While the lion’s share of research on motivation has focused on how people pursue goals (e.g., how do people avoid contact with potential sources of disease), I examine how people are affected by the goals they pursue (e.g., how does pursuing the goal to avoid disease affect how people see the world around them?). My research is geared not only towards better integrating social psychology and consumer behavior with evolutionary theories, but also towards exploring the practical effects of such findings on society and people’s lives. My research has been published in journals including Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Psychological Science, and The Journal for the Association of Consumer Research.
In my experiments and archival work, I examine how motivational processes shape consumer thoughts, feelings, and actions, and how to interdict their unwanted effects. For example, if we know that some socially harmful outcomes (e.g., increased prejudice against outgroup members; rejection of innovation) are linked to specific motivations (e.g., the goal to avoid disease), we can leverage this knowledge by temporarily allaying people’s disease concerns and consequently also diminishing prejudice integrally associated with those concerns.
My focus on the structure of motivational processes has led me to develop a theoretical model called The Selfish Goal, which explain unresolved patterns in goal-driven phenomena. I argue that both conscious and unconscious goals have evolutionary origins, but that their expression is best understood in terms of their own goal-centric or “selfish” domination over individual-level behavior. (Consequently, this framework is called The Selfish Goal—not because I focus on goals to be selfish—but because goal operation proceeds as if the goals themselves were metaphorical selfish agents, interested only in their completion.) This framework explains psychological phenomena including similarities between conscious and unconscious goals, and unintended effects associated with holding intentions over time.
Finally, I am also interested in how the motivational construct impacts interpersonal judgment. In other words, I examine how people perceive others to be pursuing goals (or not), and the consequences of these goal-related judgments on the targets. Research suggests that knowing producers’ intentions when originally creating a product can subsequently taint consumers’ evaluations of it. In a new project, I extend this approach to studying a phenomenon that is little-known and understudied in marketing: prison work programs, a billion-dollar institution of unfree labor that is intertwined with the U.S. economy. This line of research has been supported by a Trustees Faculty Award from the Stony Brook Foundation, well as a Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) grant from the Association for Consumer Research.