Wolff, Wanja Martarelli, Corinna S. 2020 During the past two decades, self-control research has been dominated by the strength model of self-control, which is built on the premise that the capacity for self-control is a limited global resource that can become temporarily depleted, resulting in a state called ego depletion. The foundations of ego depletion have recently been questioned. Thus, although self-control is among the most researched psychological concepts with high societal relevance, an inconsistent body of literature limits our understanding of how self-control operates. Here, we propose that the inconsistencies are partly due to a confound that has unknowingly and systematically been introduced into the ego-depletion research: boredom. We propose that boredom might affect results of self-control research by placing an unwanted demand on self-control and signaling that one should explore behavioral alternatives. To account for boredom in self-controlled behavior, we provide a working model that integrates evidence from reward-based models of self-control and recent theorizing on boredom to explain the effects of both self-control exertion and boredom on subsequent self-control performance. We propose that task-induced boredom should be systematically monitored in self-control research to assess the validity of the ego-depletion effect. application/pdf https://n2t.net/ark:/51647/srd1322148 https://sonar.unidistance.ch/global/documents/322148 https://sonar.unidistance.ch/documents/322148/files/Wolff_Martarelli2020.pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1177/1745691620921394 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/ark/51647/srd1322148 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess CC BY Perspectives on Psychological Science. - 2020, vol. 15, p. 1272-1283 Bored into depletion? Towards a tentative integration of perceived self-control exertion and boredom as guiding signals for goal-directed behavior. http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501