INSEAD Professor receives Ig Nobel Award for research on inhibition​s, impulse control

INSEAD, the leading international business school, yesterday announced that Mirjam Tuk, a visiting Professor in the field of Marketing, had received an Ig Nobel Award for her recent research examining inhibitions and impulse control.

Each year, the Ig Nobel Awards honour achievements that ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think’.

Professor Tuk was honoured at a gala ceremony for her research, ‘Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains,’ which recently appeared in Psychological Science.

Tuk, along with co-authors Debra Trampe of the University of Groningen, and Luk Warlop of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Norwegian School of Management, investigated how self-control is affected by a visceral factor associated with inhibition rather than with approach: bladder control. The authors show that physiological inhibitory signals (due to higher levels of bladder control) facilitate impulse inhibition in general (shown by less impulsive decisions).

“I am extremely honoured to be recognised with an Ig Nobel Award, especially in the presence of former Nobel Prize winners,” said Professor Tuk. “Our research provides key contributions to a decades-old debate in psychology and psychiatry about whether inhibitory signals are domain-specific or domain-agnostic. This is essential to better understand many impulse control problems such as obesity, alcohol abuse and gambling addiction.”

In four studies, Tuk, Trampe and Warlop found that inhibitory signals stemming from increasing levels of bladder pressure can spill over to other domains, resulting in increased impulse control in unrelated domains. Their studies are the first to examine the impact of inhibitory visceral factors on self-control conflicts and to provide evidence for inhibitory spillover effects in the behavioural domain.

Tuk’s primary research areas focus on consumer self-control processes and interpersonal influence processes. Her work in the area of interpersonal influence focuses on word-of-mouth referral behaviour and how marketing-stimulated referrals alter word-of-mouth interactions, and potentially diminish the well-known effectiveness of word-of-mouth recommendations.

Organised by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobel Awards are given out each year in a gala ceremony taking place in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. The awards are handed out by select Nobel laureates in front of 1,200 attendees. The ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Student, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and the Harvard Computer Society.