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Work And Play Lab (Copy)


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Work And Play Lab (Copy)


Why does empathy or self-control feel like hard work? Why do people spend their leisure time on social media or getting stoned?

The Work and Play Lab uses methods borrowed from social psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience to understand the nature of the mental effort we use to reach our goals and the nature of leisure activities we do for fun.  The lab’s research includes projects on self-control, motivation, and empathy (work) as well as projects on digital device use, social media, and recreational cannabis use (play). The lab is committed to open and transparent science, which includes publicly posting data and materials, often preregistering studies, and regularly running replication studies.

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About Michael (Copy)


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About Michael (Copy)


Michael Inzlicht is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, where he is also cross-appointed as a Professor in the Rotman School of Management. His research mostly focuses on effort and self-control, but he has also become interested in how people spend their leisure time. Michael is passionate about open science.

 
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Publications (Copy)


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Publications (Copy)


Recent Publications

Featured
Effort paradox redux: Rethinking how effort shapes social behavior [pdf]

Inzlicht, M., Campbell, A.V., & Saunders, B. (in press). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.

A positive empathy intervention to improve well-being on Instagram [PDF]

Depow, G. J., Oldemburdo de Mello, V., & Inzlicht, M. (in press). Emotion.

Access Open Data, Materials, and Preregistrations

Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans [PDF]

Ovsyannikova, D., Oldemburgo de Mello, V., & Inzlicht, M. (2025). Communications Psychology 3, 4

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News (Copy)


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News (Copy)


Featured News

News for Front
Can you trust DeepSeek? Can AI be your new best friend?
Can you trust DeepSeek? Can AI be your new best friend?

University of Toronto professor Michael Inzlicht wanted to find out who's better at empathic responses: people, or ChatGPT. He explains to CBC Metro Morning how AI won the empathy contest.

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She Is in Love With ChatGPT
She Is in Love With ChatGPT

A 28-year-old woman with a busy social life spends hours on end talking to her A.I. boyfriend for advice and consolation. And yes, they do have sex.

Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, said people were more willing to share private information with a bot than with a human being. Generative A.I. chatbots, in turn, respond more empathetically than humans do. In a recent study, he found that ChatGPT’s responses were more compassionate than those from crisis line responders, who are experts in empathy. He said that a relationship with an A.I. companion could be beneficial, but that the long-term effects needed to be studied.

“If we become habituated to endless empathy and we downgrade our real friendships, and that’s contributing to loneliness — the very thing we’re trying to solve — that’s a real potential problem,” he said.

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Why we avoid effort even though it can improve our well-being
Why we avoid effort even though it can improve our well-being

Understanding the effort paradox can help you reshape your relationship to exertion so that you commit to those hard but truly meaningful activities

“On the one hand, effort is costly,” says Michael Inzlicht, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada. “On the other hand, it looks like we tend to value those things that we exerted effort for.” In a seminal 2018 paper, he and his colleagues dubbed this apparent conflict the “effort paradox”. Since then, psychologists have been figuring out the origins of the effort paradox and why some of us struggle with tasks that others might find easy. What they are finding is offering fresh insights not only into how you can get off the couch and into your running shoes, but also how you can learn more effectively, better empathise with others and even cultivate a more meaningful life. “[It seems] that if we can become…

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Contact (Copy)


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Contact (Copy)


Michael Inzlicht

Department of Psychology
University of Toronto Scarborough
1265 Military Trail
Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4
Canada

Email: michael.inzlicht@utoronto.ca