Diana Tamir

Diana Tamir

Diana Tamir is a social neuroscientist, now at Princeton University, whose graduate work with Jason Mitchell at Harvard produced one of the best-known findings on self-disclosure: that telling other people about yourself registers in the brain's reward system, and that people will give up small amounts of money for the chance to do it. She is the first author of that 2012 paper, which is often credited to Mitchell first.

Who they are

Tamir studies how people think about themselves and about other minds. The paper that made her work widely known, "Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding", was published with Jason Mitchell in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, when both were at Harvard.

Popular accounts frequently reverse the author order. Jonah Berger's Contagious (2013), which brought the finding to a wide readership in its chapter on social currency, names Mitchell before Tamir in its text. This site credits Tamir first, because she is first author.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding (2012), with Jason Mitchell. The paper reported five studies. In two brain-scanning studies, with 78 and 117 participants, talking about one's own opinions produced more activity than judging someone else's in the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area, parts of the reward system that also respond to money and food. A third scanning study had 17 participants.

The behavioural studies are the part most people remember. In Study 2, 37 participants made 195 quick choices between answering a question about themselves, a question about another person, or a trivia question, with each option paying between one and four US cents. They often took a smaller payment to talk about themselves, and gave up an average of 17 per cent of what they could have earned. In Study 4, 41 participants chose on 240 trials between answering a question and sitting through a five-second wait, and on some trials their answers were shared with a friend. The chance to share a thought about themselves cost them about 25 per cent of their potential earnings, and the authors valued each such chance at just under one cent.

Key ideas

The central idea is that self-disclosure is not only a social tool but a reward in its own right. People do not talk about themselves solely to gain something from the listener; the act itself has value to them, and that value rises when someone is listening. The figure most often repeated in popular writing, a pay cut of about a quarter, is the Study 4 result from the condition in which a friend received the answers.

The finding has been tested since. A record in the FLoRA Replication Atlas, drawn from a dataset of student replication projects published by Boyce, Mathur and Frank in 2023, lists one replication attempt of this paper with a rating of 0.25 on a scale where 1 is a full success, classed as mixed. Which of the 2012 studies the attempt repeated is not stated in the record we read. The scanning samples are modest by current standards, and the behavioural result that people pay to disclose is the sturdier half.

The wider literature on self-disclosure does not rest on this one paper. Nancy Collins and Lynn Carol Miller's 1994 meta-analysis found that people who disclose tend to be liked more, with the link strongest in surveys of ongoing relationships and reversed in field studies where a stranger disclosed something intimate in public.

Sources

  1. Tamir, D. I., & Mitchell, J. P. (2012). Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(21), 8038-8043. doi:10.1073/pnas.1202129109
  2. Boyce, V., Mathur, M., & Frank, M. C. (2023). Eleven years of student replication projects provide evidence on the correlates of replicability in psychology. Royal Society Open Science, 10(11), 231240. doi:10.1098/rsos.231240
  3. Collins, N. L., & Miller, L. C. (1994). Self-disclosure and liking: a meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 116(3), 457-475. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.116.3.457
  4. Berger, J. (2013). Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age. Simon & Schuster. Ch. 1, pp. 33 to 35.