Michael Wohl
Michael Wohl is a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa. He works on self-forgiveness, on the emotions people feel as members of a group, and on gambling behaviour. He is on this site for one study, published in 2010 with Timothy Pychyl and Shannon Bennett, which produced the most quotable practical finding in this part of the site: among first-year students who had left their revision late before one examination, the ones who forgave themselves for it left it less late before the next.
Who they are
His post at Carleton was confirmed against the university's psychology department record on 11 September 2026.
The 2010 paper sits in a line of work on self-forgiveness, which is close to self-compassion without being the same thing. Self-compassion is how a person treats themselves when things are hard, in general. Self-forgiveness is narrower, and it is about one particular thing you did and now regret. They are cousins, and this site does not treat evidence about one as evidence about the other.
Key papers
Wohl, M. J. A., Pychyl, T. A., & Bennett, S. H. (2010). "I forgive myself, now I can study: How self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination", Personality and Individual Differences, 48(7), 803 to 808. First author. One hundred and nineteen first-year students, followed across two midterm examinations in the same course. Students who said they had forgiven themselves for putting off revision before the first examination put it off less before the second, and part of that difference was accounted for by a fall in how badly they felt about it.
Key ideas
The mechanism is ordinary and easy to recognise. Feeling bad about having wasted an evening makes the desk itself unpleasant, and avoiding the desk is what wasted the evening. Letting go of the guilt takes away one of the reasons to keep avoiding it.
Three caveats travel with this finding or it should not be used. It is a follow-up study rather than a trial: nobody was assigned to forgive themselves, so the direction of cause is not established. Self-forgiveness is not self-compassion. And the relationship showed up among students who had already procrastinated heavily, so it is conditional rather than a general rule about everybody.
It is quoted here because it measures behaviour over a term rather than a mood on a questionnaire, which is rarer in this literature than it should be.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
Nothing confirmed. A search was run and no website or account could be tied to this person with enough certainty to publish. A name match on its own is not evidence, and a wrong link here would be worse than none.
Checked 2026-09-11. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Wohl, M. J. A., Pychyl, T. A., & Bennett, S. H. (2010). Personality and Individual Differences, 48(7), 803 to 808.
- Vault verification record, 2026-09-11. Affiliation confirmed against the Carleton University Department of Psychology record.