Dr. Kentaro Fujita

And that way you get rid of experimenter bias.

There are some multi-lab replications that have tried to replicate this effect.

So what you do in the lab is you do one hard task that requires self-control, and then you do a second one.

And the prediction would be if you've done a hard thing first, then you should be worse at the second one.

So one multi-lab experiment did not show that it worked, and another one showed it did.

The one that showed it didn't work was led by people who conducted this research in the first place.

So it was seen as very damning.

Like if they can't get this experiment to work, then it doesn't exist.

And so I think the consensus in the field is that it doesn't actually happen, or at least we can't get it to work in the lab.

Let's say we have you do a task where you have to write something down with your left hand.

Okay, so this requires a lot of effort, it requires a lot of self-control to... Left-handers out there are like, all right, no, no, no, not opposite hand, yeah, yeah, no, I'm just teasing.

You're right in your non-dominant hand.

Then we ask you to, you know, do some other really difficult tasks, like some tasks that requires inhibition.

So the one example is the Stroop task, right?

So you see words in different color fonts.

You're supposed to identify the font color, but if you see the word blue in red ink,

Although the right response is that it's red because it's written in red ink, you automatically read the word blue so you want to say blue.

This requires inhibition.

It requires you to stop your behavior.

And research suggests that if you did the non-dominant handwriting first and then you did the Stroop task, your Stroop task should become worse.