People like Heidi Grant Halvorson

Edward Tory Higgins (born March 12, 1946) is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology, Professor of Business, and Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. Higgins has a broad set of research interests, including motivation and cognition, judgment and decision-making, and social cognition. His more notable contributions to the field of psychology include work on priming, self-discrepancy theory, and regulatory focus theory. He is also the author of Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works, and Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence (with Heidi Grant Halverson).

Higgins received a Joint Honors B.A. degree in sociology and anthropology from McGill University in 1967, an M.A. in social psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1968, and a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University in 1973. His early work included the study of priming and accessibility, through which social judgment is influenced through the unconscious activation of social categories. In 1981, he was hired by New York University, where he worked with others to re-build the social/personality psychology program. Among the early hires at NYU during this time were John Bargh, Shelly Chaiken, and Yaacov Trope. In 1989, Higgins returned to Columbia and served as the Chair of the psychology department from 1994 to 2001.