Ego depletion, pro-sociality & capitalism

Under what circumstances are people more likely to co-operate with others? This new paper by Alexander Wagner and colleagues sheds some fascinating light.
They got subjects to perform some dull jobs and then to play the ultimatum game, in which one player proposes how to split a given sum of money with a partner whilst the other accepts or rejects the offer.
They found that the subjects who had to exercise more self-control in the dull job tended to make lower offers when they became proposers in the ultimatum game, and to reject more offers when they were responders.
In other words, they were less likely to co-operate on either side of the game.
To see what’s going on here we need the concept of ego depletion. This says that we have a fixed amount of self-control. If we therefore have to exercise a lot of it in one context, we’ll have less of it in another. This explains why people in tough jobs let off steam by drinking heavily, or why we hit the biscuit tin after going to the gym, or why folk eat more when they give up smoking.
Having used up self control in the prior dull job, some subjects thus entered the ultimatum game less able to control their impulses - and these impulses are to make low, selfish offers and to reject such offers, even if it is in our self-interest to accept.
In other words, pro-social behaviour requires self-control, but this can be depleted by other things. And one of those other things is the amount of drudge work we have to do. If it takes all our self-discipline to turn up to work and do a routine job, we’ll have less self-discipline with which to act generously.
This has some important implications:
1. To the extent that ego depletion exists, it doesn’t make sense to blame the poverty of the poor upon their lack of self-control. This is because such a lack can be endogenous. If we use up our self-control doing mindless work, we’ll have less of it to curb our drinking, use contraception or save our money. ( I suspect there are other ways in which lack of self-control is endogenous, but let that pass).
2. There’s a trade-off between the monotonous work that characterises so much of capitalism and Cameron’s desire for a Big Society. Insofar as it weakens our self-control and thus diminishes our capacity for pro-social behaviour, grunt work precludes pro-social activity.
3. There’s no point bleating about union militancy. Insofar as workers are irrationally militant - in the sense of rejecting even unfair ultimatum game-type offers - this arises from the ego depletion caused by monotonous or alienating work practices.
If these implications seem quite Marxian, there’s a further implication that is not. Marx thought that alienating, mind-numbing work would engender a sense of class solidarity. These experiments, however, suggest the opposite. The ego depletion which such work generates might lead to increased selfishness and hence to more individualism.

Comments

[Jim]

So how does one explain greater social self control in days gone by when work was considerably harder, worker rights were far less (more having to toe the line or face losing your job), working hours were longer too etc etc?

To give you an example that's close to home for me, in Victorian times there was a chap called Alfred Williams who was known as the Hammerman Poet. He worked in the Swindon GWR railway works on a steam hammer. In his spare time he found time and effort to explore the Vale of the White Horse, write poetry, build his own house with stone he carted by hand from a local abandoned canal lock. He died aged 53.

Would a Honda car plant worker (the modern day replacement for the GWR in Swindon) manage to achieve as much in his considerably longer leisure hours, and indeed longer life? If not, why not?

[Yorkhull]

How about ego depletion stimulated via the dull monotony of unemployment and the subsequent inability to provide for your family. May this begin to explain the apparent irrationalities of vulnerable people such as offenders, drug users etc to the poverty of their life situation?

[chris]

@ Jim - ego depletion doesn't say the aggreate amount of self control is fixed over time. It just says it is given for a particular individual at some particular time.
The energy of many Victorians was amazing, but I'm not sure how it bears upon the issue of self-control: maybe writing poetry or building a house was a form of release, not of self-control.

[Sue R]

I don't think it's got anything to do with 'ego-depletion', I would say that it is plain old fashioned resentment and fed-upness.

[Sue R]

And another thing, I remember reading an essay about why the poor in Victorian England were criticised for spending their money on gold trinkets and drinking. (It is the same nowadays, when people with unreliable incomes or low incomes spend money on expensive items, or run up high credit card debts). The author suggested that it was because if you are vey poor, saving money doesn't make a lot of sense, and the pleasure that can be gained from buying eg an expensive fishing rod or plasma tvs is more immediate.

[Adam Bell]

Having read the paper, there's no way this would pass muster as a proper scientific experiment. There's no control for tiredness amongst the participants - which by itself would reduce self-control, no control for a sense of entitlement following the completion of a difficult task, and many other issues besides.

Putting forward some notion of 'self control' as a finite resource that is in some way separate from general mental effort requires much more stringently managed experimentation than this. If this is what passes for experimental research in economics, I would fear for the future of the profession.

[Tom Addison]

As usual, very interesting stuff.

"The ego depletion which such work generates might lead to increased selfishness and hence to more individualism."

I'd say that this is pretty consistent with what I've observed amongst mates of mine who are more "working class". They often seem to live their lives based on the idea that you should live each day like it's your last, and that it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and that you should look after number one before anyone else. And then there's the massive LCD TVs. More inches than measuring tape (I could have been rude there).

From personal experience, the urge to hit the lash was much greater when having finished at stint at the pub, the call centre or the supermarket compared to having finished a hard days auditing. Dull, but not as mind numbing. But I was younger then, hardly the sophisticated bastion of maturity that I am now, so perhaps the causality lies elsewhere.

[Nik]

What is the link you seem to assume between self-control and working-class professions? Are you saying that middle-class work doesn't require self-control? Your allusion to militant unions seems odd in the context of the current strikes being planned by, among others, teachers, whose jobs are probably about as far from the monotonous, alienated picture you paint as it is possible to get.

[chris y]

"The ego depletion which such work generates might lead to increased selfishness and hence to more individualism."

Now Marx wasn't just bullshitting when he suggested that alienated labour would lead to class solidarity. He could look out of his window and see alienated workers joining mass socialist parties in droves and beginning the process of unionising unskilled occupations. Later, the apogee of Fordism coincided with the height of Union influence and membership in the west.

So if this correlation doesn't signify causation, what do you suggest was the driver for working class self organisation?

[King-Walters]

This post seems to assume that everyone's level of self-control is permanently fixed. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't most psychological research suggest the opposite? That is, that we get better at controlling ourselves with practice.

If that is the case, then you are doing the equivalent of using the fact that people are tired after exercise to prove that being fit will not give you more energy. Or conversely, that the lower energy levels of the unfit is due to what exercise they do undertake.