I suspect age. This could be a mechanism for the observed increases in Conscientiousness with age.
You write that as if being on autopilot is a terrible thing. It could be a terrible thing or it could be a great thing, depending on how good your autopilot is.
Possibly they have trained their autopilots to work really well, freeing effort for rare tasks. Young 'uns have crappy autopilots so they need to switch to manual and reprogram the autopilot all the time.
If I understand virtue ethics correctly, which I don't, virtue ethicists want to have good autopilots. They don't give themselves much credit for doing good things, except inasmuch as it shows they do them and makes them more likely to continue to do so. Likewise, they don't do slightly bad things, because that would condition them to do bad things in other circumstances.
I think a more distinctly virtue ethicist way of putting it is that they don't do slightly bad things because that would condition them to have bad dispositions, or to be bad people, something that is intrinsically disvaluable.
People who avoid doing slightly bad things to prevent instilling unhelpful habits, and to prevent themselves from bringing about future harm are (roughly) global utilitarians.
I'm such a utilitarian, I don't understand the difference. What's a bad person with bad dispositions, if not someone who does bad things?
What's a bad person with bad dispositions, if not someone who does bad things?
Well, in practice most of us do make these sorts of judgments. We don't think a bad person stops being a bad person when we imprison them, for example, even if they are thereafter unable to do bad things and therefore don't. Which suggests that we have some notion of a bad person who isn't doing bad things.
This may not be justified, but I'd be very surprised if it were so alien to you that you don't understand it.
My first thought was "Does it matter?".
My second thought was, "Maybe it matters for doing creative thought, which presumably can't be done on autopilot".
Is there a difference between pre-committing and going on autopilot?
I sometimes think "I shouldn't deplete myself by doing unpleasant things that don't matter a lot - I should save my willpower for the really important things." Apparently this may get less true as I age, so I should push myself sometimes to find out how much ego depletion is really happening.
Probably not in this test, the follow-up task of remembering a specific day apparently requires one to actively resist priming.
I am in the "old fogey" category. If you explain what the heck you actually mean, I might try and answer this for you. I honestly can't understand how "autopilot" might apply in the kind of test the linked article is describing.
I haven't read the article yet, but initial thought - was there any attempt to account for the possibility that older people might have been raised with different norms about willpower, so the difference is not about age but upbringing?
Brain areas associated with self-regulation don't mature until the mid-twenties. And apparently, if you compare older and younger people in a standard set-up for detecting ego-depletion, older people are not affected. WEIRD, indeed.
In 2010, there was a study indicating that ego depletion doesn't affect people who don't expect it to (and that one was run on college students). I wonder if part of the effect might be coming from differences in attitudes about effort between older and younger people.