E. Tory Higgins

Edward Tory Higgins, born March 12, 1946, is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology and Business and director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. His research covers motivation and cognition, judgment and decision-making, and social cognition, and he is best known for work on priming, self-discrepancy theory and regulatory focus theory. Regulatory focus theory separates a promotion system aimed at achieving gains from a prevention system aimed at avoiding losses. He later proposed regulatory fit theory, worked with Arie Kruglanski on regulatory mode theory, and studied shared reality, the motivation to share feelings and beliefs with others. He earned a B.A. at McGill in 1967, an M.A. at the London School of Economics in 1968 and a Columbia Ph.D. in 1973, and chaired Columbia's psychology department from 1994 to 2001.