Michael Inzlicht

Last updated
Michael Inzlicht
Born(1972-06-20)June 20, 1972
Alma mater Brown University
McGill University
Scientific career
Fields Social Psychology
Neuroscience
Cognitive Sciences
Institutions University of Toronto
Wilfrid Laurier University
New York University

Michael Inzlicht is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto recognized in the areas of social psychology and neuroscience. Although he has published papers on the topics of prejudice, academic performance, and religion, his most recent interests have been in the topics of self-control, where he borrows methods from affective and cognitive neuroscience to understand the underlying nature of self-control, including how it is driven by motivation. [1]

Contents

In the early 2000s, he and his colleagues claimed to demonstrate that small, seemingly benign characteristics of an environment could play a large role in determining how stereotyped groups perform on academic tests. They found, for example, that the number of men in a small group could determine whether women succeeded (fewer men) or failed (more men) a math test. [2] [3] Although this work on stereotype threat was well received, Professor Inzlicht has of late suggested that work on stereotype threat might not be replicable. [4]

In his more recent work, Professor Inzlicht has primarily focused on improving our understanding of self-control and the related concepts of cognitive control and executive function (mental processes that allow behavior to vary adaptively depending on current goals). Much of his work explores the building blocks of control, including its neural, cognitive, emotional, and motivational foundations. [5] [6] [7] At the same time—and at a different level of analysis—he also explores the various ways that self-control can be influenced by various cultural and situational factors, including mindfulness meditation, [8] quality of motivation, [9] religious belief, [10] and stigmatization. [11] Another feature of his work is that he takes a social affective neuroscience approach to address questions of interest. Thus, he combines neuroimaging, cognitive reaction time, physiological, and behavioral techniques to understand and explain social behaviour. This interdisciplinary approach provides a fuller, more integrated understanding of social behavior, emotion, and the brain. [7] [12]

In recent years, Professor Inzlicht's has become a vocal and often passionate advocate for open science reform. [13] Part of his advocacy included not only criticizing the status quo and lamenting the clear evidence that psychology was suffering from a replication crisis; [14] [15] [16] but also examining his own past scientific work, [17] asking how much his own work might be simply false. [18]

Selected Awards & Honours

See also

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

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A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.

Moral psychology is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology. Historically, the term "moral psychology" was used relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development. Moral psychology eventually came to refer more broadly to various topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics of the field are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character, altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotion, affective forecasting, and moral disagreement.

Mindfulness is the cognitive skill, usually developed through meditation, of sustaining meta-attention of the contents of one's own mind in the present moment. Mindfulness derives from sati, a significant element of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and is based on Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan meditation techniques. Though definitions and techniques of mindfulness are wide-ranging, Buddhist traditions describe what constitutes mindfulness, such as how perceptions of the past, present and future arise and cease as momentary sense-impressions and mental phenomena. Individuals who have contributed to the popularity of mindfulness in the modern Western context include Thích Nhất Hạnh, Joseph Goldstein, Herbert Benson, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Richard J. Davidson.

Stereotype threat is a situational predicament in which people are or feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group. It is theorized to be a contributing factor to long-standing racial and gender gaps in academic performance. Since its introduction into the academic literature, stereotype threat has become one of the most widely studied topics in the field of social psychology.

Ego depletion is the controversial idea that self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up. When the energy for mental activity is low, self-control is typically impaired, which would be considered a state of ego depletion. In particular, experiencing a state of ego depletion impairs the ability to control oneself later on. A depleting task requiring self-control can have a hindering effect on a subsequent self-control task, even if the tasks are seemingly unrelated. Self-control plays a valuable role in the functioning of the self on both individualistic and interpersonal levels. Ego depletion is therefore a critical topic in experimental psychology, specifically social psychology, because it is a mechanism that contributes to the understanding of the processes of human self-control. There have both been studies to support and to question the validity of ego-depletion as a theory.

Susan Tufts Fiske is an American psychologist who serves as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice. Fiske leads the Intergroup Relations, Social Cognition, and Social Neuroscience Lab at Princeton University. Her theoretical contributions include the development of the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, power as control theory, and the continuum model of impression formation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Effects of meditation</span> Surveys & evaluates various meditative practices & evidence of neurophysiological benefits

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stereotype</span> Generalized but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing

In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can be, for example, an expectation about the group's personality, preferences, appearance or ability. Stereotypes are often overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information. A stereotype does not necessarily need to be a negative assumption. They may be positive, neutral, or negative.

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Cultural neuroscience is a field of research that focuses on the interrelation between a human's cultural environment and neurobiological systems. The field particularly incorporates ideas and perspectives from related domains like anthropology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to study sociocultural influences on human behaviors. Such impacts on behavior are often measured using various neuroimaging methods, through which cross-cultural variability in neural activity can be examined.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is an eight-week, evidence-based program designed to provide secular, intensive mindfulness training to help individuals manage stress, anxiety, depression, and pain. MBSR was developed in the late 1970s by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. It incorporates a blend of mindfulness meditation, body awareness, yoga, and the exploration of patterns of behavior, thinking, feeling, and action. Mindfulness can be understood as the non-judgmental acceptance and investigation of present experience, including body sensations, internal mental states, thoughts, emotions, impulses and memories, in order to reduce suffering or distress and to increase well-being. Mindfulness meditation is a method by which attention skills are cultivated, emotional regulation is developed, and rumination and worry are significantly reduced. During the past decades, mindfulness meditation has been the subject of more controlled clinical research, which suggests its potential beneficial effects for mental health, athletic performance, as well as physical health. While MBSR has its roots in wisdom teachings of Zen Buddhism, Hatha Yoga, Vipassana and Advaita Vedanta, the program itself is secular. The MBSR program is described in detail in Kabat-Zinn's 1990 book Full Catastrophe Living.

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Attentional control, colloquially referred to as concentration, refers to an individual's capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore. It is also known as endogenous attention or executive attention. In lay terms, attentional control can be described as an individual's ability to concentrate. Primarily mediated by the frontal areas of the brain including the anterior cingulate cortex, attentional control and attentional shifting are thought to be closely related to other executive functions such as working memory.

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Amy Joy Casselberry Cuddy is an American social psychologist, author and speaker. She is a proponent of "power posing", a self-improvement technique whose scientific validity has been questioned. She has served as a faculty member at Rutgers University, Kellogg School of Management and Harvard Business School. Cuddy's most cited academic work involves using the stereotype content model that she helped develop to better understand the way people think about stereotyped people and groups. Though Cuddy left her tenure-track position at Harvard Business School in the spring of 2017, she continues to contribute to its executive education programs.

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Affect labeling is an implicit emotional regulation strategy that can be simply described as "putting feelings into words". Specifically, it refers to the idea that explicitly labeling one's, typically negative, emotional state results in a reduction of the conscious experience, physiological response, and/or behavior resulting from that emotional state. For example, writing about a negative experience in one's journal may improve one's mood. Some other examples of affect labeling include discussing one's feelings with a therapist, complaining to friends about a negative experience, posting one's feelings on social media or acknowledging the scary aspects of a situation.

David Michael Greenberg is a psychologist, neuroscientist, and musician. He is best known for his contributions to personality psychology, social psychology, social neuroscience, music psychology, and autism.

References

  1. Professional Profile: Michael Inzlicht.
  2. APA Online: College women underperform on tests when in the minority.
  3. Inzlicht, Michael; Ben-Zeev, Talia (2000). "A threatening intellectual environment: Why females are susceptible to experiencing problem-solving deficits in the presence of males". Psychological Science. 11 (5): 365–371. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.24.1847 . doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00272. PMID   11228906. S2CID   2887128.
  4. Stereothreat , retrieved 2018-03-23
  5. Saunders, Blair; Milyavskaya, Marina; Inzlicht, Michael (2015). "What does cognitive control feel like? Effective and ineffective cognitive control is associated with divergent phenomenology". Psychophysiology. 52 (9): 1205–1217. doi:10.1111/psyp.12454. PMID   26041054. S2CID   206286673.
  6. Inzlicht, Michael; Schmeichel, Brandon (2012). "What is ego depletion? Toward a mechanistic revision of the resource model of self-control". Perspectives on Psychological Science. 7 (5): 450–463. doi:10.1177/1745691612454134. PMID   26168503. S2CID   3899310.
  7. 1 2 Inzlicht, Michael; Bartholow, Bruce; Hirsh, Jacob (2015). "Emotional foundations of cognitive control". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 19 (3): 126–132. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2015.01.004. PMC   4348332 . PMID   25659515.
  8. Teper, Rimma; Segal, Zindel; Inzlicht, Michael (2013). "Inside the mindful mind: How mindfulness enhances emotion regulation through improvements in executive control". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 22 (6): 449–454. doi:10.1177/0963721413495869. S2CID   146587497.
  9. Legault, Lisa; Inzlicht, Michael (2013). "Self-determination, self-regulation, and the brain: Autonomy improves performance by enhancing neuroaffective responsiveness to self-regulation failure". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 105 (1): 123–138. doi:10.1037/a0030426. PMID   23106250. S2CID   3899238.
  10. Inzlicht, Michael; Tullett, Alexa; Good, Marie (2011). "The need to believe: a neuroscience account of religion as a motivated process". Religion, Brain, & Behavior. 1 (3): 192–251. doi:10.1080/2153599X.2011.647849. S2CID   18064680.
  11. Inzlicht, Michael; Kang, Sonia (2010). "Stereotype threat spillover: How coping with threats to social identity affects aggression, eating, decision making, and attention". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 99 (3): 467–481. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.600.1063 . doi:10.1037/a0018951. PMID   20649368.
  12. Inzlicht, Michael; Shenhav, Amitai; Olivola, Christopher Y. (2018). "The Effort Paradox: Effort Is Both Costly and Valued". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 22 (4): 337–349. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2018.01.007. PMC   6172040 . PMID   29477776.
  13. "Ghost Effects | By Patchen Barss | Winter 2018 | University of Toronto Magazine". magazine.utoronto.ca. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  14. Yong, Ed. "Psychology's Replication Crisis Can't Be Wished Away". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  15. "How much of the psychology literature is wrong?". apa.org. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  16. Engber, Daniel (2016-03-06). "Everything Is Crumbling". Slate. ISSN   1091-2339 . Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  17. "Guest Post: Check Yourself before you Wreck Yourself". sometimes i'm wrong. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  18. "Psychology's Replication Crisis Is My Crisis". Undark. Retrieved 2018-03-23.