Response behavior in questionnaires: The role of self-regulation.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Anja Göritz
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 268749986

• Final Report Year: 2018

Final Report Abstract

In the project we set out to examine the role of self-control in questionnaire research. We aimed to examine five areas: (1) Identifying questionnaire elements that require increased self-regulation. Such questionnaire elements were thought to both cause and be influenced by reduced self-regulation capacity. (2) Using self-regulation to predict satisficing, that is, a reduction of the invested effort while answering a questionnaire. (3) Shedding light onto the link between self-regulation and socially desirable responding. (4) Examining whether ego depletion shifts response behavior towards gratification by drawing on the process model of self-control. (5) Developing and evaluating interventions to mitigate undesired effects of ego depletion on response behavior. We deviated from our initial plan due to complicating issues in ego depletion research that surfaced both in the research community as well as in our own experiments. All of our planned experiments rely on the ego depletion effect, which came into question during the course of our project. A meta-analysis and a large replication effort cast doubt on the ego depletion effect. This replication crisis was fueled by the facts that (1) many hitherto ego depletion studies had relied on small samples and (2) many researchers had not made their decisions transparent regarding the tasks they used and how the task data were aggregated. To accommodate this new development, we worked on applied experiments in line with our original proposal while at the same time conducting ego depletion research that was more basic than originally planned. In summary, our project revealed that ego depletion had no discernible, stable effect on questionnaire response behaviour. Due to the wide range of approaches in inducing and measuring ego depletion that we used, we feel confident that a lack of effects cannot be solely attributed to our operationalization. The only discernible effect was that ego depletion interferes with the recognition of social cues. Yet, this mechanism was not measurable using conventional scales of socially desirable response behaviour. Apart from the research in line with the proposal, we have contributed to the ongoing discussion surrounding ego depletion. As such, we contributed to the methodological discussion and found evidence that ego depletion does not interfere with working memory performance.

Publications

• (2016, Sept). Self-control and the recognition of social cues. 50. Congress of the German Society for Psychology, Leipzig, Germany
  Voggeser, B. J., Singh, R. K. & Göritz, A. S.
  
• (2018). Ego depletion does not interfere with working memory performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 538
  Singh, R. K. & Göritz, A. S.
  
• (2018). Self-control in online discussions: Disinhibited online behavior as a failure to recognize social cues. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 2372
  Voggeser, B. J., Singh, R. K. & Göritz, A. S.
  
• (2018, March). Ego depletion does not interfere with working memory performance. 14th European Spring Conference on Social Psychology, St. Anton, Austria
  Singh, R. K. & Göritz, A. S.