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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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…
…This isn’t a relic of a bygone era. The idea that marijuana makes you lazy has been a recurring theme in anti-drug campaigns and remains a widely held belief. Many people still view cannabis users as unmotivated slackers, content to waste their days in a haze of smoke. But is this really true? According to recent research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, it may be little more than a myth.
Researchers conducted experiments to investigate the psychological effects of flicking by and fast-forwarding through online videos during moments of downtime
Scrolling through videos on TikTok or YouTube to avert boredom may have a decidedly unintended consequence: It can make people feel more bored, according to the paradoxical findings of a recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. People seem increasingly intolerant of it, and Michael Inzlicht has a counterintuitive tip for avoiding boredom: Lean into it. Sit with the discomfort of boredom for a bit before flitting to something else. “If we’re so addicted to escaping boredom, so intolerant of boredom, it would be like a foraging animal going tree to tree, but never searching long enough to see if it bears fruit,” Inzlicht said. “Eventually, that animal will die.”
The struggle for self-control is real, and one many of us are familiar with - but is 'willpower' actually a myth? Psychology professor Michael Inzlicht has long been intrigued by how we curb our less desirable behaviours, and what it is that unites people with 'high self-control'. His research at the University of Toronto's Work and Play Lab also seeks to understand our complicated relationship with effort and empathy - and whether so-called 'empathetic AI' has a place in our future.
It’s probably all too familiar. Against your best intentions, you find yourself reaching for a late-night snack again. You snap at a colleague who didn’t really say anything wrong. You find excuses so that your daily run becomes a biweekly one. You’re convinced you don’t want to behave that way anymore, but here you are, doing it again. Psychologist Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto has long been fascinated by how we keep ourselves in check — or don’t — whether you call that willpower, self-control or something else.
But sometimes—whether it’s running a marathon, climbing a mountain, or assembling furniture—we willingly choose difficulty over ease. Michael Inzlicht, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, calls this the effort paradox. While we often eschew hard work, other times we value it, viewing things as more rewarding if we have to work for them. We hike mountains even though we could see the same view by gondola and willingly spend more on furniture we put together than on preassembled pieces. “Both things seem to exist at once: we avoid effort, we also seem to like it,” says Inzlicht.
Famous rapper Snoop Dogg is well known for his love of the herb: He once indicated that he inhales around five to 10 blunts per day—extreme even among chronic cannabis users. But the habit doesn’t seem to interfere with his business acumen: Snoop has sold 35 million albums across the globe and has collaborated extensively with numerous other successful celebrities, including domestic doyenne Martha Stewart. He’s hardly alone in his cannabis hobby. In Canada, where I live and work, about 9 percent of residents use cannabis three or more times per week.
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.
We’re abundantly familiar with the stereotypes surrounding cannabis use that still prevail in today’s world, namely tropes embraced over the years in the media and among anti-reform advocates deeming that regular cannabis use makes people lazy and unproductive. As cannabis use is becoming increasingly more common, many regular consumers will attest that this broad assumption is far from the truth, but a new study has provided further insight on how regular cannabis users tend to function after consuming.
‘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.”
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Social psychologist Michael Inzlicht launched his academic career on the study of “ego depletion.” His research suggested it was real. Then came doubts.
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.
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.
Commenting in the News and Views section of Nature Human Behaviour, Michael Inzlicht and Cendri A. Hutcherson comment on a brilliant new paper on prosocial apathy, noting its many strengths, but also areas for future inquiry.
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.
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.
Michael Inzlicht talks to Science for the People about what bad science looks like, why good scientists with good intentions often use techniques of bad science in their work, and how we may be unintentionally selecting for bad science over good science in our culture.
Vox covers the psychology of self-control, suggesting that effortful forms of control are over-hyped. Part of the article covers work from the lab indicating that self-control does not predict goal progress.
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.
Forbes covers a new lab study showing that acetaminophen, a common painkiller found in brands like Tylenol and Paracetamol, impacts the brain's error-detection system. One implication of such a finding is that drugs like Tylenol might have unintended side effects, including hurting the ability to respond to cognitive errors, which is essential for control.
Michael Inzlicht talks to Slate about the replication crisis in psychology. He discusses the recent failure to replicate a basic ego depletion effect and drops an F-bomb about meta-analyses along the way.
A blog post by Michael Inzlicht is featured heavily in a story in The Atlantic, discussing Psychology's replication crisis. Michael Inzlicht provides a human face to the replication crisis, with an account that is unguarded, humane, and heartbreaking.
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.
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.”
Michael Inzlicht talks with TIME magazine about his research showing that watching bad things happen to outsiders can make us feel powerful and give us pleasure.
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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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.
Read More
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…
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
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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