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"Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources."

I don't see how that follows from the the memorization experiment. Maybe the people who could remember 7 items felt they worked hard so they deserved to be rewarded with a chocolate cake.

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> Maybe the people who could remember 7 items felt they worked hard so they deserved to be rewarded with a chocolate cake.

That would be what depleted willpower feels like, assuming you like chocolate cake and prefer it over the other option. Depleted willpower doesn't really feel like much in itself, just an increased likelihood of thinking "oh wow, chocolate cake" over "cake? doesn't fit my macros".

I'm sure we could all come up with tons of other similar interpretations, but what is this other than pure speculation?

How do we know it's not an increased sense of entitlement rather than a reduction of willpower?

My thoughts exactly. I don't know about the original paper, but the article doesn't even seem to discuss the possibility of other conclusions.

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