Join the Lab
Do you want to volunteer for the Work and Play Lab? Michael Inzlicht accepts new student volunteers from time to time. Interested students should be prepared to volunteer for 8-10 hours per week.
To join the lab, please complete a lab application and submit it with a transcript (unofficial copies are OK) to Dr. Inzlicht’s mailbox in the Psychology office, or slipped under the door of the lab, in room SY162 of the Science Building.
Apply to Grad School
Are you interested in pursuing graduate studies with Dr. Inzlicht at the University of Toronto? Dr. Inzlicht is always on the lookout for self-motivated and hard-working graduate students and he will be accepting one new experimental psychology PhD student for the Fall of 2025; he will not be accepting new clinical MA students for the foreseeable future. Dr. Inzlicht is eager to accept students who have interests in the psychology effort, boredom, motivation, social media, and cannabis.
Benefits of working in the Work and Play Lab include guaranteed funding (including funds for one to two conferences per year), experience in a multidisciplinary lab, and the quality of life conferred by living in the great city of Toronto.
For more information about the lab, please contact Dr. Inzlicht.
If you are interested in attending psychology graduate school, these links may be useful:
> University of Toronto Department of Psychology Graduate Admission Requirements and Application Form
> How to Get In: Your Guide to Applying to Graduate Programs in Psychology
> Pursuing Psychology Graduate School Information Page
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News
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.
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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Collaborators
- Joshua Aronson, New York University
- Avi Ben-Zeev, San Francisco State University
- Elliot Berkman, University of Oregon
- Kirk Brown, Virginia Commonwealth University
- Daryl Cameron, Penn State University
- Belle Derks, Utrecht University
- Jennifer Gutsell, Brandeis University
- Greg Hajcak, Florida State University
- Eddie Harmon-Jones, University of New South Wales
- Jacob Hirsh, University of Toronto
- Cendri Hutcherson, University of Toronto
- Sonia Kang, University of Toronto
- Michael Larson, Brigham Young University
- Lisa Legault, Clarkson University
- Ian McGregor, University of Waterloo
- Marina Milyavskaya, Carleton University
- Sukhvinder Obhi, McMaster University
- Liz Page-Gould, University of Toronto
- Travis Proulx, Cardiff University
- Blair Saunders, University of Dundee
- Brandon Schmeichel, Texas A&M University
- Zindel Segal, University of Toronto
- Alexa Tullett, University of Alabama
University of Toronto
Organizations
- Association for Psychological Science
- Canadian Psychological Association
- Canada Foundation for Innovation
- International Social Cognition Network
- International Society for Research on Emotion
- National Academy of Education
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Social and Affective Neuroscience Society
- Social Psychology Network
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
- Society for Personality and Social Psychology
- Society for Psychophysiological Research
- Spencer Foundation
Why do people enjoy doing difficult things?
“You can imagine that some people are willing to work hard, but go about it from a sense of duty and responsibility,” Inzlicht told me for my New York Times story. “But other people—call them ‘joyful workers’—this is what they live for. This is what gives them purpose. This is what makes them feel important. This is what helps them make the world make sense.” The existence of “joyful workers” suggests that, even if the Effort Paradox applies to everyone, it doesn’t apply equally. Where you sit on the Meaningfulness-of-Effort scale probably reflects a changeable mix of nature and nurture.
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