March 2003
Volume 16, Number 3
No Starving Artist, Psychologist Collaborates in Advertising
 Patrick Vargas earned a BA in philosophy from St. Mary's College of Maryland, and a MA and PhD in social psychology from The Ohio State University. Vargas has appointments in the departments of advertising and psychology, and the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on implicit measures of attitudes and personality. |
As a teenager I was interested in pursuing a career in painting, drawing, or photography. My parents, possibly fearing that they would end up financially supporting a struggling artist for the rest of their lives, tried to guide me in directions where I could earn a living using my artistic interests. Advertising seemed like a good possibility and in the summer following my junior year in high school I took a course on advertising at Cornell University. That summer course was the last time I studied advertising until after I finished my PhD, 10 years later.
As an undergraduate I developed interests in stereotyping and prejudice, and attitudes and persuasion. I pursued those interests to the social psychology program at The Ohio State University, where I was fortunate to receive thorough training from some of the best in the field. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of New South Wales, where I studied affective influences on cognition, I moved in to the Advertising Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
My training in psychology did not completely prepare me to enter an advertising department. But my relative ignorance of advertising probably turned out to be something of an advantage at the very beginning - on my interview visit I did not even know enough to be nervous about interacting with some of the biggest names in advertising. What most impressed me about the advertising faculty at UIUC was their diversity and collective receptiveness to a wide variety of research. The current advertising faculty have degrees in advertising, communications, English, journalism, history, law, psychology, and sociology. They conduct interpretive, qualitative, and quantitative research. It is exciting and enlightening to give a social psychological talk to colleagues who come from completely different research paradigms. Many of the research-oriented discussions I have with my advertising colleagues could never occur with traditionally trained social psychologists.
Advertising opened new doors for collaborative efforts. Rich Petty once told me, "If you hang out with ducks long enough, you start to quack like a duck." It's true; even interpretive research is beginning to make sense to me. I am collaborating with an interpretive researcher on a project examining the role of imagery in persuasion. We bring different skills to the table, each of us somewhat skeptical of the other's methodology; but both of us are willing to learn from one another, and we are having fun working together. I had the opportunity to work at the Leo Burnett advertising agency. This experience gave me some insight into "practical" uses of advertising research, providing me with numerous classroom examples.
I was unprepared to enter the advertising department and teach courses in advertising. It took me most of one semester to figure out that undergraduate advertising majors are very different from undergraduate psychology majors. The former tend to be more goal-oriented than the latter in that advertising students generally have clearly defined goals of working in advertising agencies when they graduate from college. They are most receptive to information that they perceive to be directly relevant, and ultimately helpful, to their future careers. Psychology majors tend to be much more tolerant of abstract information, and broad theories. Still, I try to impart to the advertising students that nothing is so useful as a good theory, and I am getting better at conveying this to them.
One primary reason I feel so comfortable in the program is because I was preceded by two top-notch social psychologists, Sharon Shavitt and Thom Srull. The department has a history of embracing social psychology, and I am fortunate to follow in that tradition. The UIUC Department of Psychology is also one of the best in the country and I have developed good friends and colleagues there and regularly attend psychology colloquia, and collaborate with faculty in the Social Personality Organizational group. I'm fortunate to be able to embrace my social psychology roots and venture deeper into the research pond with the advertising ducks.
