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About

Brad J. Bushman, born May 14, 1960, in Salt Lake City, Utah, is the Margaret Hall and Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication Professor at Ohio State University. He also has an appointment in psychology. He has published extensively on the causes and consequences of human aggression. His work has questioned the utility of catharsis and relates to violent video game effects on aggression. Along with Roy Baumeister, his work suggests that it is narcissism, not low self-esteem, that causes people to act more aggressively after an insult. Bushman's research has been featured in Newsweek, on the CBS Evening News, on 20/20, and on National Public Radio. He has also been featured on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! He earned his BS in psychology from Weber State College (now Weber State University) in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 1989 and holds three master's degrees (in psychology, statistics, and secondary education). Since 2005, Bushman has spent the summers as a professor of communication science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Prior to joining Ohio State University, Bushman was a professor at the University of Michigan and at Iowa State University. He was awarded an Ig Nobel award in psychology in 2013 for his work about the attractiveness of drunk people. In 2014 he received the Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Media Psychology and Technology award from the American Psychological Association. In 2016, a paper co-authored by Bushman and his graduate student, Jodi Whitaker, was retracted by Communication Research. The retraction came after Patrick Markey, a Villanova University psychologist, pointed out irregularities in some of the paper's data. Bushman was cleared of wrongdoing by Ohio State but agreed to the retraction anyway; Whitaker had her Ph.D. revoked.

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Skills

Experience

Professor of Communication and Psychology

The Ohio State University (OSU)

Sep-2010 to Present

Publication

  • dott image January, 2024

Evolution, culture, and the possibility of peace

Glowacki's work meshes well with our view of human nature as having evolved to use culture to improve survival and reproduction. Peace is a cultural achievement, requiring advances in social...

Cultural Animal Theory of Political Partisan Conflict and Hostility

Seeking to understand and reduce partisan hostility, we propose that humans evolved to benefit from cultural societies. Societies perform two crucial tasks, which have grown apart and are no...

Resources and Partisanship: Response to Commentaries

We thank all the commentators for their diligent and thoughtful efforts on our article. The detailed and scholarly work by several of them went far beyond the call of duty, which was most gr...

Social Psychology and Human Nature

Explore how social psychology can help you make sense of your own social world with this engaging and accessible book. Roy F. Baumeister and Brad J. Bushman's SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND HUMAN NAT...

  • dott image November, 2022

A Review of Multisite Replication Projects in Social Psychology: Is It Viable to Sustain Any Confidence in Social Psychology’s Knowledge Base?

Multisite (multilab/many-lab) replications have emerged as a popular way of verifying prior research findings, but their record in social psychology has prompted distrust of the field and a ...

Looking Again, and Harder, for a Link Between Low Self-Esteem and Aggression

Recent field studies have revived the hypothesis that low self-esteem causes aggression. Accordingly, we reanalyzed the data from a previous experiment and conducted a new experiment to stud...

Looking Again, and Harder, for a Link Between Low Self-Esteem and Aggression

Recent field studies have revived the hypothesis that low self-esteem causes aggression. Accordingly, we reanalyzed the data from a previous experiment and conducted a new experiment to stud...

Social psychology and human nature, Annotated instructor's ed

Social psychology is partly about the power of situations; but to us, social psychology is also very much about people. We believe students sign up for the course because they want to learn ...

  • dott image December, 2004

Too Proud to Let Go: Narcissistic Entitlement as a Barrier to Forgiveness

Narcissistic entitlement impedes forgiveness in ways not captured by other robust predictors (e.g., offense severity, apology, relationship closeness, religiosity, Big Five personality facto...