Speaker
Description
The metaphor of a battery that gets depleted when engaging in effortful activities and needs to be recharged in a recovery period has governed much of psychological research over the past decades (Baumeister et al., 1998). This depletion model has been extensively criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds (Inzlicht & Friese, 2019), but might nevertheless be the predominant belief lay people hold about exhaustion. An alternative lay belief inspired by the metaphor of a break-through when pushing the boundaries of what seems possible might be that persisting despite feeling exhausted leads to performance gains. To capture these different beliefs, we have developed items for a self-report scale of subjective beliefs about exhaustion. These items are currently being tested in an online study with a targeted sample size of N = 492 adults per group, aged 18 – 85 years. We will present the results of this study regarding the reliability (factor structure, internal consistency, measurement invariance across age groups) as well as the convergent and discriminant validity with established psychological constructs. The scale aims to offer a tool that can be used to further investigate in subsequent studies how different beliefs about exhaustion influence motivation and behavior.
