Depleted egos and affirmed selves: The two faces of customization

• Customization requires active exercise of personal choice by users.
• Choosing behaviors during customization lead to depletion of self control resources (i.e., ego depletion).
• Identity expression during customization can counteract ego-depletion effect of customization.
• Website customization for others depleted more self-control resources than customization for self.
• Perception of identity in customized portal is critical for maintaining self-control resources.

Customization is generally considered a desirable attribute of media technologies, but it also entails the active exercise of choice by the user. Research has shown that constantly making personal choices results in depletion of inner resources required for self-control—a phenomenon known as “ego depletion.” Therefore, we hypothesize a negative effect of customization on self control. But, in doing so, we also consider the possibility that this effect could be mitigated by the affordance of self-expression via customization. So, although making numerous choices could lead to ego-depletion, identity expression could lead to self-affirmation, which is known to counter ego-depletion. The current study explores these two competing effects of customization on one’s inner resources, by way of a three-condition, between-subjects experiment (N = 54), in which one group of participants was instructed to customize their iGoogle portal in a manner that would bolster their self-affirmation and another in a manner that would minimize it, with the third condition serving as a browsing-only control. The results indicate that self-affirmation may compensate for ego depletion, with theoretical implications for the psychology of customization technology and practical implications for design of customization options in media interfaces.