Award Winners

The Hilgard Award recognizes an individual who has made significant and long-lasting contributions to general psychology, and whose work exemplifies an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to inquiry, consistent with the mission and goals of Division 1.

Roy F. Baumeister is professor of psychology associated with the University of Queensland (Australia), Florida State University (USA), and Constructor University (Germany). He grew up in Cleveland, the oldest child of a schoolteacher and an immigrant businessman. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton in 1978 and did a postdoctoral fellowship in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent over two decades at Case Western Reserve University, where he eventually was the first to hold the Elsie Smith professorship. He has also worked at Harvard University, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia, the Max-PlanckInstitute, the VU Free University of Amsterdam, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Bamberg, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Baumeister’s research spans multiple topics, including self and identity, selfregulation, interpersonal rejection and the need to belong, sexuality and gender, aggression, self-esteem, meaning, and self-presentation. He has received research grants from the National Institutes of Health and from the Templeton Foundation. He has over 750 publications, and his 49 books include Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, The Cultural Animal, Meanings of Life, and the New York Times bestseller Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. The Institute for Scientific Information lists him among the handful of most cited (most influential) psychologists in the world, and Google Scholar indicates that his work has been cited over 325,000 times in the scientific literature, with over 60 of his publications having been cited a thousand times each. His awards include the William James Award (the highest honor for lifetime achievement by the Association for Psychological Science), the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (highest honor by Humboldt Society), and the Distinguished Scientist Award (highest honor from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology). He is currently past-president of the International Positive Psychology Association.

You can visit his website at roybaumeister.com