November 2003
Volume 16, Number 11
Giving Psychology the Business
My career path reinforces the notion that life is both serendipitous and endogenous. After graduating with an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles, I was working for Walt Disney's marketing department, and eventually ran Disney Music Co. Along the way I observed my wife, Judy Tschirgi, study for her PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and I became interested in reasoning and decision-making. One of my professors at UCLA had planted the seed that I could study consumer and managerial decision-making as a marketing professor in a business school. So we moved to Chicago, I went to the business school at Northwestern, and Judy joined Bell Labs as part of its human factors department.
Marketing is a very interdisciplinary field, drawing on psychology, economics, statistics, and operations research, and so along the way I experienced a good amount of confusion about which direction to pursue. Fortunately, I ran into Hilly Einhorn early on, took my first behavioral decision theory class from him at the University of Chicago, and was immediately hooked. My goal was to become the best psychologist dressed in marketing clothes that I could be, and my first job at Chicago's graduate school of business allowed me to do exactly that, with a joint appointment in marketing and behavioral science.
Working in a business school is a bit different than working in a psychology department. The two biggest differences are the students and colleagues. Most top business schools have active PhD programs, but they are small. Although we have a behavioral lab where we can run experiments, business faculty do not have labs in the same sense as psychology faculty. Our focus is on MBAs. These students are smart and can absorb difficult material, but their primary motivation for attending graduate school is to further their business careers. This translates into less tolerance of theory for theory's sake and more emphasis on demonstrating the practical significance of the material being presented.
The second big difference is that one's colleagues have research interests that cover a broader spectrum than one would find in psychology. I realize that there are lots of sub-fields and specialized interests in psychology, but take my word for it, being parochial does not pay off in a business school. And so as with most things in life, one adapts to the environment. My research started off focusing on specific and manageable decision-making problems, and I published most of my papers in psychology journals. As my career has progressed, the problems have become a bit messier and more relevant to business.
The dominant language in business schools is economics. Money talks, and in a business school, it lectures. At the same time, there are all sorts of characters wandering the halls with non-economic backgrounds: sociologists, statisticians, and quite a few psychologists. Most psychologists work in either marketing or organizational behavior. At Wharton, out of a marketing department of 25, there are10 faculty members who do psychologically-grounded research, on topics including decision-making, social cognition, persuasion, psychometrics, memory, self-control, and social identity. Although marketing has its own set of journals, including both the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Consumer Psychology, the research is predominantly psychological, and the field-values faculty publish in the basic social science disciplines.
Moving into a business school necessitates collaboration with people who have different training skills, a transition that is both challenging and rewarding. The challenge is appreciating different perspectives while being constantly reminded of the limits of what you know and can contribute; the reward is the collegial interaction, which can provide a more diversified set of skills and knowledge base. With time I also have come to appreciate working on problems of a more applied nature, in part because the research output is more concrete and observable.
Finally, in the more than 20 years I have been working in business schools, it has been gratifying to see the intellectual quality steadily improve, at least partly due to an influx of new colleagues with solid basic training in psychology, economics, and statistics. Hopefully more psychologists will migrate to business schools in the years to come.
Stephen J. Hoch is the John J. Pomerantz professor of marketing at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, chairperson of the marketing department, and director of the Baker Retailing Initiative. Previously, he taught at the University of Chicago. He received a bachelor's in human biology from Stanford University, a master's from UCLA, and a PhD from Northwestern University.
