Chapter 1 - Universiteit Twente

General Discussion
The research in Chapter 4 proposed that individuals low in self-control resources can still
be successful at defending themselves against a persuasive attack, when prompted to
be efficient in allocating their remaining self-regulatory resources. Based on the notion
that a depleted state does not reflect a complete exhaustion of resources but merely a
temporary or relative deficit (Muraven et al., 2006), it was proposed that initially depleted
people can still be successful at resisting persuasion when they temporarily economize
on their use of self-control resources, and avoid spending more strength. Specifically,
a forewarning of an upcoming influence attempt should motivate these individuals to
conserve their remaining resources (although this comes at a cost, and self-control will
temporarily suffer), enabling them to be just as successful at resisting persuasion as nondepleted
participants. However, a forewarning was expected to function as a motivational
factor only for people who previously suffered a loss of self-control resources, otherwise
there would be no need to conserve.
Three studies tested the hypothesis that individuals low in self-control resources show
more resistance in response to a persuasive request when given a forewarning of an
upcoming influence attempt. In Experiment 4.1, participants whose self-regulatory
resources had been lowered (using a similar task as in Experiment 3.1) were willing to
volunteer for a smaller amount of time for a student project when they were forewarned
about an upcoming persuasive encounter with a representative of this project. As
expected, non-depleted individuals were not affected by the forewarning.
A second study was performed to uncover whether the assumed underlying
psychological process driving this effect was indeed conserving self-control strength. To
test this notion, Experiment 4.2 included a validated measure of self-control performance
after the depletion and forewarning manipulations, preceding the compliance measure.
The design and procedure paralleled that of study 4.1. As expected, results showed that
a forewarning of an impending influence attempt motivated depleted participants to
conserve their resources: they performed worse than participants in any other condition
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