Empirica Research Think Tank

In addition to our core team of researchers, Empirica offers the unique ability to connect with a group of esteemed academics from around the world. Known as our “Think Tank”, they partner with us on select projects.

• Michael Norton, PhD. Harvard Business School. Michael is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, and a member of Harvard’s Behavioral Insights Group. His two major areas of research interest are the impact of social norms on our behaviour and the application of behavioral economics. Michael has worked with Empirica on a project for the ACTU on Australians perceptions of wealth inequality.

• Patrick Vargas, PhD. University of Illinois. Patrick is a Professor of Advertising at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a social psychologist and his research focuses on attitudes, attitude measurement, stereotyping and persuasion. His work is published in leading academic journals. He has also conducted research that examines the ethics of 'direct to consumer' pharmaceutical advertising.

• Simon Laham, PhD. University of Melbourne. Simon is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences. His academic research focuses on the psychology of morality and on the non-verbal communication of attitudes, beliefs and values. He is currently working with Empirica on a project exploring the psychology of donation.

• Nick Haslam, PhD. University of Melbourne. Nick is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. He has a unique combination of academic and applied experience on barriers to self-change. He also has been a pioneer in new statistical techniques that can be applied to classification and segmentation analysis. Broadly, his research covers areas such as social relationships, statistical methods, stereotyping and prejudice.

• Christian Wheeler, PhD. Stanford University. Christian is the StrataCom Professor of Management and Professor of Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His primary areas of research are attitudes and social cognition – this covers everything from how we make decisions, what things influence our everyday judgments and how things that we aren’t even consciously aware of can impact our attitudes and behaviours.

• Sebastien Brion, PhD. IESE Business School. Sebastien is an Associate Professor of Managing People in Organizations at IESE Business School. He holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. In his research, he explores the psychological effects of power, focusing on the attainment, maintenance, and loss of power in group and organizational settings.

• Jennifer Overbeck, PhD. Melbourne Business School. Jennifer is an Associate Professor of Management at the Melbourne Business School. Her research focuses on the effects of power and status on interpersonal and group dynamics, how hierarchies develop, how leaders can bolster their images, and how emotions and communication patterns affect negotiations.

• Amy Cuddy, PhD. Amy and her collaborators have developed a substantial body of research that focuses on judgments of other people and groups along two core trait dimensions, warmth and competence, which shape and motivate social emotions, intentions, and behaviours. She examines how these social perception and influence processes play out in domains such as hiring, promotion, and charitable giving, for example. Amy and Cassie worked together on a paper examining the impact of Qantas twitter promotions during a grounding.

• Jon Krosnick, PhD. Stanford University. Jon is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Stanford University. He also holds professorships in Communication, Political Science and Psychology. He is the author of four books and more than 140 articles and chapters. He conducts research in attitude change, the psychology of political behaviour, and the optimal design of questionnaires. He is our go-to guru for survey design!

• Brian Lowery, PhD. Stanford University. Brian is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a social psychologist and his core research areas are how people perceive inequality and the impact of non-conscious racial attitudes.

• Courtney von Hippel, PhD. University of Queensland. Courtney is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. A core element of her research is intergroup relations and stereotyping in the workplace. One aspect of this line of research is how women perform (and feel) when they are in male-dominated fields (such as law, accounting, management) and much of this draws on the theory of 'stereotype threat.'

• Bill von Hippel, PhD. University of Queensland. Bill is a Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. He is a social psychologist with an evolutionary bent and his research spans topics such as 'Darwinian grand-parenting', the influence of attractive women on men’s risk taking, the impact of Viagra on endangered animals, the attitudes of health care workers towards injecting drug users, and the effects of ageing on inhibitory control (or, why older people can sometimes be very blunt).