Wilhelm Hofmann

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Ruhr University Bochum

Experience sampling or ecological momentary assessment offers unique insights into how people think, feel, and behave in their natural environments. Because the method is able to capture situational variation as it happens in “real time,” experience sampling has become an increasingly popular method in social and personality, psychology, and beyond...

The field of self-control has witnessed an unprecedented boom, not least due to the immense implications of successful and unsuccessful self-control for people’s lives. However, successful and unsuccessful self-control can take many different forms, and many conceptual problems have been raised as to what self-control is about and how to best study...

Self-regulation is a core aspect of adaptive human behavior that has been studied, largely in parallel, through the lenses of social and personality psychology as well as cognitive psychology. Here, we argue for more communication between these disciplines and highlight recent research that speaks to their connection. We outline how basic facets of...

How often and how strongly do people experience desires, to what extent do their desires conflict with other goals, and how often and successfully do people exercise self-control to resist their desires? To investigate desire and attempts to control desire in everyday life, we conducted a large-scale experience sampling study based on a conceptual...

This chapter does not contain an abstrat. It reviews current research on the role of regulatory flexibility in strategy use for self-control.

Social comparison is a fundamental aspect of daily life with major implications for motivation and goal pursuit. By observing others, individuals can be inspired to set new goals and observe the steps needed to achieve them. Upward comparisons with more successful people typically drive self-improvement, while downward comparisons with less success...

Ambitious and legitimate climate action requires extensive public discussion, with social media serving as an important forum. This study analyzes over 6.4 million English tweets on ‘climate action’ from 2021, posted by the general public (1.25 million users; two-thirds of tweets) and over 3,000 climate scientists working on climate change on the t...

The dire challenge of climate change and the history of inadequate policy action by governments around the globe raise the critical question of how more impactful, structural climate solutions may be advanced. Here, we examine the role of citizen’s public policy acceptance as a key signal for the policymaking process with a focus on structural solu...

The regulation of self-control conflicts is integral to exerting self-control and pursuing (long-term) goals. Nonetheless, prevailing conceptualizations of self-control conflict remain vague, and the mechanisms and boundary conditions through which self-control conflict emerges are rarely empirically tested. In the present research, we thus propose...

Widespread behavior changes are essential to mitigate climate change, including adopting improved technologies and reducing energy-intensive activities. This study examines country and income differences in the perceived plasticity of climate-relevant behaviors and their connection to climate policy support through an online survey across Denmark,...

To improve public health and promote environmental sustainability, widespread dietary changes are necessary in high-income countries. However, adopting and maintaining dietary goals is challenging and requires repeated self-regulation. Effective public policies can facilitate healthy food choices and reduce the likelihood of goal failure. This stud...

Climate change is currently one of humanity’s greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate chan...

Hedonic overconsumption (e.g., overconsumption of gratifying behaviors, e.g., eating, gaming) is common in daily life and often problematic, pointing to the need for adequate behavioral models. In this article, we develop a self-regulatory framework proposing that when an actual consumption experience falls short of hedonic expectations—such as whe...

The regulation of self-control conflicts is integral to exerting self-control and pursuing (long-term) goals. Nonetheless, prevailing conceptualizations of self-control conflict have been overly broad and rarely tested empirically. In the present research, we therefore propose that self-control conflicts originate in accessible ambivalent attitudes...

Whether nudges succeed in promoting pro-environmental behavior strongly depends on their public acceptance. Prior literature shows that the framing of nudges, i.e., whether they address the individual (personal framing) or the society (societal framing), is one critical factor in determining nudging acceptance. Since a personal framing highlights t...

The concept of implicit bias – the idea that the unconscious mind might hold and use negative evaluations of social groups that cannot be documented via explicit measures of prejudice – is a hot topic in the social and behavioral sciences. It has also become a part of popular culture, while interventions to reduce implicit bias have been introduced...

Although attitudinal conflict is a pervasive aspect of everyday decision-making, little is known about the temporal dynamics that characterize how people experience and resolve such conflict. The present research investigated attitudinal conflict by adopting a temporal framework of conflict emergence and resolution. We conducted a preregistered exp...

Intergroup contact literature is still heavily dominated by one-shot correlational and experimental studies that do not take into account the dynamic interplay between intergroup contact and prejudice. Furthermore, these studies usually focus on a single ingroup-outgroup dichotomy, whereas all our interaction partners in real life simultaneously be...

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and a...

In a preregistered ecological momentary intervention study, we alternately instructed participants to adopt an upward and downward comparison focus. In all, 349 participants reported 8,137 social comparison situations across 6 days and three comparison conditions (baseline, upward, downward). For each comparison, participants reported social compar...

When individuals eat while distracted, they may compensate by consuming more afterwards. Here, we examined the effect of eating while driving, and explored potential underlying mechanisms. Participants (N = 116, 73.3% female) were randomly allocated to complete a driving simulation (distraction condition) or to watch someone else drive (control con...

Effectively reducing climate change requires dramatic, global behavior change. Yet it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an e...

This pre-print is an excerpt of a chapter accepted for publication in the 6th edition of The Handbook of Social Psychology to be published in 2024. The chapter reviews the current state of theorizing and research in this interdisciplinary area, and sketches emerging themes and connections. The topics covered include conceptual issues, an overview o...

To reduce social injustice, we need to understand the social dimensions behind these issues, like gender, race/ethnicity, or class. Class and its intersections are relatively understudied in social psychology. We examine how class (operationalized as education, income, and occupational status) and gender shape person evaluation across different cul...

We see unique opportunities to advance emotional research by studying an overlooked environmental problem. The biodiversity crisis is caused by land use, in particular by reducing and damaging habitats, such as deforestation for cattle grazing. Biodiversity processes are proximate and personally moving, like when a person is causing or experiencing...

We see unique opportunities to advance emotion research by studying an overlooked environmental problem. The biodiversity crisis is caused by land use, in particular by reducing and damaging habitats, such as deforestation for cattle grazing. Biodiversity processes are proximate and personally moving, like when a person is causing or experiencing c...

The successful introduction of public policies to prompt behavior change hinges on the degree to which citizens endorse the proposed policies. Although there is a large body of research on psychological determinants of public policy acceptance, these determinants have not yet been synthesized into an integrative framework that proposes hypotheses a...

Social psychology is strongly grounded in the experimental method for rigid theory testing. At the same time, our discipline strives to generalize to and fully understand the social–psychological phenomena that manifest in people’s everyday environments (“the field”). Whereas the former requires optimizing internal validity, the latter requires hig...

This pre-print is an excerpt of a chapter accepted for publication in the 6th edition of The Handbook of Social Psychology. The chapter reviews the current state of theorizing and research in this interdisciplinary area, and sketches emerging themes and connections. The topics covered include conceptual issues, an overview of self-control models, p...

The successful introduction of public policies to prompt behavior change hinges on the degree to which citizens endorse the proposed policies. While there is a large body of research on psychological determinants of policy acceptance, these determinants have not yet been synthesized into an integrative framework that proposes hypotheses about their...

The successful introduction of public policies to prompt behavior change hinges on the degree to which citizens endorse the proposed policies. While there is a large body of research on psychological determinants of policy acceptance, these determinants have not yet been synthesized into an integrative framework that proposes hypotheses about their...

Social psychology is strongly grounded in the experimental method for rigid theory testing. At the same time, our discipline strives to generalize to and fully understand the social-psychological phenomena that manifest in people’s everyday environments (“the field”). Whereas the former requires optimizing internal validity, the latter requires hig...

Significant greenhouse gas emission reductions can come from changing consumer behaviors. While the technical mitigation potential of such changes is known, evidence of their feasibility is less abundant. In a pre-registered international survey with mostly North American and European participants (n = 7,349), we examined the predictors and interre...

There is a lay assumption that women’s sexual desire varies substantially over time, whereas men’s is stable. This assumption is mirrored in prominent theories of desire, which posit that women are more variable than men in the extent to which they desire sex, and that women’s sexual desire is more contextually sensitive than men’s. We tested this...

In the past decades, affective science has overwhelmingly demonstrated the unique properties of affective information to bias our attention, memory, and decisions. At the same time, accumulating evidence suggests that neutral and affective representations rely on the same working memory substrates for the selection and computation of information an...

A key challenge for social psychology is to identify unifying principles that account for the complex dynamics of social behaviour. We propose psychological relativity and its core mechanism of comparison as one such unifying principle. To support our proposal, we review recent evidence investigating basic processes underlying and novel application...

Recent work suggests that most individuals support policies targeting the immediate economic and physical food environment to change behavior (Gold, Lin, Ashcroft, & Osman, 2020; Schroeder, Waytz, & Epley, 2017). The present set of studies builds upon this preliminary evidence by testing the idea that people who are dissatisfied with their self-reg...

In today’s elections, abundantly available polls inform voters what parties lead and what parties trail. This allows voters to accurately predict the likely outcomes of elections before the final results are in. Voters may react to these ex-ante election outcomes by shifting their votes either toward leading parties, often termed the “bandwagon eff...

When individuals eat while distracted, they may compensate by consuming more afterwards. Here, we examined the effect of eating while driving, and explored potential underlying mechanisms. Participants (N = 116, 73.3% female) were randomly allocated to complete a driving simulation (distraction condition) or to watch someone else drive (control con...

Hedonic overconsumption (e.g., overconsumption of gratifying behaviors, e.g., eating, gaming, etc.) is common in daily life and often problematic, pointing to the need for adequate behavioral models. It has been theorized that when a consumption experience falls short of hedonic expectations people will generally consume more to compensate the shor...

A common form of moral hypocrisy occurs when people blame others for moral violations that they themselves commit. It is assumed that hypocritical blamers act in this manner to falsely signal that they hold moral standards that they do not really accept. We tested this assumption by investigating the neurocognitive processes of hypocritical blamers...

In the past 20 years, greater attention has been devoted to the study of self‐regulation in an interpersonal context. This review summarize this work and presents findings on how self‐regulation processes influence close relationship outcomes. The review is organized around the four ingredients of self‐regulation (i.e., standards, monitoring, self‐...

A common form of moral hypocrisy occurs when people blame others for moral violations that they themselves commit. It is assumed that hypocritical blamers so act to falsely signal that they hold moral standards that they do not really accept. We test this assumption by investigating the neurocognitive processes of hypocritical blamers during moral...

Accurate models of pro-environmental behaviour can support environmental sustainability. Previous studies identifying the psychological predictors of pro-environmental behav- iour rarely accounted for environmental impact. We studied the greenhouse gas emissions of clothing purchasing across four countries. Clothing purchasing is responsible for 2–...

The discrepancy between ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility is well established in social psychology. Under which conditions does “ingroup love” turn into “outgroup hate”? Studies with natural groups suggest that when group membership is based on (dis)similarity of moral beliefs, people are willing to not only help the ingroup, but also harm...

Exposure to right-wing media has been shown to be related to lower perceived threat from COVID-19, lower compliance with prophylactic measures against it, and higher incidence of infection and death. What features of right-wing media messages may account for these effects? In a preregistered cross-sectional study ( N = 554), we tested a model that...

Accurate models of pro-environmental behavior can support environmental sustainability. Previous studies identifying the psychological predictors of pro-environmental behavior rarely accounted for environmental impact. We studied the greenhouse gas emissions of clothing purchasing across four countries and found that psychological factors like atti...

Self-control has predominantly been characterized as a domain-general individual difference, assuming that highly self-controlled individuals are generally, that is, irrespective of domain, better at resisting their desires. However, qualitative differences in the domains in which these desires emerge and how individuals interact with these domains...

Evidence suggesting that implicit partner evaluations (IPEs), but not explicit evaluations (EPEs), can predict later changes in satisfaction and relationship status has led researchers to postulate that IPEs must be especially sensitive to relational reward and costs. However, supporting evidence for this assumption remains scarce, and very little...

Across many parts of the world, people increasingly eat out-of-home. Simultaneously, many people strive to eat a healthier diet, but it remains unclear to what extent and how eating out helps or hinders people in achieving their dietary goals. The present study investigated how characteristics of the physical micro-environment in out-of-home food o...

Guiding people’s attempts to sustain current states—from health and personal relationships, to households, jobs, and the biological environment—maintenance goals are a fundamental albeit understudied aspect of human motivation. We tested how comparisons to the self and to others impact the motivation to maintain. We hypothesized that maintenance go...

Previous theorizing suggests there are multiple means by which people regulate their emotions and impulses, but that these strategies vary in the degree to which they support goal attainment. Some have proposed that proactive strategies (e.g. situation selection, distraction) may be particularly effective, while interventive strategies (e.g. suppre...

Dieses Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit Verfahren, mit denen sich der statistische Zusammenhang von Merkmalen ausdrücken und statistisch bewerten lässt. Im ersten Hauptteil des Kapitels werden verschiedene Korrelationstechniken je nach Skalenniveau der untersuchten Variablen vorgestellt (z. B. Produkt-Moment-Korrelation, punktbiseriale Korrelation, Ran...

Dieses Kapitel geht näher auf die Verteilungseigenschaften gemessener Merkmale ein und legt damit den Grundstein für die sogenannte „schließende Statistik“. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Normalverteilung, die bei vielen statistischen Verfahren vorausgesetzt wird. Zunächst werden die Verteilungseigenschaften der Normalverteilung und die damit mögliche Be...

Dieser Kapitel behandelt den t-Test, ein zentrales statistisches Auswertungsverfahren für den Vergleich zweier Gruppenmittelwerte. Dabei wird zunächst ausführlich auf alle dem t-Test für unabhängige Stichproben zugrunde liegenden Annahmen (z. B. Nullhypothese versus Alternativhypothese), statistischen Konzepte (z. B. t-Verteilung, Freiheitsgrade) u...

Dieses Kapitel führt zunächst ein in die Organisation von Daten in einer Datenmatrix und die Darstellung von Daten mithilfe einfacher Diagrammtypen. Anschließend werden die verschiedenen Skalentypen (Nominalskala, Ordinalskala, Intervallskala, Verhältnisskala) vorgestellt und die ihnen zugrunde liegenden Annahmen diskutiert und verglichen. Der drit...

Dieses Kapitel behandelt die einfaktorielle Varianzanalyse (ANOVA), die sich zur statistischen Analyse der Mittelwertsunterschiede mehrerer Gruppen eignet. Zunächst wird das Grundprinzip der ANOVA verdeutlicht, die Zerlegung der Gesamtvarianz in systematische (Zwischenvarianz) und unsystematische Einflüsse (Residualvarianz). Daraus wird die statist...

Sogenannte nichtparametrische Verfahren werden verwendet, wenn die Intervallskalenqualität der Messwerte nicht gegeben ist. Dieses Kapitel stellt drei statistische Auswertungsverfahren vor, die sich auf die Analyse von Daten auf Ordinalskalenniveau beziehen: den U-Test für unabhängige Stichproben von Mann-Whitney (das Pendant zum t-Test für unabhän...

Dieses Kapitel führt ein in die Varianzanalyse mit Messwiederholung, einer Erweiterung des t-Tests für abhängige Stichproben (Kap. 3, Band 1). Dabei wird sowohl auf die einfaktorielle Varianzanalyse mit Messwiederholung als auch auf zweifaktorielle Versuchspläne mit Messwiederholung auf einem Faktor oder beiden Faktoren eingegangen. Für jeden diese...

Dieses Kapitel behandelt die Chi-Quadrat-Verfahren (χ²-Verfahren), eine Familie nichtparametrischer statistischer Verfahren, die sich zur Analyse (nominalskalierter) Häufigkeitsdaten eignen. Das gemeinsame Prinzip dieser Familie ist der Vergleich beobachteter und theoretisch erwarteter Häufigkeiten. Für drei typisch anzutreffende Verfahren (der ein...

Dieses Kapitel setzt sich mit der zweifaktoriellen Varianzanalyse auseinander, einer Erweiterung der einfaktoriellen Varianzanalyse um einen zusätzlichen Faktor. Zunächst werden die drei Arten von Effekten (Haupteffekt A, Haupteffekt B, Wechselwirkung A×B) und deren Prüfung auf Signifikanz erläutert sowie Effektstärke, Teststärkeanalyse und Stichpr...

A central Buddhist claim is that having desires causes suffering. While this tenet draws from the belief that an acute desire state is more momentarily aversive than a no-desire state, the efficacy of this belief has yet to be comprehensively examined. To empirically investigate this claim, we furnished data from two experience sampling studies acr...

Interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has stimulated many research investigations. Much of this research has used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure association strengths that are presumed to underlie implicit biases. It had been more than a decade since the last...

The quest for authenticity is a potent existential striving. Authenticity is commonly defined as the extent to which a person knows, and lives in accordance with their "true self." We propose that people can also infer whether they are being authentic from ambient feelings of fluency, or the subjective feeling of ease that corresponds to one's imme...

In this contribution, we review current research on daily-life experiences of trust in diverse and naturally occurring social interactions ranging from close relationships to complete strangers. Experience-sampling methodology allows the joint examination of situational, relational, dispositional, motivational and behavioral variables in their rela...

The comparison to other athletes and the resulting effects on emotion, motivation and effort investment are a natural and integral part of sports performance. The current study tested a bias toward upward comparison in athletes. Further it tested how comparison processes influence motivation (i.e., self-improvement motivation, coasting, disengageme...

Do people in need share less with others? And what if the recipient is in need too? In two experiments, we addressed these questions by testing whether fasting-induced and self-rated hunger influence allocations in a dictator game in which allocators distribute food (cookies) between themselves and a recipient. In line with rational choice theory,...

A key function of morality is to regulate social behavior. Research suggests moral values may be divided into two types: binding values, which govern behavior in groups, and individualizing values, which promote personal rights and freedoms. Because people tend to mentally activate concepts in situations in which they may prove useful, the importan...

The purpose of the present research was to develop a more comprehensive measure of self-control that reflects recent theoretical advancements that extend beyond inhibition. Across six samples (N = 1,946, 48.95% males, Ages 18-76, US-MTurkers/Israelis), we sought to develop and validate the Self-Control Strategies Scale (SCSS), as well as examine it...

The current research tests how comparisons in the moral domain differ from other social comparisons in three ways. First, an initial experience-sampling study shows that people compare downward more strongly in the moral domain than in most other domains (Study 1, N = 454), because people like to feel moral and present themselves as moral. Second,...

Understanding persistence and changes in prosociality across the life span is fundamental to inform theory and practice. As life expectancy increases and pressing societal challenges demand increasing generosity and cooperation among individuals, it is crucial to understand intergenerational interactions. We present the findings from a novel lab-in...

Whether people's current motivation levels increase or decline also hinge on their social environment. The current research tightly integrates motivational principles from self-regulation research with social comparison processes. In a preregistered experience sampling study including more than 5,400 social comparison situations from people's every...

Previous theorizing suggests there are multiple means by which people regulate their emotions and impulses, but that these strategies vary in the degree to which they support goal attainment. Some have proposed that antecedent-focused strategies (e.g., situation selection, distraction) may be particularly effective, while response-focused strategie...

Extensive research has documented the frequent gap between people's intentions to perform environmentally significant behavior and their actual behavior. Despite this, limited research has empirically unpacked the processes and conditions under which people's environmental considerations influence behavior and when they do not. The present research...

Dieses Lehrbuch macht Dich fit für die Statistik-Prüfung – hier geht es um die Deskriptive Statistik sowie um die ersten Schritte in Inferenzstatistik, z.B. den t-Test. Also Dinge, die in vielen sozialwissenschaftlichen Studiengängen, wie z.B. Psychologie, Soziologie oder Erziehungswissenschaften, auf dem Lehrplan stehen. Vielen macht die Statistik...

Dieses Lehrbuch macht Dich fit für die Statistik-Prüfung – hier geht es u.a. um Varianzanalysen und Verfahren für Rang- und Nominaldaten. Also Dinge, die in vielen sozialwissenschaftlichen Studiengängen, wie z.B. Psychologie, Soziologie oder Erziehungswissenschaften, auf dem Lehrplan stehen. Mit diesem Buch wirst Du die Prüfung meistern, weil Dir h...

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...

Although trust plays a pivotal role in many aspects of life, very little is known about the manifestation of trust and distrust in everyday life. In this work, we integrated several prior approaches to trust and investigated the prevalence and key determinants of trust (vs. distrust) in people’s natural environments, using preregistered experience-...

Exposure to right-wing media has been shown to relate to lower perceived threat from COVID-19, lower compliance with prophylactic measures against it, and higher incidence of infection and death. What features of right-wing media messages account for these effects? In a preregistered cross-sectional study (N = 554) we test a model that differentiat...

Given the powerful implications of relationship quality for health and well-being, a central mission of relationship science is explaining why some romantic relationships thrive more than others. This large-scale project used machine learning (i.e., Random Forests) to 1) quantify the extent to which relationship quality is predictable and 2) identi...

Recent research on choice architecture has highlighted the role of external aspects such as stimulus proximity or availability on consumption. How such external factors interact with internal, intraindividual factors, however, is very poorly understood. Here we show how the wanting for palatable food emerges from the interplay of one key external f...

Do people realize the evaluative feelings that are spontaneously activated by their partner? If so, do they use those evaluations when judging their romantic relationships? To answer these questions, we investigated the association between automatic partner attitudes and judgments of relationship satisfaction in 7 studies. Study 1 was a meta analys...