Roy F. Baumeister

Psychologist, author of eighteen books including Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (2011) and nearly 600 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. His work has been cited in the scientific literature over 100,000 times, including over 10,000 for his most-cited paper on the need to belong. Research on self-presentation, suicide, binge eating, the relative strengths of bads versus goods, violence stemming from threats to positive self-views, an economic account of heterosexual sexual behavior, how the self becomes a burden, self-control failure, ego depletion, male and female sexuality, guilt and willpower. Typical of his contributions is his theory of aggression, which provided insightful and now widely accepted resolution of the debate between those who believed that aggression was associated with high, and those who believed it was associated with low, self-esteem. His synthetic resolution: aggression is associated with high but fragile self-esteem; narcissists 'lash out' when they fear that they are going to be toppled from their shaky pedestal of elevated sense of self. His overarching goal is to use interdisciplinary evidence from the social sciences to address grand philosophical problems.