Jason Mitchell
Jason Mitchell is a social neuroscientist at Harvard and the senior author, with Diana Tamir as first author, of "Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding", published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.
Who they are
Popular accounts often name Mitchell first, as Jonah Berger's Contagious does in its text. This site credits Tamir first, because she is the 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), Tamir and Mitchell. In brain-scanning studies, talking about one's own opinions produced more activity than judging someone else's in parts of the brain's reward system. In behavioural studies, people gave up money for the chance to talk about themselves: 17 per cent of potential earnings in Study 2, with 37 participants, and about 25 per cent in Study 4, with 41 participants, when their answers were shared with a friend.
Key ideas
The central idea is that self-disclosure is rewarding in itself, not only for what it gains from a listener, and that the reward grows when someone is listening. A student replication project recorded in the FLoRA Replication Atlas rated one attempt to repeat the paper at 0.25 on a scale where 1 is full success, so the finding is best quoted as one study's result.
Sources
- 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