This is a graduate seminar for Ph.D. students interested in behavioral science. The course will be divided into two parts.
The first part of the seminar, taught by Professor McGill, will cover topics related to product anthropomorphism, brand relationships, artificial intelligence, and dehumanization in consumer contexts. These topics, which are connected via conceptualizations of “humanness,” are active and interesting in their own right but also provide an opportunity to introduce different approaches to research in the consumer behavior literature.
The second part of the seminar, taught by Professor Koch, introduces a cognitive-ecological perspective on navigating the social environment. We examine how asymmetries in the evaluative information ecology shape impression formation, decision making, and communication, and ask whether this perspective can provide an elegant unifying explanation for valence asymmetries documented across social psychology, management, and marketing.
Students are expected to read the assigned articles in advance, actively participate in class discussions, generate original research ideas, and provide critical and constructive comments on classmates’ research ideas. The main purpose of this course is to stimulate research, and as part of this class you will be asked to develop two mini research proposals (one should be related to the topics covered in the first half of the class and the second to the second half of the class). Each proposal should include an experiment that you could conduct. After getting feedback on the two proposals, students will choose one of the two to present to class and to submit as a final paper.
