Ego depletion theory may have been debunked
The framing of this article very much misunderstands the scientific method.<p>Science is a process.  It&#x27;s a method where you conduct a series of disciplined, reproducible experiments and use this data to build a <i>model</i> of the truth.  Science never gives you the truth directly; instead, you get a series of successively more accurate representations of the truth that you can use to make predictions.  Those predictions are not guaranteed to always yield a positive result, but when they come up negative, you have more data with which to refine your theories.<p>Casting this in black and white terms - &quot;this effect has been debunked&quot; - is doing a disservice to science.<p>Rather, a negative result in this study should be grounds for further investigation.  <i>Why</i> did it come up with different results?  Is there something different about how they ran the study?  Is there something different about the <i>subjects</i>, something that may hold useful lessons in its own right?  Was the original data flawed?  Does the effect hold only under certain conditions?  All of these would be very useful things to know.  The point of science is not to say &quot;This is true and this is not&quot;, it&#x27;s to be able to create increasingly refined models of &quot;This is true under these conditions, and if you apply this model in this situation, you will get these results.&quot;<p>By analogy with physics: the ancient Egyptians (the Ptolemaic kings) believed that the sun revolved around the earth.  To make this model work, they had to invent increasingly more complex epicycles in the motions of planets.  Copernicus came around and showed that the earth revolved around the sun in a circle.  Kepler re-examined this data and said no, planets actually move in <i>ellipsis</i>.  Einstein re-examined this data and came up with a tensor calculus that even more accurately predicted the orbits of the outer planets.  Now, there is strong evidence that Einstein&#x27;s theory of general relativity is &quot;wrong&quot; too, but we don&#x27;t have anything to replace it with.<p>Was the Ptolemaic calculation wrong?  Well, technically not - as my physics professor pointed out, they were just doing a Fourier decomposition of the observed data.  And for a kid making a sun-dial on a beach or a hiker who wants to know when the sun will set, the first term of that series is perfectly adequate.  But the advantages of the heliocentric and relativistic models are that they can predict the data with increasing accuracy, <i>without</i> adding extraneous magic numbers.<p>Similarly, when a psychological study can&#x27;t be replicated, it doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean the basic idea is useless.  Rather, it means that we should look further into the <i>situations</i> where that idea is useless, and refine our models so they gain additional predictive power.