, and poor table manners have in common? Or embarrassment, the advantage younger siblings enjoy over older ones in understanding others ’ mental states, and the complexity of Supreme Court justices ’ decisions? Our answer is simple: power. Power is a basic force in social relationships (Fiske, 1993;

The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the Editor, the Associate Editor, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments. Evolutionary Preference/Utility Functions 3 Evolutionary Preference/Utility Functions: A Dynamic Perspective The collection of repeated measures in psychological research is one of the most common data collection formats employed in survey and experimental research. The behavioral decision theory literature documents the existence of the dynamic evolution of preferences that occur over time and experience due to learning, exposure to additional information, fatigue, cognitive storage limitations, etc. We introduce a Bayesian dynamic linear methodology employing an empirical Bayes estimation framework that permits the detection and modeling of such potential changes to the underlying preference/utility structure of the respondent. An illustration of revealed/stated preference analysis (i.e., conjoint analysis) is given involving students’ preferences for apartments and their underlying attributes and features. We also present the results of several simulations demonstrating the ability of the proposed procedure to recover a

Imagine that you are recruited to participate in market research for a new product. You are presented with a sample of the product and told either that it has recently been launched in the marketplace or that it will be launched in the near future. Will your evaluation of the product be affected by whether the launch is cast in the past versus the future? While intuitively it would seem that temporal perspective should not influence product evaluation if the product itself is held constant, a recent experience by the Clorox Company suggests otherwise. Clorox had conducted market research on a new product that it was considering launching under the Glad brand name. The product was an elasticized plastic cover resembling a disposable shower cap, which could be used to cover open food containers quickly and conveniently. When consumers were asked about their willingness to purchase if the product were to be launched in the future, their response was resoundingly negative. As a result, the company scrapped its plans to launch the product. Shortly thereafter, S.C. Johnson, launched a nearly identical product under the name of Saran Quick Covers. The product was an instant success, bringing Saran to number one in the category of plastic food coverings. Puzzled by the apparent invalidity of their research results and

When leaders perform solitary tasks, do they self-regulate to maximize their effort, or do they reduce effort and conserve their resources? Our model suggests that power motivates selfregulation toward effective performance — unless the task is perceived as unworthy of leaders. Our first studies showed that power improves self-regulation and performance, even when resources for self-regulation are low (ego depletion). Additional studies showed that leaders sometimes disdain tasks they deem unworthy, by withholding effort (and therefore performing poorly). Ironically, during ego depletion leaders skip the appraisal and therefore work hard regardless of task suitability, so that depleted leaders sometimes outperform non-depleted ones. Our final studies replicated these patterns with different tasks and even simply manipulating framing and perception of the same task (Experiment 5). Experiment 4 also showed that the continued high exertion of leaders when depleted takes a heavy toll, resulting in larger impairments later. The judicious expenditure of self-control resources among powerful people may help them prioritize their efforts to pursue their goals effectively.