Ego depletion, attentional control, and decision making in sport

• The quality of athletes' decisions has been found to determine their performance.
• We examined the effect of ego depletion on decision making in basketball.
• We found that ego depletion impaired basketball players' decision making ability.
• The availability of sufficient self-control resources benefits decision making in sport.

ObjectivesAthletes differ at staying focused on performance and avoiding distraction. Drawing on the strength model of self-control we investigated whether athletes do not only differ inter-individually in their disposition of staying focused and avoiding distraction but also intra-individually in their situational availability of focused attention.Design/methodIn the present experiment we hypothesized that basketball players (N = 40) who have sufficient self-control resources will perform relatively better on a computer based decision making task under distraction conditions compared to a group who's self-control resources have been depleted in a prior task requiring self-control.ResultsThe results are in line with the strength model of self-control by demonstrating that an athlete's capability to focus attention relies on the situational availability of self-control strength.ConclusionsThe current results indicate that having sufficient self-control strength in interference rich sport settings is likely to be beneficial for decision making.