Michael Inzlicht
Biographic Data
| ID | 343305 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Inzlicht |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Inzlicht |
| SIGNATURE | INZLICHT M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9297-6497 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 337 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
How Individual Differences in Empathy Predict Moments of Empathy in Everyday Life
Do trait empathy measures predict how people experience empathy in daily life? Despite considerable research on empathy, we know surprisingly little about how trait measures relate to real-world empathic experiences. In this preregistered analysis of 7,343 experience sampling surveys from a near-representative sample of 246 U.S. adults, we map the connections between validated trait empathy measures and state experiences of empathy. Each componen…
Meaning and Attention Intertwined: Experimental and Experience-Sampling Findings
How does one attain meaning? Though pivotal to well-being, this question has been explored mainly within symbolic and philosophical domains, with little focus on its cognitive processes. We present a theoretical integration of meaning and attention, followed by five studies investigating their relationship in lab experiments and everyday life (total N = 1,654). Experimental findings indicate that meaning increased attention (Studies 1 and 3), and…
Experimental evidence that exerting effort increases meaning
Efficiency demands that we work smarter and not harder, but is this better for our wellbeing? Here, we ask if exerting effort on a task can increase feelings of meaning and purpose. In six studies (N = 2883), we manipulated how much effort participants exerted on a task and then assessed how meaningful they found those tasks. In Studies 1 and 2, we presented hypothetical scenarios whereby participants imagined themselves (or others) exerting more…
Chronic Cannabis Use in Everyday Life: Emotional, Motivational, and Self-Regulatory Effects of Frequently Getting High
Approximately 200 million people consume cannabis annually, with a significant proportion of them using it chronically. Using experience sampling, we describe the effects of chronically getting high on emotions, motivation, effort, and self-regulation in everyday life. We queried chronic users ( N = 260) 5 times per day over 7 days (3,701 observations) to assess immediate effects of getting high and longer term, between-person effects. Getting hi…
A positive empathy intervention to improve well-being on Instagram
With more than half the global population on social media, there is a critical need to understand how to engage it in a way that improves rather than worsens user well-being. Here, we show that positive empathy is a promising tool. Participants who received brief positive empathy instructions before 10 min of browsing their own Instagram feed showed greater affective well-being (Studies 1-4) and life satisfaction (Study 4) at posttest relative to…
Should PhD students drink more
An experimental manipulation of the value of effort
Expecting tasks to help or hurt subsequent cognitive performance: Variability, accuracy, and bias in forecasted after‐effects
After‐effects on cognition—where a prior activity either benefits or hinders subsequent cognitive performance—are empirically inconsistent. Do people have insight into when their subjective energy and cognition will be helped or hurt by engaging in prior activities? Studies 1a and 1b (combined N = 316) find that people expect more demanding and unenjoyable tasks to hinder their subsequent energy and cognitive performance, regardless of their will…
Integrating Models of Self-Regulation
Self-regulation is a core aspect of human functioning that helps facilitate the successful pursuit of personal goals. There has been a proliferation of theories and models describing different aspects of self-regulation both within and outside of psychology. All of these models provide insights about self-regulation, but sometimes they talk past each other, make only shallow contributions, or make contributions that are underappreciated by schola…
Promises and Perils of Experimentation: The Mutual-Internal-Validity Problem
Researchers run experiments to test theories, search for and document phenomena, develop theories, or advise policymakers. When testing theories, experiments must be internally valid but do not have to be externally valid. However, when experiments are used to search for and document phenomena, develop theories, or advise policymakers, external validity matters. Conflating these goals and failing to recognize their tensions with validity concerns…
Self‐control in daily life: Prevalence and effectiveness of diverse self‐control strategies
OBJECTIVE: What strategies do people use to resist desires in their day-to-day life? How effective are these strategies? Do people use different strategies for different desires? This study addresses these questions using experience sampling to examine strategy use in daily life. METHOD: = 20.4, 63% female) reported on their use of six specific strategies (situation modification, distraction, reminding self of goals, promise to give in later, rem…
Do early birds share their worms? How prosocial behaviour and empathy vary across the day
To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply
Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof an…
Why Are Self-Report and Behavioral Measures Weakly Correlated?
Do people avoid mental effort after facing a highly demanding task
Motivational effects on empathic choices
Is Ego Depletion Real? An Analysis of Arguments
An influential line of research suggests that initial bouts of self-control increase the susceptibility to self-control failure (ego depletion effect). Despite seemingly abundant evidence, some researchers have suggested that evidence for ego depletion was the sole result of publication bias and p-hacking, with the true effect being indistinguishable from zero. Here, we examine (a) whether the evidence brought forward against ego depletion will c…
Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs.
1,204) and a meta-analysis, we found a robust preference to avoid empathy, which was associated with perceptions of empathy as more effortful and aversive and less efficacious. Experimentally increasing empathy efficacy eliminated empathy avoidance, suggesting that cognitive costs directly cause empathy choice. When given the choice to share others' feelings, people act as if it is not worth the effort. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all…
The Past, Present, and Future of Ego Depletion
At the center of social psychology just a few years ago, ego depletion is now widely seen as a controversial topic, one of the chief victims of the replication crisis. Despite over 600 studies of apparent support, many are now asking if ego depletion is even real. Here, we comment on the articles included in this Special Issue: Ego Depletion and Self-Control: Conceptual and Empirical Advances. Specifically, we delineate the contributions and limi…
The Effort Paradox: Effort Is Both Costly and Valued
The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework
Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, this article provides an organizing framework to understand recent empirical work…
Development of a Within-Subject, Repeated-Measures Ego-Depletion Paradigm: Inconsistent Results and Future Recommendations
Ego depletion is under scrutiny for low replicability, possibly reflecting the limited statistical power available in between-subject designs. In response, we created a within-subject, repeated-measures ego-depletion paradigm that repeatedly alternated depletion and recovery manipulations. Each manipulation was followed by measuring subjective fatigue, mood, and self-control performance. Across 12 studies (N = 754), participants reliably reported…
Self-Control as Value-Based Choice
Self-control is often conceived as a battle between “hot” impulsive processes and “cold” deliberative ones. Heeding the angel on one shoulder leads to success; following the demon on the other leads to failure. Self-control feels like a duality. What if that sensation is misleading, and despite how they feel, self-control decisions are just like any other choice? We argue that self-control is a form of value-based choice wherein options are assig…
What’s So Great About Self-Control? Examining the Importance of Effortful Self-Control and Temptation in Predicting Real-Life Depletion and Goal Attainment
Self-control is typically viewed as a key ingredient responsible for effective self-regulation and personal goal attainment. This study used experience sampling, daily diary, and prospective data collection to investigate the immediate and semester-long consequences of effortful self-control and temptations on depletion and goal attainment. Results showed that goal attainment was influenced by experiences of temptations rather than by actively re…
Owning Up to Negative Ingroup Traits: How Personal Autonomy Promotes the Integration of Group Identity
OBJECTIVE: Our experiences, attributes, and behaviors are diverse, inconsistent, and often negative. Consequently, our capacity to assimilate divergent experiences-particularly negative aspects-is important to the development of a unified self. Whereas this process of integration has received attention at the level of personal identity, it has not been assessed at the level of group identity. OBJECTIVE: We examined the mechanisms involved in inte…
Arousal and stereotype threat
Do needs for security and certainty predict cultural and economic conservatism? A cross-national analysis
We examine whether individual differences in needs for security and certainty predict conservative (vs. liberal) position on both cultural and economic political issues and whether these effects are conditional on nation-level characteristics and individual-level political engagement. Analyses with cross-national data from 51 nations reveal that valuing conformity, security, and tradition over self-direction and stimulation (a) predicts ideologic…
Stereotype threat spillover: How coping with threats to social identity affects aggression, eating, decision making, and attention
Stereotype threat spillover is a situational predicament in which coping with the stress of stereotype confirmation leaves one in a depleted volitional state and thus less likely to engage in effortful self-control in a variety of domains. We examined this phenomenon in 4 studies in which we had participants cope with stereotype and social identity threat and then measured their performance in domains in which stereotypes were not "in the air." I…
Empathy constrained: Prejudice predicts reduced mental simulation of actions during observation of outgroups
A particular resiliency to threatening environments
Saying “no” to temptation: Want-to motivation improves self-regulation by reducing temptation rather than by increasing self-control
Self-regulation has been conceptualized as the interplay between controlled and impulsive processes; however, most research has focused on the controlled side (i.e., effortful self-control). The present studies focus on the effects of motivation on impulsive processes, including automatic preferences for goal-disruptive stimuli and subjective reports of temptations and obstacles, contrasting them with effects on controlled processes. This is done…
The Past, Present, and Future of Ego Depletion
At the center of social psychology just a few years ago, ego depletion is now widely seen as a controversial topic, one of the chief victims of the replication crisis. Despite over 600 studies of apparent support, many are now asking if ego depletion is even real. Here, we comment on the articles included in this Special Issue: Ego Depletion and Self-Control: Conceptual and Empirical Advances. Specifically, we delineate the contributions and limi…
The face of chauvinism: How prejudice expectations shape perceptions of facial affect
The Neuroscience of Stigma and Stereotype Threat
This article reviews social neuroscience research on the experience of stigma from the target's perspective. More specifically, we discuss several research programs that employ electroencephalography, event-related potentials, or functional magnetic resonance imaging methods to examine neural correlates of stereotype and social identity threat. We present neuroimaging studies that show brain activation related to the experience of being stereotyp…
Motivational effects on empathic choices
Mimicry reduces racial prejudice
Mind the gap: Increasing associations between the self and blacks with approach behaviors
Although perceived differences between outgroup social categories and the self are often cited as a major contributor to prejudice and intergroup tension, surprisingly few studies have examined ways to improve associations between the self and racial outgroups. The present research investigated one strategy to increase these associations-approach training. Specifically, 3 studies investigated the impact of training participants to conceptually ap…
Development of a Within-Subject, Repeated-Measures Ego-Depletion Paradigm: Inconsistent Results and Future Recommendations
Ego depletion is under scrutiny for low replicability, possibly reflecting the limited statistical power available in between-subject designs. In response, we created a within-subject, repeated-measures ego-depletion paradigm that repeatedly alternated depletion and recovery manipulations. Each manipulation was followed by measuring subjective fatigue, mood, and self-control performance. Across 12 studies (N = 754), participants reliably reported…
Threat, high self-esteem, and reactive approach-motivation: Electroencephalographic evidence
Is dissonance reduction a special case of fluid compensation? Evidence that dissonant cognitions cause compensatory affirmation and abstraction
Cognitive dissonance theory shares much in common with other perspectives that address anomalies, uncertainty, and general expectancy violations. This has led some theorists to argue that these theories represent overlapping psychological processes. If responding to dissonance and uncertainty occurs through a common psychological process, one should expect that the behavioral outcomes of feeling uncertain would also apply to feelings of dissonanc…
Self-determination, self-regulation, and the brain: Autonomy improves performance by enhancing neuroaffective responsiveness to self-regulation failure
The importance of autonomous motivation in improving self-regulation has been a focal topic of motivation research for almost 3 decades. Despite this extensive research, however, there has not yet been a mechanistic account of how autonomous motivation works to boost self-regulatory functioning. To address this issue, we examined the role of autonomy in 2 basic self-regulation tasks while recording a neural signal of self-regulation failure (i.e.…
To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply
Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof an…
Lingering Effects: Stereotype Threat Hurts More than You Think
Starting with the first realization that negative stereotypes can cause people to underperform in the stereotyped domain, an impressive body of work has documented the robust and wide‐ranging nature of stereotype and social identity threat. In this article, we look beyond the stereotyped ability domain and present evidence that coping with stereotypes and prejudice can linger, affecting a broad range of behaviors even in areas unrelated to the st…
Social Neuroscience and Public Policy on Intergroup Relations: A Hegelian Analysis
Social neuroscience is an exciting new field with much to offer to the study of stigma and intergroup relations. In this article, we consider the potential impact that social neuroscience will have for social and public policy pertaining to these important topics. Taking a Hegelian approach, we discuss why social neuroscience should and should not be used by intergroup researchers and policy makers to inform public policy. We then critique these …
An experimental manipulation of the value of effort
Do early birds share their worms? How prosocial behaviour and empathy vary across the day
Do people avoid mental effort after facing a highly demanding task
A Threatening Intellectual Environment: Why Females Are Susceptible to Experiencing Problem-Solving Deficits in the Presence of Males
Does placing females in environments in which they have contact with males cause deficits in their problem-solving performance? Is a situational cue, such as gender composition, sufficient for creating a threatening intellectual environment for females--an environment that elicits performance-impinging stereotypes? Two studies explored these questions. Participants completed a difficult math or verbal test in 3-person groups, each of which includ…
Sex differences in response to physical and social factors involved in human mate selection
Improving adolescents' standardized test performance: An intervention to reduce the effects of stereotype threat
Arousal and stereotype threat
A particular resiliency to threatening environments
Stigma as Ego Depletion: How Being the Target of Prejudice Affects Self-Control
This research examined whether stigma diminishes people's ability to control their behaviors. Because coping with stigma requires self-regulation, and self-regulation is a limited-capacity resource, we predicted that individuals belonging to stigmatized groups are less able to regulate their own behavior when they become conscious of their stigmatizing status or enter threatening environments. Study 1 uncovered a correlation between stigma sensit…
The face of chauvinism: How prejudice expectations shape perceptions of facial affect
The Neuroscience of Stigma and Stereotype Threat
This article reviews social neuroscience research on the experience of stigma from the target's perspective. More specifically, we discuss several research programs that employ electroencephalography, event-related potentials, or functional magnetic resonance imaging methods to examine neural correlates of stereotype and social identity threat. We present neuroimaging studies that show brain activation related to the experience of being stereotyp…
Threat, high self-esteem, and reactive approach-motivation: Electroencephalographic evidence
Social Neuroscience and Public Policy on Intergroup Relations: A Hegelian Analysis
Social neuroscience is an exciting new field with much to offer to the study of stigma and intergroup relations. In this article, we consider the potential impact that social neuroscience will have for social and public policy pertaining to these important topics. Taking a Hegelian approach, we discuss why social neuroscience should and should not be used by intergroup researchers and policy makers to inform public policy. We then critique these …
Stereotype threat spillover: How coping with threats to social identity affects aggression, eating, decision making, and attention
Stereotype threat spillover is a situational predicament in which coping with the stress of stereotype confirmation leaves one in a depleted volitional state and thus less likely to engage in effortful self-control in a variety of domains. We examined this phenomenon in 4 studies in which we had participants cope with stereotype and social identity threat and then measured their performance in domains in which stereotypes were not "in the air." I…
Empathy constrained: Prejudice predicts reduced mental simulation of actions during observation of outgroups
Ironic Effects of Antiprejudice Messages: How Motivational Interventions Can Reduce (but Also Increase) Prejudice
Although prejudice-reduction policies and interventions abound, is it possible that some of them result in the precise opposite of their intended effect—an increase in prejudice? We examined this question by exploring the impact of motivation-based prejudice-reduction interventions and assessing whether certain popular practices might in fact increase prejudice. In two experiments, participants received detailed information on, or were primed wit…
Active Transgressions and Moral Elusions: Action Framing Influences Moral Behavior
Are certain methods more effective for eliciting altruism than others? If so, what are the factors that stimulate moral behavior? Although past research has suggested that “passive” transgressions are more acceptable than “active” transgressions, it is unclear whether this bias translates to actual behavior. The goal of this research was to investigate the role of active or passive framing in prescriptive and proscriptive moral situations. In Stu…
Trait Approach Motivation Relates to Dissonance Reduction
Over 50 years of work on cognitive dissonance theory has suggested that dissonance reduction is a motivated process. However, no research has unambiguously demonstrated the direction of this motivation—whether it is approach or avoidance oriented. The action-based model of dissonance proposes that dissonance reduction is an approach-related process that assists in the implementation of decisions. It follows from the action-based model that approa…
The need to believe: A neuroscience account of religion as a motivated process
Religious belief has been shown to offer substantial benefits to its adherents, including improved well-being and health. We suggest that these benefits might be explained, at least in part, from a “motivated meaning-making” perspective. This model holds that people are motivated to create and sustain meaning (i.e., a sense of coherency between beliefs, goals, and perceptions of the environment, which provides individuals with the feeling that th…
Existential neuroscience: A proximate explanation of religion as flexible meaning and palliative
The cognitive science of religion has made great strides in the past decade (e.g., Boyer, 2008), with more and better research from many disciplines asking basic questions about why religions exist
Lingering Effects: Stereotype Threat Hurts More than You Think
Starting with the first realization that negative stereotypes can cause people to underperform in the stereotyped domain, an impressive body of work has documented the robust and wide‐ranging nature of stereotype and social identity threat. In this article, we look beyond the stereotyped ability domain and present evidence that coping with stereotypes and prejudice can linger, affecting a broad range of behaviors even in areas unrelated to the st…
Mimicry reduces racial prejudice
Mind the gap: Increasing associations between the self and blacks with approach behaviors
Although perceived differences between outgroup social categories and the self are often cited as a major contributor to prejudice and intergroup tension, surprisingly few studies have examined ways to improve associations between the self and racial outgroups. The present research investigated one strategy to increase these associations-approach training. Specifically, 3 studies investigated the impact of training participants to conceptually ap…
What Is Ego Depletion? Toward a Mechanistic Revision of the Resource Model of Self-Control
According to the resource model of self-control, overriding one’s predominant response tendencies consumes and temporarily depletes a limited inner resource. Over 100 experiments have lent support to this model of ego depletion by observing that acts of self-control at Time 1 reduce performance on subsequent, seemingly unrelated self-control tasks at Time 2. The time is now ripe, therefore, not only to broaden the scope of the model but to start …
Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations
The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making
Across eras and literatures, multiple theories have converged on a broad psychological phenomenon: the common compensation behaviors that follow from violations of our committed understandings. The meaning maintenance model (MMM) offers an integrated account of these behaviors, as well as the overlapping perspectives that address specific aspects of this inconsistency compensation process. According to the MMM, all meaning violations may bottlene…
Inside the Mindful Mind: How Mindfulness Enhances Emotion Regulation Through Improvements in Executive Control
Although the psychological benefits of mindfulness training on emotion regulation are well-documented, the precise mechanisms underlying these effects remain unclear. In the present account, we propose a new linkage between mindfulness and improved emotion regulation—one that highlights the role played by executive control. Specifically, we suggest that the present-moment awareness and nonjudgmental acceptance that is cultivated by mindfulness tr…
Mindful acceptance dampens neuroaffective reactions to external and rewarding performance feedback
Previous research on mindfulness has suggested that individuals high in trait mindfulness show heightened sensitivity to visceral and internally generated stimuli. However, when mindful individuals are exposed to external stimuli-such as pictures or faces-their emotional responses are typically attenuated. In the current study, we tested how trait mindfulness relates to reactivity in response to a different type of external stimulus, namely, perf…
Psychology (59 works) · Social Psychology (53 works) · Cognitive psychology (33 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (25 works) · Developmental psychology (25 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (21 works) · Cognition (18 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (15 works) · Mental Health Research Topics (15 works)