Interview with Roy F. Baumeister, PhD

ABOUT ROY F. BAUMEISTER, Ph.D.

Roy F. Baumeister is the Francis Eppes Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University.

He is internationally known for his research in social psychology that spans topics ranging from the human need to belong and the effects of rejection to how people seek to make their lives meaningful to the essence of the relationship between the individual and society.

In his latest book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strengths, Dr. Baumeister collaborates with New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control.

In what became one of the most cited papers in social science literature, Dr. Baumeister discovered that willpower actually operates like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice and fatigued by overuse.

In Baumeister’s latest research on self-control, he shows that we typically spend four hours every day resisting temptation.

A summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University, Dr. Baumeister did graduate work at the University of Heidelberg, took a M.A. in psychology at Duke University, and received his Ph.D. in experimental social psychology from Princeton in 1978.

After holding a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied personality and social structure, he joined the psychology faculty at Case Western Reserve University as an assistant professor in 1979.

He was named a full professor a decade later and awarded the E. Smith Professorship in the Liberal Arts in 1992, a post he held until accepting his present chair at Florida State in 2003.

Dr. Baumeister has been a visiting associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute in Munich and at the University of Virginia, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

His research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health and the John Templeton Foundation. An elected fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, he has just been honored with the Jack Block Award for lifetime career achievement by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. In January 2012, he will receive the International Society for Self and Identity Lifetime Career Award.

Dr. Baumeister has over 400 publications (including 27 books).

According to the Institute for Scientific Information, his research has been cited over ten thousand times by other scientists, making him one of the most influential social psychologists in the world. Dr. Baumeister’s research is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health and by the Templeton Foundation. He and Brad Bushman have recently authored a social psychology textbook, Social Psychology and Human Nature.

Dr. Baumeister was born in Cleveland, the son of an immigrant businessman and a schoolteacher. He now lives by a small lake in Tallahassee with his wife and colleague, Dianne Tice. In his (very rare) spare time, he enjoys windsurfing, playing jazz guitar, and composing music on the piano.