Advances in the Science of Habits 2016

Provost Professor of Psychology and Business
Vice Dean for Social Sciences
University of Southern California
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Areas of Interest:  My research addresses questions of how habits form and change, how people are influenced by social groups, and what are the bases for gender differences in social behavior.

Post Doc Fellow, Department of Psychology
Stanford University

Areas of Interest:  Leor is interested in the intersection of learning, social cognition, and decision-making. In particular, he studies how people learn about others through interaction (linking instrumental learning to social cognition), and how people make value-based decisions guided by social knowledge (linking social cognition to decision-making), leading to both habitual and flexible behavior.

Presentation Title:  “Habit and Social Cognition:  Learning Processes and Effects on Behavior”

Research Scientist, Department of Psychology
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
University of Southern California

Areas of Interest:  Gavin is interested in neural mechanism of cognitive control and the role cognitive control plays in various cognitive functions

Presentation Title: “Neural mechanism of cognitive control and the role cognitive control plays in various cognitive functions such as risky decision-making and habit formation”

By Gavin Xue and John Monterosso

Professor of Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine
Professor of Health Care Management, Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania

Areas of Interest:  Kevin’s work focuses on developing and testing innovative ways of applying insights from behavioral economics in improving patient health behavior and affecting provider performance. He has done work with a variety of employers, insurers, health systems, and consumer companies in testing the effectiveness of different behavioral economic strategies in addressing tobacco dependence, obesity, and medication non-adherence.  Kevin’s research program focuses on the impact of financial and organizational incentives on health outcomes.

Presentation Title:  “Incentives and habit formation: some successes, some failures, and potential future directions”

Post Doc, Department of Psychology
University of Southern California
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Areas of Interest:  I study behavior change with a focus on habits. Current projects examine how misunderstanding the causes of our habits can lead to failed self-change attempts, and a consumer psychology study investigates the impact of habits on product choice, use, and switching to alternative products.

Presentation Title:  “Planning to Form a Habit?”

Assistant Professor, Organizational Behavior, Olin School of Business
Washington University, St. Louis

Areas of Interest:  Goals and Motivation, Self Regulation, Social Influence.  Hengchen’s main stream of research applies insights from behavioral economics and psychology to motivate people to behave in line with their long-term best-interests both inside and outside of the workplace (e.g., avoiding counterproductive behaviors, maintaining a healthy lifestyle). In other work, she has explored how different social forces (e.g., online reviews, news about a celebrity’s health) affect judgments and behavior.

Presentation Title: “Motivating Process Compliance through Individual Electronic Monitoring:  An Empirical Examination of Hand Hygiene in Healthcare”

Assistant Professor
MIT Sloan School of Management

Areas of Interest:  Dean is a social scientist, statistician who was previously a member of the Core Data Science team at Facebook. He studies how interactive technologies affect human behavior by mediating, amplifying, and directing social influence — and the statistical methods to study these processes. Dean’s current work uses large field experiments and observational studies.

Presentation Title:  “Social Influence and Changing Circumstances in the Creation, Maintenance and Disruption of Habits”

Professor of Marketing and Behavioral Decision Making
Betsy Wood Knapp Term Chair of Innovation and Creativity
John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management
University of California, Los Angeles

Areas of Interest: I am a consumer psychologist who studies the decision processes underlying consumers’ choices. Much of my recent research focuses on 1) habits and meta-rules and 2) the decision-making of older adult consumers.

Presentation Title:  “The Compromise Heuristic Habit”

Interim Professor, Department of Psychology
University of Konstanz

Areas of Interest:  Lukas currently holds a Post-Doctoral position at Konstanz University. He continues his work with Peter Gollwitzer and Frank Wieber on collective self-regulation through goals and plans in group decision-making. Building on past work on the regulation of self-esteem protective behavior, Lukas collaborates with Sean McCrea (University of Wyoming) in a project on threat and decision making and with Joana Kunz (University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand) in a project on effective self-regulation at the workplace.

Presentation Title:  “Why Does Observing Peer Habits Increase Impulse Buying?  Processes and Remedies”

James L Frank Professor of Marketing, School of Management
Yale University

Areas of Interest:  Sudhir’s research focuses on gaining market insights by analyzing consumer and firm actions through econometric modeling. As director of the China India Insights Program, he specializes in research on consumers in emerging markets and leads the various data-driven projects at the Yale Center for Customer Insights.

Presentation Title:  “Exploiting the Choice-Consumption Mismatch: a New Approach to Disentangle State Dependence and Heterogeneity”

Associate Professor, Preventive Medicine and Psychology and Director, USC REACH
Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California

Areas of Interest:  The objectives of her research are to explain and promote participation in physical activity and healthy dietary behaviors in children, adults, and families. This work is guided by a social-ecological perspective of behavior change, which takes into account the interplay between environmental, social, and individual variables. Her research considers how policy, community, neighborhood, and school contexts can influence physical activity either independently or through their impact on more proximal social and psychological factors.

Presentation Title:  “Applying Ecological Momentary Assessment Methods to Study Habitual Behaviors”

Assistant Professor, School of Administrative Studies
York University

Areas of Interest:  Jodi teaches in the School of Administrative Studies and researches and publishes in the areas of consumer finance, economics, financial planning, and financial well-being.

Presentation Title:  “An Analysis of Financial Distress, Habit Formation and Personality Traits”

Presented with Stuart Heckman

Assistant Professor and Certified Financial Planner
Kansas State University

Areas of Interest:  Stuart is passionate about the financial planning profession and is excited to be involved with graduate education due to the field’s need for rigorous research and theory development. Dr. Heckman’s research interests focus on the financial decision-making of college students, young adults and low-income households. He is also interested in the influence of financial planning on consumer well-being and behavior.

Presentation Title:  “An Analysis of Financial Distress, Habit Formation and Personality Traits”

Working with Jodi Letkiewicz who presented

Assistant Professor and Certified Financial Planner
Kansas State University

Areas of Interest:  Stuart is passionate about the financial planning profession and is excited to be involved with graduate education due to the field’s need for rigorous research and theory development. Dr. Heckman’s research interests focus on the financial decision-making of college students, young adults and low-income households. He is also interested in the influence of financial planning on consumer well-being and behavior.

Presentation Title:  “An Analysis of Financial Distress, Habit Formation and Personality Traits”

Working with Jodi Letkiewicz who presented

Founder and Managing Partner
Catalyst Behavioral Sciences, Miami Florida

Areas of Interest:  Habit, behavior change, consumer behavior, trademark litigation

Presentation Title:  “Product and Consumer Innovation Through a Habit Lens”

Associate Professor of Marketing, Stern School of Business
New York University

Areas of Interest:  Vishal’s general research interests lie in the domain of Data Driven Business Strategies, with a focus on retail competition, competitive pricing, database marketing, customer management, and empirical industrial organization. His more recent work focuses on leveraging large databases to generate psychological insights and guide policies in public health.

Presentation Title:  “Gender Differences in Shopping Habits”

Jointly working with Kartsen Hansen

Professor of Marketing, Rady School of Management
University of California, San Diego

Areas of Interest: Hansen’s primary research interests are centered on developing, analyzing and testing theories of household/customer behavior and the implications for retail strategy and competition.

Presentation Title:  “Gender Differences in Shopping Habits”

Jointly working with Vishal Singh who will be presenting for their group

Assistant Professor, Practice
Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

Areas of Interest:  Dan is a behavioral economist whose research focuses on the theory, practice, and political science of behavior change and benefit-cost analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis.  Past work has included a field experimental test of behavioral-economic theories of habit-formation and health-related behavior change, large-scale online experiment on the effectiveness of voluntary self-control mechanisms for online game players. Current projects include development of a theoretical model of bounded rationality in future self-control beliefs and an online survey-experiment test of the political psychological dimensions of behavioral-economic inspired public policy agendas.

Presentation Title: “Self Control and a Demand for Commitment in On-line Gamming Evidence from a Field Experiment”

Assistant Professor, Marketing, College of Business
SUNY at Stony Brook

Areas of Interest:  Ethan conducts research on consumer behavior, particularly in the context of investment decision making and focuses on topics such as how consumers perceive time and process information when evaluating investment opportunities.

Presentation Title:  “Exercise Habits and Academic Performance”

Walmart Behavioral Science Team

Areas of Interest:  Om is the Head of Behavioral Science at Walmart setting up a team of behavioral scientists to work across the enterprise reporting into the CEO level. Presently he leads a lean startup team of devs, designers, marketers, and strategists.  Om has been invited to speak at conferences in big data, marketing, market research, strategic foresight, and spoken on panels alongside CMO’s of the world’s largest companies. He also teaches at UCLA and his current course is on academic creativity and applying academic ideas to industries in new ways. Students think about interdisciplinary applications of technology and are exposed to industry frontiers.

Distinguished Professor, James Collins Professor of Marketing, Statistics and Economics

Anderson School of Management
University of California, Los Angeles

Areas of Interest:  His work in the area of target marketing presaged many of the developments in targeting today as practiced in electronic couponing and by web-based retailers.  His work in data-based pricing and methods for estimation of high-dimensional demand systems influenced the development of analytic pricing tools in use today.

Associate Professor, Marketing, Olin School of Business
Washington University, St. Louis

Areas of Interest:  Microeconomics/ Industrial Organization, Marketing Management and Strategy, Marketing Research, Pricing, Pricing, Product Design, Game Theory, Point-of-Sale, Marketing