Edward R. Hirt

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Indiana University Bloomington

Human sociality is governed by two types of social norms: injunctive norms, which prescribe what people ought to do, and descriptive norms, which reflect what people actually do. The process by which these norms emerge and their causal influences on cooperative behavior over time are not well understood. Here, we study these questions through socia...

Vaccine hesitancy is variable across individuals and contexts. Theoretical work suggests that group membership should differentially affect attitudes and behavior related to COVID‐19 vaccines, as individuals draw on their identities and experiences relevant to their social groups to deal with uncertainty concerning the vaccines. The present work us...

Psychology researchers have long attempted to identify educational practices that improve student learning. However, experimental research on these practices is often conducted in laboratory contexts or in a single course, which threatens the external validity of the results. In this article, we establish an experimental paradigm for evaluating the...

We define self-control as an individual's efforts to bias the outcome of present or anticipated motivational conflicts in order to increase the likelihood that subsequent behavior serves perceived long-term interests. We suggest suppression and resolve are not "mechanisms" that underlie self-control, but rather are classes of strategies that influe...

Psychology researchers have long attempted to identify educational practices that improve student learning. However, experimental research on these practices is often conducted in laboratory contexts or in a single course, threatening the external validity of the results. In this paper, we establish an experimental paradigm for evaluating the benef...

We conducted a preregistered multi-laboratory project (k = 36; N = 3531) to assess the size and robustness of ego depletion effects using a novel replication method, termed the paradigmatic replication approach. Laboratories implemented one of two procedures that intended to manipulate self control and tested performance on a subsequent measure of...

Two experiments investigate the role of self-regulatory resources in bullshitting behavior (i.e., communicating with little to no regard for evidence, established knowledge, or truth; Frankfurt, 1986; Petrocelli, 2018a), and receptivity and sensitivity to bullshit. It is hypothesized that evidence-based communication and bullshit detection require...

Although models of political ideology traditionally focus on the motivations that separate conservatives and liberals, a growing body of research is directly exploring the cognitive factors that vary due to political ideology. Consistent with this emerging literature, the present research proposes that conservatives and liberals excel at tasks of d...

The recent debate in the study of ego depletion casts doubt on the assumption that self-control has a limited capacity. Adopting a revisionist perspective, we assume that people manage self-control exertion efficiently and ask what psychological mechanism would counteract motivational withdrawal following initial exertion in order to sustain an imp...

Past research on academic success emphasizes the need to avoid pleasurable nonacademic activities. In the context of enjoying big-time collegiate sports, we examined the notion that students, especially academically successful ones, may strategically indulge in sports games to resolve the conflict with academic pursuit. After confirming that high-...

Avoiding temptations has been traditionally touted as the desired way to manage self-control conflicts. Recent evidence, however, suggests that strictly avoidance- or abstinence- focused self-control strategies are neither adaptive in the long run nor practiced by people who are good at long-term pursuit. We resolve the apparent contradiction by an...

The authors examined the role of intrinsic interest in mediating the relationship among mood, processing goals, and task performance. Participants in induced happy, neutral, or sad moods generated similarities and differences between TV shows using performance-based, enjoyment-based, or no stop rule (cf. L. L. Martin, D. W. Ward, J. W. Achee, & R....

This study examines moral responses to sports media content. Using two conditions, participants (N = 639) were randomly assigned to read a damaging sports article about their university's basketball team, either written by an ingroup or outgroup member. Participants then reported their moral outrage to the article, moral cleansing responses, and te...

In order to encourage people with mobility impairments (PwMI) to become active tourists, it is crucial to enhance their self-determination for overcoming travel constraints. This study proposes mental construal priming as a relatively efficient approach to facilitating self-determined travel pursuits among PwMI. Two pretest-posttest web-based exper...

Temptations elicit both appetitive and aversive responses because they offer hedonic gratification on the one hand and impede long-term goal pursuit on the other hand (Fujita, Personality and Social Psychology Review 15(4):352–366, 2011). In this paper, we investigate how people’s affective responses toward temptations are regulated by the appetiti...

Past research on depletion has illustrated how prior exertion of self-control leads individuals to perform more poorly at subsequent self-control tasks. However, a number of recent studies have illustrated cases in which certain psychological manipulations (eg, positive mood, power, self-affirmation, meditation, exposure to nature) can ameliorate t...

When claimants press their claims without counsel, they fail at virtually every stage of civil litigation and overwhelmingly fail to obtain meaningful access to justice. This research program harnesses psychological science to experimentally test a novel hypothesis: mainly, a claimant's pro se status itself sends a signal that biases decision makin...

Emerging research documents the self-control consequences of individuals’ theories regarding the limited nature of willpower, such that unlimited theorists consistently demonstrate greater self-control than limited theorists. The purpose of the present research is to build upon prior work on self-validation and perceptions of mental fatigue to demo...

Past research has investigated ego depletion primarily in goal-absent contexts. We argue that the effect of depletion is more nuanced in goal-present contexts, whereby a long-term goal is highly salient. Specifically, we propose that individuals can recruit a motivational tuning process to adaptively respond to the state of depletion. Essentially,...

Through both internal and external influences, most humans exhibit a propensity to distinguish phenomena into "mental" and "physical" categories. Emerging from this propensity is the potential for self-control capabilities to vary as a function of metaphysical perceptions. In this chapter, we propose that if self-control can be perceived as reliant...

The purpose of this chapter is to outline the empirical work to date regarding the importance of individuals’ subjective perceptions of mental fatigue for self-control. We first review existing research on the causal link between perceptions of mental fatigue and self-control. Next, we discuss factors shown to impact or alter individuals’ perceptio...

Self-Regulation and Ego Control examines the physiological effects of depletion, the effects of psychological variables in self-control depletion effects, the role of motivational and goal states on self-control depletion effects, and a number of cognitive perspectives on self-control exertion. This insightful book begins with an introduction of se...

Past research on depletion has illustrated how prior exertion of self-control leads individuals to perform more poorly at subsequent self-control tasks. However, a number of recent studies have illustrated cases in which certain manipulations (e.g., positive mood, power, self-affirmation, meditation, exposure to nature) can ameliorate the effects o...

In 4 studies, we accumulated support for the prediction that depletion suspends the comparator mechanism of self-regulatory monitoring. We adopted an individual difference approach and designated chronic self-consciousness as a signature variable for the comparator mechanism. In the nondepletion condition, we found that self-consciousness predicted...

The current research examines the effects of resource availability, assessed here via individual differences in circadian typology, on the use of claimed self-handicapping. Participants high in trait self-handicapping were more likely to claim stress when told it would negatively affect their score on an upcoming intelligence task (versus when told...

Significance Surprisingly little is known about the self-control consequences of individuals’ political ideologies, given the centrality of political ideology to people’s self-identity and the vitality of self-control to human functioning. This research addresses this unexplored gap by offering insight into the processes (freewill beliefs) and fact...

The present research explored the empirical relation between positive mood and self-control restoration. In line with recent work on the perceptual correlates of self-control exertion,we tested whether positive mood's restorative effects could be partly attributable to expectancies of mental energy change. Results showed that positive mood elicited...

Research suggests that high levels of interpersonal power can promote enhanced executive functioning capabilities. The present work explored whether this effect is contingent upon expectancies concerning power’s downstream cognitive consequences. Study 1 showed that social dominance orientation (SDO) predicted idiosyncratic expectancies of mental e...

Past research has indicated that individuals with a high need for cognitive closure (NFCC) are more susceptible to priming effects in norm-absent contexts. We proposed that in norm-present contexts, whereby normative information competes with priming in affecting individuals' understanding of the social environment, the opposite pattern would occur...

Negative acknowledgment is an impression management technique that uses the admission of an unfavorable quality to mitigate a negative response. Although the technique has been clearly demonstrated, the underlying process is not well understood. The current research identifies a key mediator and moderator while also demonstrating that the effect ex...

In the realm of self-regulation, recent work shows that the state of ego depletion can be vicariously transmitted from a target to a perceiver simply by imagining the perspective of a depleted target (i.e., vicarious depletion; Ackerman et al., 2009). The present study asked whether such vicarious effects can extend to the domain of self-regulatory...

Americans' opposition toward building an Islamic community center at Ground Zero has been attributed solely to a general anti-Muslim sentiment. We hypothesized that some Americans' negative reaction was also due to their motivation to symbolically pursue a positive U.S. group identity, which had suffered from a concurrent economic and political dow...

Sport provides a unique opportunity to explore how emotions operate in people. However, the prevailing sport consumer behavior research has focused on emotion as an outcome variable and little research has examined the motivational function of such transitory emotional states on subsequent behavior and cognitive processing. The purpose of this rese...

The human mind is quite adept at modifying and regulating thoughts, judgments, and behaviors. Recent research has demonstrated that depletion of self-regulatory resources can impair executive function through restriction of working memory capacity. The current work explored whether the mere perception of resource depletion (i.e., illusory fatigue)...

Goal-striving and achievement can be undermined when individuals have a competing desire to protect a cherished self-view. When individuals are more concerned with avoiding the negative implications of a likely failure than with self-improvement, they may ignore negative information or may even go so far as to purposefully undermine their own perfo...

Considerable research demonstrates that the depletion of self-regulatory resources impairs performance on subsequent tasks that demand these resources. The current research sought to assess the impact of perceived resource depletion on subsequent task performance at both high and low levels of actual depletion. The authors manipulated perceived res...

Every year, billions of dollars are spent gambling on the outcomes of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. This study examines how individuals make predictions for tournament pools, one of the most popular forms of betting, in which individuals must correctly predict as many games in the tournament as possible. We demonstrate that individuals pred...

Recent research [Förster, J., Friedman, R. S., & Liberman, N. (2004). Temporal construal effects on abstract and concrete thinking: Consequences for insight and creative cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 177–189] has identified temporal distance as a situational moderator of creativity. According to Construal Level Theory...

Research in self-handicapping has consistently demonstrated a robust yet puzzling gender difference in the use of behavioral self-handicaps. Women not only are less likely to use behavioral self-handicaps when such opportunities present themselves, but are also more punitive in their evaluations of others who utilize these types of handicaps. For y...

The self-protective mechanism of self-handicapping appears to be motivated by the need to protect ability attributions in the face of concern about possible failure. Indeed, the present research finds a correlation between trait self-handicapping and chronic prevention focus. Moreover, the present research examines the role of “regulatory fit” on t...

Research has consistently found that men engage in more behavioral self-handicapping than do women. We first review evidence suggesting that these gender differences result from women placing more importance on displaying effort than do men. We then present the results of two studies seeking to develop measures of beliefs about effort that might ex...

Research in the area of self-handicapping has consistently demonstrated a robust yet puzzling gender difference in the use of and evaluation of behavioral self-handicaps; women (1) are less likely to use these forms of handicaps, particularly those involving the actual or reported reduction of effort, and (2) evaluate the use of these handicaps by...

Three studies explored the role of hedonic contingency theory as an explanation for the link between positive mood and cognitive flexibility. Study 1 examined the determinants of activity choice for participants in happy, sad, or neutral moods. Consistent with hedonic contingency theory, happy participants weighted potential for creativity as well...

The disrupt-then-reframe (DTR) influence technique involves confusing consumers with a disruptive message and then reducing ambiguity by reframing the message. Experiment 1 shows that the DTR technique increases retail sales in a supermarket setting. Experiment 2 shows that the DTR technique increases the willingness to pay to join a student intere...

This experiment examined the effects of public self-focus on individuals' behavioral self-handicapping tendencies. When faced with a threatening evaluation, a person may choose to self-handicap behaviorally. Men, more than women, and trait self-handicappers have been shown to self-handicap behaviorally. How do situational factors such as self-focus...

Encouraging people to consider multiple alternatives appears to be a useful debiasing technique for reducing many biases (explanation, hindsight, and overconfidence), if the generation of alternatives is experienced as easy. The present research tests whether these alternative generation procedures induce a mental simulation mind-set (cf. Galinsky...

Past research has shown that self-handicapping involves the trade-off of ability-related attributional benefits for interpersonal costs. Study 1 examined whether perceiver or target sex moderates impressions of self-handicapping targets. Although target sex was not an important factor, female perceivers were consistently more critical of behavioral...

Past research has shown that self-handicapping involves the trade-off of ability-related attributional benefits for interpersonal costs. Study 1 examined whether perceiver or target sex moderates impressions of self-handicapping targets. Although target sex was not an important factor, female perceivers were consistently more critical of behavioral...

Two studies examined the allegiance bias - the rendering of biased predictions by individuals who are psychologically invested in a desired outcome. In Study 1, fans of either Notre Dame or University of Miami college football read information about an upcoming game between the two teams and then explained a hypothetical victory either by Notre Dam...

This research investigated whether self-handicapping preserves specific conceptions of ability in a particular domain despite poor performance. Reports of preparatory behaviors and stress among introductory psychology students were measured prior to an exam and subsequent performance, attributions for the performance, and measures of global self-es...

The present study examined the effects of public self-focus and participants’ sex on self-handicapping behavior. Research in the area of self-handicapping has consistently shown that men alone tend to self-handicap behaviorally. Because conditions of public self-focus tend to make the evaluative implications of per formance more salient, the author...

This study examined the effects of induced mood on susceptibility to question-framing effects. Participants were placed in either a happy, sad, or neutral mood and performed an impression-formation task under different phrasings of Martin, Ward, Achee, and Wyer’s (1993) stop rule instructions. For the enjoy rule, participants were told to stop read...

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Previous research by Hirt, Melton, McDonald, and Harackiewicz (1996) found that mood effects on creativity were not mediated by the same mechanisms as were mood effects on quantitative measures of performance and evaluations of performance, suggesting that mood may simultaneously be working through different processes (dual process view). However,...

Two studies investigated the effects of motivational factors on expectancy use in reconstructive memory. Participants were given target's midterm grades for later recall; expectancies about the target's future performance were then manipulated. Participants' desires to see their expectancies confirmed were manipulated by making the target likable o...

Two studies investigated the effects of motivational factors on expectancy use in reconstructive memory. Participants were given a target's midterm grades for later recall; expectancies about the target's future performance were then manipulated. Participants' desires to see their expectancies confirmed were manipulated by making the target likable...

The authors examined the role of intrinsic interest in mediating the relationship among mood, processing goals, and task performance. Participants in induced happy, neutral, or sad moods generated similarities and differences between TV shows using performance-based, enjoyment-based, or no stop rule (cf. L.L. Martin, D.W. Ward, J.W. Achee, & R.S. W...

Previous research has suggested that an effective strategy for debiasing judgments is to have participants "consider the opposite." The present research proposes that considering any plausible alternative outcome for an event, not just the opposite outcome, leads participants to simulate multiple alternatives, resulting in debiased judgments. Three...

Two studies investigated the role of initial encoding in the relative weighting of the memory trace versus expectancy information in reconstructive memory. Ss were given a hypothetical student′s midterm grade report under either impression set, recall set, or comprehension set instructions. After a retention interval, Ss′ expectancies about the stu...

Two experiments were conducted to examine (1) whether a trait hypothesis about a target person sets up expectancies for the type of evidence that will be received and (2) how subjects use a trait hypothesis and actual evidence about the target to draw conclusions about the validity of the hypothesis and, thus, to form an impression of the target pe...

We suggest that the positivity bias found by Wann and Dolan in highly allegiant sports fans might be better explained by considering the mediating role of self-esteem in both the prediction of a team's future performance as well as the recall of past performance.

Reviews the book, The Construction of Social Judgments edited by Leonard L. Martin and Abraham Tesser (see record 1992-98414-000 ). Social judgment researchers have become increasingly aware that there are important differences in the ways in which people process social information. Thus, the present challenge for researchers in this field has been...

Two studies investigated how expectancy-timing and expectancy-outcome consistency affect expectancy-guided retrieval. Ss were given a student's grade report for later recall. During the retention interval, Ss' expectancies about the student's future performance (improve vs decline) were manipulated. The expectancy information was presented either a...

Two studies investigated how expectancy-timing and expectancy-outcome consistency affect expectancy-guided retrieval. Ss were given a student's grade report for later recall. During the retention interval, Ss' expectancies about the student's future performance (improve vs. decline) were manipulated. The expectancy information was presented either...

Two studies examined the effect of game outcome on sports fans' estimates of the team's as well as their own future performance. Consistent with social identity theory, it was expected that Ss for whom fanship was an important identity would respond to team success and failure as personal success and failure. Ss watched a live basketball game; then...

The present study was an investigation of how Ss would respond when given 2 self-handicapping options, 1 behavioral (withdrawal of practice effort) and 1 self-reported (reporting high levels of stress). Ss anticipating a diagnostic test of intellectual ability were given different instructions regarding the effects of stress and practice on test pe...

The present study was an investigation of how Ss would respond when given 2 self-handicapping options, 1 behavioral (withdrawal of practice effort) and 1 self-reported (reporting high levels of stress). Ss anticipating a diagnostic test of intellectual ability were given different instructions regarding the effects of stress and practice on test pe...

Three experiments test the hypothesis that positive mood facilitates cognitive flexibility in categorization. Study 1 used a sorting task and found that positive mood subjects in relation to subjects in other mood states, formed fewer (broader) categories when focusing on similarities among exemplars and more (narrower) categories when focusing on...

The role of diagnostic and confirmation strategies in trait hypothesis testing is examined. The present studies integrate theoretical and empirical work on qualitative differences among traits with the hypothesis-testing literature. Ss tested trait hypotheses from 2 hierarchically restrictive trait dimensions: introversion–extraversion and honesty–...

The article proposes an expectancy-guided retrieval model of memory reconstruction. In all 3 experiments, Ss were presented with a student's grade report that they would later have to recall. As predicted by the model, the results of Experiment 1 indicate that Ss' recall was significantly influenced both by manipulations of Ss' expectancies about t...

The role of diagnostic and confirmation strategies in trait hypothesis testing is examined. The present studies integrate theoretical and empirical work on qualitative differences among traits with the hypothesis-testing literature. Ss tested trait hypotheses from 2 hierarchically restrictive trait dimensions: introversion-extraversion and honesty-...

Fault trees have been advocated as aids for problem solvers. However, research has suggested limitations in their usefulness. Fischhoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein (1978) found that subjects given incomplete (pruned) trees were insensitive to omissions; these authors hypothesized that Tversky and Kahneman's (1974) availability heuristic was the media...

Having subjects explain a hypothetical future event biases their subjective likelihood estimates for that event. However, Sherman, Zehner, Johnson, and Hirt (1983, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 1127–1143) found that the biasing effects of an explanation task were reduced when subjects formed an initial impression based on the in...

An attributional perspective on interpersonal attraction based on Kelley's principles was presented and examined. Kelley's model has emphasized that persons, stimuli, and/or circumstances that covary with behaviors will be seen as causing those behaviors. Seven different patterns of positive and neutral evaluations were presented to the subjects by...

The effects of public self-awareness induced in an ordinary introduction situation on recall of people's names and characteristics were examined in two studies. Public self-awareness was varied by having 4 women introduce themselves to a woman subject either face to face or through a one-way mirror so that the subject could not be seen by the other...

471 undergraduates, selected for interest in and knowledge of college football, read information about an upcoming football game and explained a hypothetical victory by 1 team. Some Ss knew of the outcome to be explained prior to reading the information. Others learned of the explanation task only after reading the information. Of these latter Ss,...