The Work and Play Lab explores the science of mental effort and leisure
The Work and Play Lab is serious about mental and physical effort, but also about leisure and rest. The lab is primarily focused on understanding the nature of effort, how people push themselves to reach their goals. This has led to an emphasis on the psychology of self-control and the related concepts of cognitive control and executive function. For example, work in the lab has examined how self-control wanes over the course of a day as fatigue and boredom set in. It has also examined an unappreciated aspect of empathy: that empathy requires effort, and as such is often avoided.
Inspired by the philosopher Josef Pieper who said that work is the means of life; leisure the end, the lab has started focusing on how people spend their free time and the consequences of these choices. For example, work in the lab is examining why and how people use Twitter, and some of the consequences of this use for wellbeing and political polarization. Work in the lab has also examined the joys of empathy—when people celebrate and resonate with others’achievements. Current projects on leisure also include questions about recreational cannabis use and the downsides of people treating their work as leisure.
In the past, the lab also conducted research on prejudice and discrimination, especially at they impact academic performance. Also noteworthy is the lab’s commitment to open and transparent science, which among other things includes regularly running replication studies.
What follows are questions that have guided the lab’s research and representative publications that address these questions.
Self-Control
Why is self-control so hard? Is self-control a limited resource? Does self-control help people reach their goals? What strategies do people use to control themselves? Is ego depletion real?
Inzlicht, M., Werner, K.M., Briskin, J.L., & Roberts, B.W. (2021). Integrating models of self-regulation. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 319-345.
Milyavskaya, M., Saunders, B., & Inzlicht, M. (2021). Self-control in daily life: Prevalence and effectiveness of diverse self-control strategies. Journal of Personality, 89, 634-651.
Saunders, B., Milyavskaya, M., & Inzlicht, M. (2022). Longitudinal evidence that Event Related Potential measures of self-regulation do not predict everyday goal pursuit. Nature Communications, 13, 3201.
Milyavskaya, M., & Inzlicht, M. (2017). What’s so great about self-control? Examining the importance of effortful self-control and temptation in predicting real-life depletion and goal attainment. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8, 603-611.
Empathy
Is empathy hard work? Can AI express empathy well? Are doctors especially empathic? Does empathy feel good? Do people readily share in other’s good fortunes?
Cameron, C.D., Hutcherson, C.A., Ferguson, A.M., Scheffer, J.A., Hadjiandreou, E., & Inzlicht, M. (2019). Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148, 962-976.
Inzlicht, M., Cameron, C.D., D’Cruz, J., Bloom, P. (2024). In praise of empathic AI. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28, 89-91.
Ferguson, A.M., Cameron, C.D., & Inzlicht, M. (2021). When does empathy feel good? Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 39, 125-129.
Depow, G.J., Francis, Z.L., & Inzlicht, M. (2021). The experience of empathy in everyday life. Psychological Science, 32, 1198-1213.
Effort
Do people avoid mental effort? Do people find effort meaningful? Is exerting effort boring? Can people be taught to value hard work? Do people prefer effort over doing nothing?
Inzlicht, M., Shenhav, A., & Olivola, C.Y. (2018). The effort paradox: Effort is both costly and valued. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22, 337-349.
Milyavskaya, M., Inzlicht, M., Johnson, T., & Larson, M.J. (2019). Reward sensitivity following boredom and cognitive effort: A high-powered neurophysiological investigation. Neuropsychologia, 123, 159-168.
Wu, R, Ferguson, A.M., & Inzlicht, M. (2023). Do humans prefer cognitive effort over doing nothing? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152, 1069-1079.
Lin, H., Westbrook, A., Fan, F., & Inzlicht, M. (2024). An experimental manipulation of the value of effort. Nature Human Behaviour.
Leisure Time
Why doe people use social media and how does it make them feel? Does cannabis make people lazy and unmotivated? Why do we find smartphones so addictive? What kinds of leisure promote wellbeing and a sense of meaning and purpose?
Oldemburgo de Mello, V., Cheung, F., & Inzlicht, M. (2024). Twitter (X) use predicts substantial changes in well-being, polarization, sense of belonging, and outrage. Communications Psychology, 2, 15.
Inzlicht, M., Sparrow-Mungal, T. B., & Depow, G. J. (2024). Chronic cannabis use in everyday life: Emotional, motivational, and self-regulatory effects of frequently getting high. Social Psychology and Personality Science.
Lyngs, U., Lukoff, K., Slovak, P., Inzlicht, M., Freed, M., Andrews, H., Tinsman, C., Csuka, L., Alberts, L., Oldemburgo de Mello, V., Makransky, G., Hornbæk, K., Van Kleek, M., & Shadbolt, N. (2024). “I finally felt I had the tools to control these urges”: Empowering students to achieve their device use goals with the Reduce Digital Distraction Workshop. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
Prejudice & Discrimination
Why are women under-represented in math and science? Can negative stereotypes undermine academic performance? Can anti-racism interventions ironically increase prejudice?
Inzlicht, M. & Schmader, T. (2012). Stereotype Threat: Theory, Process, and Application. New York: Oxford University Press.
Inzlicht, M. & Ben-Zeev, T. (2000). A threatening intellectual environment: Why females are susceptible to experiencing problem-solving deficits in the presence of males. Psychological Science, 11, 365-371.
Legault, L., Gutsell, J.N., & Inzlicht, M. (2011). Ironic effects of anti-prejudice messages: How motivational intervention reduces (but also increases) prejudice. Psychological Science, 22, 1472–1477.
Open Science
Is the well-known ego depletion effect replicable? How does social psychology move on from decades of questionable research practices? Are self-replications valuable? Why are meta-analyses problematic?
Inzlicht, M., & Friese, M. (2019). The past, present, and future of ego depletion. Social Psychology, 50, 370-378.
Inzlicht, M. (2016, February 29) Reckoning with the Past [blog post]. Getting Better.
Dang, J., King, K.M., & Inzlicht, M. (2020). Why are self-report and behavioral measures weakly correlated? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24, 267-269.
Saunders, B., & Inzlicht, M. (2021). Pooling resources to enhance rigour in psychophysiological research: Insights from open science approaches to meta-analysis. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 162, 112-120.
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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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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.”
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
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.
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