The surprising promise and profound perils of AIs that fake empathy

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The surprising promise and profound perils of AIs that fake empathy

It might seem strange that AI can even attempt to offer this kind of assistance. But millions of people are already turning to ChatGPT and specialist therapy chatbots, which offer convenient and inexpensive mental health support. Even doctors are purportedly using AI to help. Some experts say this is a boon. After all, AI, unhindered by embarrassment and burnout, might be able to express empathy more openly and tirelessly than humans. “We praise empathetic AI,” one group of psychology researchers recently wrote.

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Why do people find "bed rotting" so hard?

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Why do people find "bed rotting" so hard?

‘People would rather shock themselves than spend 15 minutes alone with their thoughts’ — could you handle the ‘bed rotting’ trend?

Over the past few years, wellness advocates have championed “niksen” (the Dutch art of doing nothing) as an antidote to burnout. Before that, we had il dolce far niente, a 200-plus-year-old Italian phrase that refers to the pleasures of doing nothing: a romantic concept that enjoyed a little comeback when it was name-checked in the 2010 movie “Eat, Pray, Love.” “Actually doing nothing is something a lot of people find aversive,” explained Michael Inzlicht, a professor in the University of Toronto’s department of psychology. “People associate doing nothing with boredom, which is an emotion most people try to avoid.”

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How Painful Should Your Workout Be?

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How Painful Should Your Workout Be?

Every strenuous exercise involves some mixture of suffering and pleasure. The key to sticking with it is getting the balance right

“People avoid effort, but it’s also something that we can learn to like,” said Michael Inzlicht, a colleague of Dr. Bloom’s at the University of Toronto. In addition to pleasure, humans seek out things like competence, mastery and self-understanding. “You can’t get those without pushing yourself,” he said.

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Why it feels good to do hard things

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Why it feels good to do hard things

New research suggests we can train our brain to value making an effort and not just the outcome

Effort “just feels bad, and we tend to avoid it. That’s why it’s costly,” said Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Yet at the same time, “there’s something about pushing yourself that seems to be valuable and enjoyable as well.” One obvious reason we make an effort is for the end product, be it a championship trophy, personal record or end-of-year bonus. Generally, “in the real world, the harder you work, the more rewards you tend to get,” Inzlicht said.

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You Can’t Simply Decide to Be a Different Person

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You Can’t Simply Decide to Be a Different Person

Forming new habits isn’t impossible, but it’s much easier for some people than others.

The key distinction here, Inzlicht told me, is that a person who appears highly self-controlled to others—who is displaying a high level of trait self-control—probably isn’t exercising their behavioral self-control as much as you do. “People who have high trait self-control, they don’t actually engage in more restraint of their behavior and thoughts and emotions in the moment,” he said. Instead, they just aren’t tempted or distracted or diverted from their purpose as often or as effectively as the rest of us.

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How Small Moments of Empathy Affect Your Life

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How Small Moments of Empathy Affect Your Life

Empathy is one of many skills that help us build better relationships. But empathy can sometimes feel like a lofty concept. While it may be good for us and others, what does it actually look like in real life, and how can we cultivate it? Findings from lab studies don’t give us the full picture, often suffering from narrow definitions of empathy and not reflecting people’s everyday empathy experiences. To fill this void in the research, Greg Depow at the University of Toronto and his colleagues Dr. Zoe Francis and Dr. Michael Inzlicht conducted a study on people’s experience with empathy in their everyday lives, to find out how it affected their actions and well-being. Their findings shed some interesting light on how small moments of ordinary, everyday empathy work to benefit us all.

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You Can’t Deplete Your Willpower

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You Can’t Deplete Your Willpower

Ego-depletion theory quickly became one of the hottest concepts in psychology. “The idea really took social psychology by storm. It’s not an exaggeration to say that for a while it was at the center of the field,” says Michael Inzlicht, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Inzlicht himself was swept up in the ego-depletion furor and published work that supported its existence and significance.

“But then some cracks started to appear,” he says.

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I feel your pain (or not)

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I feel your pain (or not)

Empathy—the ability to relate to and understand the perspective of others—is sometimes completely absent and at other times difficult to sustain. “There’s a school of thought that suggests that empathy is automatic and effortless,” says Michael Inzlicht, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto. Yet according to a new study led by Inzlicht, this conception might not be accurate. People, it turns out, may opt against empathy if the mental effort needed is too high. In other words, empathy could be an on-off switch that’s easier left in the off position.

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Are human beings naturally lazy?

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Are human beings naturally lazy?

We know from everyday life that people constantly choose to do things they don’t need to do and which are sometimes painful. Think of all of your friends who run marathons or have punishing regimes at the gym. Michael Inzlicht from the University of Toronto calls this the paradox of effort. Sometimes we take the easy route and do as little as we can get away with, but at other times we value situations more if we have to expend considerable effort.

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Psychologists confront impossible finding, triggering a revolution in the field

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Psychologists confront impossible finding, triggering a revolution in the field

In 2011, an American psychologist named Daryl Bem proved the impossible. He showed that precognition — the ability to sense the future — is real. His study was explosive, and shook the very foundations of psychology. University of Toronto psychologist Michael Inzlicht was shocked to find that research papers in his own area of research no longer held water. They could not be replicated under the filter of more rigorous methodology.

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A Revolution Is Happening in Psychology. Here's How It's Playing Out.

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A Revolution Is Happening in Psychology. Here's How It's Playing Out.

In the last decade, behavioral scientists concluded that their field had taken a wrong turn. Efforts to root out false findings and bad practices spurred a crisis now poised to transform the landscape of psychology. Psychology Today profiles four scientists who are leading the charge.

"[Pre-registration] is really gratifying. It's frustrating, too, because you realize how hard science is," Michael Inzlicht says. "There are a lot of null results out there. I've got a lot of bad ideas, it turns out. But because I want the results I publish to lean toward the truth, I'm happy with that."

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People avoid feeling empathy toward others because it is too mentally taxing

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People avoid feeling empathy toward others because it is too mentally taxing

The Independent covers a new paper from the lab examining empathy's intrinsic costs. Our study suggests that people avoid feeling empathy because they think it requires too much mental effort. Defined as the ability to understand the feelings of another person, empathy can facilitate positive social or helpful behaviours in an individual. However, our research suggests that people often don’t want to feel empathy, even if the feelings it produces are positive.

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Why your desk job is so damn exhausting

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Why your desk job is so damn exhausting

This is the greatest mystery of my adult life: How can I spend all day typing at a computer and go home feeling exhausted? How could merely activating the small muscles of my fingers leave me craving the couch at the end of the day? This question actually lies very close to one of the more hotly contested issues in psychology: What causes mental fatigue? Why is desk work so depleting? “It is kind of a mystery, to be honest,” says Michael Inzlicht, a University of Toronto psychologist who studies self-control, motivation, and fatigue.

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Here’s Why Athletes Love to Suffer

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Here’s Why Athletes Love to Suffer

In Outside Magazine, an article describes a new paper by Michael Inzlicht, Amitai Shenhav, and Christopher Olivola on what they call the effort paradox. The effort paradox might help us understand why people do things like climb mountains, solve crossword puzzles, or shop at IKEA.

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Stereothreat

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Stereothreat

Back in 1995, Claude Steele published a study that showed that negative stereotypes could have a detrimental effect on students' academic performance. But the big surprise was that he could make that effect disappear with just a few simple changes in language. In this podcast, Radiolab revisits the topic of stereotype threat in light of the roil of replications and self-examination in the field of social psychology. Radioab speaks to Michael Inzlicht about his own experiences with the topic, including why he now has doubts about the robustness of the phenomenon.

Listen to the podcast 

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How rituals could help you win

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How rituals could help you win

Outside Magazine discusses some of the latest research from the lab, specifically focusing on the work by former lab members, Nicholas Hobson and Devin Bonk, and Michael Inzlicht. The Outside Magazine article details how pre-performance rituals can soothe the anxiety of poor performance.

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Does Empathy have limits?

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Does Empathy have limits?

In an essay published in the Conversation, Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht, and William Cunningham discuss the nature of empathy, specifically asking if empathy has limits. In the essay, which is part book review of Paul Bloom's Against Empathy, Michael and his co-authors suggest that limits to empathy are more apparent than real; these apparent limits are not built into empathy itself, but reflect the choices we make. These so-called limits, in other words, result from general trade-offs that people make as they balance some goals against others.

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Have we been thinking about willpower the wrong way for 30 years?

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Have we been thinking about willpower the wrong way for 30 years?

Harvard Business Review discusses the changing landscape of research on self-control, including covering work by Michael Inzlicht, who suggests that self-control is not similar to a fuel tank that becomes emptied with use. Instead, Michael suggests that self-control is better understood as a motivational construct, with features that make it resemble an emotion. 

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Willpower might be overrated when it comes to achieving goals

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Willpower might be overrated when it comes to achieving goals

Business Insider covers a new lab study suggesting that effortful self-control might be relatively unimportant in reaching one's goals.  Achieving your goals, in other words, is less about exercising self-control; instead it's about avoiding temptation in the first place. Thus, against popular and scientific wisdom, effortful self-control does not appear to play a role in goal-pursuit, suggesting that the immediate positive consequences of exerting willpower do not translate into long-term goal success.

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The Edge of Restraint

The Edge of Restraint

Michael Inzlicht talks with Psychology Today magazine about his research on self-control, suggesting that effortful control is not based on some finite resource, but is instead determined by people's priorities and motivations. 

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Empathy Is Actually a Choice

Empathy Is Actually a Choice

Psychologists Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht, and William Cunningham believe the “limits” of our empathy “can change, sometimes drastically, depending on what we want to feel.”

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The Paradox of the Free-Market Liberal

The Paradox of the Free-Market Liberal

Ariel Malka and Michael Inzlicht write in The New York Times about their cross-national research examining the influence of personality characteristics on cultural and economic attitudes.

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