Jacob B Hirsh

University of Toronto | U of T · Rotman School of Management

Social power, alcohol intoxication, and anonymity all have strong influences on human cognition and behavior. However, the social consequences of each of these conditions can be diverse, sometimes producing prosocial outcomes and other times enabling antisocial behavior. We present a general model of disinhibition to explain how these seemingly con...

Persuasive messages are more effective when they are custom-tailored to reflect the interests and concerns of the intended audience. Much of the message-framing literature has focused on the advantages of using either gain or loss frames, depending on the motivational orientation of the target group. In the current study, we extended this research...

Entropy, a concept derived from thermodynamics and information theory, describes the amount of uncertainty and disorder within a system. Self-organizing systems engage in a continual dialogue with the environment and must adapt themselves to changing circumstances to keep internal entropy at a manageable level. We propose the entropy model of uncer...

Theory of mind research has traditionally focused on the ascription of mental states to a single individual. Here, we introduce a theory of collective mind: the ascription of a unified mental state to a group of agents with convergent experiences. Rather than differentiation between one's personal perspective and that of another agent, a theory of...

Contemporary research on human sociality is heavily influenced by the social identity approach, positioning social categorization as the primary mechanism governing social life. Building on the distinction between agency and identity in the individual self (“I” vs. “Me”), we emphasize the analogous importance of distinguishing collective agency fro...

Contemporary research on human sociality is heavily influenced by the social identity approach, positioning social categorization as the primary mechanism governing social life. Building on the distinction between agency and identity in the individual self (“I” versus “Me”), we emphasize the analogous importance of distinguishing collective agency...

Tomasello describes how the sense of moral obligation emerges from a shared perspective with collaborative partners and in-group members. Our commentary expands this framework to accommodate multiple social identities, where the normative standards associated with diverse group memberships can often conflict with one another. Reconciling these conf...

The study of observational learning, or learning from others, is a cornerstone of the behavioral sciences, as it grounds the continuity, diversity, and innovation inherent to humanity’s cultural repertoire within the social learning capacities of individual humans. In contrast, collective learning, or learning with others, has been underappreciated...

Decades of research have demonstrated that having or lacking power can influence how people think and behave in organizations. By contrasting the experiences associated with high and low-power states, however, this research has neglected the psychological and behavioral correlates of middle power, defined as the subjective sense that one's power is...

Objective The Big Five personality dimension Openness/Intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement. Little is known, however, regarding the discriminant validity of its two aspects— Openness to Experience (reflecting cognitive engagement with sensory and perceptual information) and Intellect (reflecting co...

Savings rates in the U.S. have reached an historic low, posing challenges to long-term economic well-being. Among individuals, impulsive spending is associated with preferences for immediate gratification, driven by a heightened sensitivity to immediate rewards. Three studies examined whether population levels of trait Extraversion, reflecting disp...

Social identities are associated with normative standards for thought and action, profoundly influencing the behavioral choices of individual group members. These social norms provide frameworks for identifying the most appropriate actions in any situation. Given the increasing complexity of the social world, however, individuals are more and more...

Often seen as the paragon of higher cognition, here we suggest that cognitive control is dependent on emotion. Rather than asking whether control is influenced by emotion, we ask whether control itself can be understood as an emotional process. Reviewing converging evidence from cybernetics, animal research, cognitive neuroscience, and social and p...

The idea that group contexts can intensify emotions is centuries old. Yet, evidence that speaks to how, or if, emotions become more intense in groups remains elusive. Here we examine the novel possibility that group attention-the experience of simultaneous coattention with one's group members-increases emotional intensity relative to attending alon...

We conducted five studies to examine the effects of physiological deprivation on unethical behavior. Consistent with predictions from Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory, we found that physiologically deprived participants engaged in unethical behavior related to obtaining physiological satiation. Contrary to models in which deprivation increases glob...

Previous research has linked higher levels of the personality traits Agreeableness and Openness with greater concern about environmental issues. While these traits are important predictors of environmental attitudes among individuals, a growing literature has begun examining the broader consequences of population differences in personality characte...

By situating goals at the heart of human cognitive function, Huang & Bargh (H&B) provide a useful platform for understanding the process of personality integration as the gradual mapping of implicit motives into a coherently organized self-system. This integrative process is a critical feature of human development that must be accounted for by any...

While church and state are officially separated in many Western nations, there is nonetheless a great deal of overlap between the religious beliefs and political orientations of individual citizens. Religious individuals tend to be more conservative, placing a greater emphasis on order, obedience, and tradition. While many religious movements empha...

Neural processes that support individual differences in attachment security and affect regulation are currently unclear. Using electroencephalography, we examined whether securely attached individuals, compared with insecure individuals, would show a muted neural response to experimentally manipulated distress. Participants completed a reaction tim...

Many different interpretive frames can be brought to bear on the same experience. Heidegger described this space of possible meanings as the horizon of interpretation. This horizon can be understood as a probability distribution of possible meanings, instantiated as the relative activation of the brain's interpretive networks in response to sensory...

We suggest that the hierarchical predictive processing account detailed by Clark can be usefully integrated with narrative psychology by situating personal narratives at the top of an individual's knowledge hierarchy. Narrative representations function as high-level generative models that direct our attention and structure our expectations about un...

The current research explores how awareness of shared attention influences attitude formation. We theorized that sharing the experience of an object with fellow group members would increase elaborative processing, which in turn would intensify the effects of participant mood on attitude formation. Four experiments found that observing the same obje...

The working alliance between therapist and patient is an important component of effective interventions for borderline personality disorder (BPD). The current study examines whether client personality affects the development of the working alliance during the treatment of BPD, and whether this influences treatment effectiveness. Data was based on 8...

This paper investigates gender differences in personality traits, both at the level of the Big Five and at the sublevel of two aspects within each Big Five domain. Replicating previous findings, women reported higher Big Five Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism scores than men. However, more extensive gender differences were found at the l...

Political conservatism has been characterized by resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, with liberalism characterized by the polar opposite of these values. Political attitudes are heritable and may be influenced by basic personality traits. In previous research, conservatism (vs. liberalism) has been associated positively with Conscien...

Delay discounting is the process by which the value of an expected reward decreases as the delay to obtaining that reward increases. Individuals with higher discounting rates tend to prefer smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards. Previous research has indicated that personality can influence an individual's discounting rates, with hi...

Of students who enroll in 4-year universities, 25% never finish. Precipitating causes of early departure include poor academic progress and lack of clear goals and motivation. In the present study, we investigated whether an intensive, online, written, goal-setting program for struggling students would have positive effects on academic achievement....

People vary considerably in their attitudes toward environmental issues. Although some individuals view the environment from a purely utilitarian perspective, others are concerned about environmental sustainability and maintaining an ecological balance. The current study examines the relationship between personality characteristics and environmenta...

We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the fiv...

As the prefrontal cortex expanded in human evolution, so too did the capacity for nesting basic biological goals within more complex systems of behavioral organization. This increased ability for abstraction brought with it the challenge of deciding how to interpret the personal significance of any given experience. The human brain appears to manag...

This study examined whether the degree to which one perceives overlap between the self and another person predicts the magnitude of the neural response of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) following the observation of that person’s errors. Specifically, we measured the magnitude of the observational feedback-related negativity (oFRN), an event-re...

The prisoner’s dilemma has been used to study self-interest and cooperation in a variety of contexts. Applying an individual differences approach to this paradigm allows for the examination of dispositional factors that predict the likelihood of betraying one’s game partner. An iterative prisoner’s dilemma was administered to undergraduate students...

Although initially believed to contain orthogonal dimensions, the Big Five personality taxonomy appears to have a replicable higher-order structure, with the metatrait of Plasticity reflecting the shared variance between Extraversion and Openness/Intellect, and the metatrait of Stability reflecting the shared variance among Neuroticism, Agreeablene...

Social and personality psychologists have recently begun examining patterns of natural language use in relation to psychological phenomena. One domain of interest has been the relationships between individual differences in personality and the types of words that people use. The current study extends this research by examining the association betwe...

Activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been linked to the processes of error detection and conflict monitoring, along with the subsequent engagement of cognitive-control mechanisms. The error-related negativity (ERN) is an electrophysiological signal associated with this ACC monitoring process, occurring approximately 100 ms after an e...

Good help is hard to find - at least when you're using the wrong tools. Although the science of performance prediction has advanced over the past 100 years, many organisations continue to use outdated personnel selection techniques. A large body of research nonetheless indicates that tests of personality and cognitive ability are among the most eff...

Many people derive peace of mind and purpose in life from their belief in God. For others, however, religion provides unsatisfying answers. Are there brain differences between believers and nonbelievers? Here we show that religious conviction is marked by reduced reactivity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a cortical system that is involved...

Delay discounting describes the extent to which the value of a reward decreases as the delay to obtaining that reward increases. Lower discounting rates predict better outcomes in social, academic, and health domains. The current study investigates how personality and cognitive ability interact to predict individual differences in delay discounting...

Self-report measures of personality appear susceptible to biased responding, especially when administered in competitive environments. Respondents can selectively enhance their positive traits while downplaying negative ones. Consequently, it can be difficult to achieve an accurate representation of personality when there is motivation for favourab...

Individuals differ in the extent to which they respond negatively to uncertainty. Although some individuals feel little discomfort when facing the unknown, those high in neuroticism find it aversive. We examined neurophysiological responses to uncertainty using an event-related potential framework. Participants completed a time-estimation task whil...

Consumerism and Environmentalism are often viewed as mutually opposing constructs. While the for-mer emphasizes the accumulation and consumption of material resources, the latter advocates resource conservation and long-term sustainability. Highly materialistic individuals are known to be selfish, pos-sessive, and to place a greater value on the ac...

The present study examined the thesis that positive affect may serve to broaden the scope of attentional filters, reducing their selectivity. The effect of positive mood states was measured in two different cognitive domains: semantic search (remote associates task) and visual selective attention (Eriksen flanker task). In the conceptual domain, po...

While frequent readers are often stereotyped as socially awkward, this may only be true of non-fiction readers and not readers of fiction. Comprehending characters in a narrative fiction appears to parallel the comprehension of peers in the actual world, while the comprehension of expository non-fiction shares no such parallels. Frequent fiction re...

Manypeoplederivepeaceofmindandpurpose inlife fromtheirbelief inGod. Forothers,however,religion provides unsatisfying answers. Are there brain differences between believers and nonbelievers? Here we show that religious conviction is marked by reduced reactivity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a cortical system that is involved in the experie...