Roy F. Baumeister

Roy Baumeister (born 1953) is an American social psychologist known for research on the self, self-control, social rejection, belongingness, self-esteem, self-defeating behavior, motivation, aggression, sexuality and free will. He earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1978 under his mentor Edward E. Jones, then taught at Case Western Reserve University, Florida State University and, from 2016, the University of Queensland. With Mark Leary he wrote the 1995 paper on the need to belong, which argues that people naturally seek lasting relationships and suffer in mood and health when that need is unmet, and he coined the term ego depletion for the finding that self-regulation draws on a limited resource. He has been named an ISI highly cited researcher and is a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.