• Hello!
    My name is Adrian.

    I am an associate professor in the marketing department at the University of Texas at Austin. I study technology, cognition, and how we can be better to those around us--and ourselves.

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  • Technology and Cognition

    The Internet has transformed the way we find and understand information. I explore what happens when our "old" cognitive systems interact with this "new" technology.

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  • Financial Decision-Making

    Most of us aren't very good at making financial decisions, and financial education is often ineffective. I use both empirical research and large-scale field applications to investigate potential solutions to these problems.

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  • Moral Decision-Making

    Moral beliefs and intuitions influence almost all aspects of our lives. My research examines how "flexible morality" can explain our beliefs, decisions, and treatment of others.

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About me:

I use methods from cognitive and social psychology, as well as insights gleaned from behavioral economics, machine learning, human-computer interaction, and whatever else I can get my hands on to investigate consumer behavior and decision-making. My work is primarily focused on: (1) how "new" technology affects the outputs of "old" cognitive systems, (2) consumer financial decision-making, and (3) flexible morality and mind-perception. In each of these areas, my goal is to understand human behavior "in the wild." I want to understand why people do the things they do, as they actually do them--and, perhaps, to help them do these things just a little bit better.

Research: publications

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I share, therefore I know? Sharing online content—even without reading it—inflates subjective knowledge

w/ Frank Zheng and Susan Broniarczyk

Journal of Consumer Psychology (2023)
View Article Online
Billions of people across the globe use social media to acquire and share information. A large and growing body of research examines how consuming online content affects what people know. The present research investigates a complementary, yet previously unstudied question: how might sharing online content affect what people think they know? Sharing signals expertise, and people frequently internalize their public behavior into their private self-concepts. We therefore posit that sharing information on social media may cause people to believe they are as knowledgeable as their posts make them appear. We examine this possibility in the context of “sharing without reading,” a phenomenon that allows us to isolate the effect of sharing on subjective knowledge from any influence of reading or objective knowledge. Six studies provide correlational (study 1) and causal (studies 2, 2a) evidence that sharing—even without reading—increases subjective knowledge, and test the internalization mechanism by varying the degree to which sharing publicly commits the sharer to an expert identity (studies 3-5). A seventh study investigates potential consequences of sharing-inflated subjective knowledge on downstream behavior in the domain of financial decision-making.
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Making molehills out of mountains: Removing moral meaning from prior immoral actions

w/ Chelsea Helion, Ian O'Shea and David Pizarro

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (2022)
View Article Online
At some point in their lives, most people have told a lie, intentionally hurt someone else, or acted selfishly at the expense of another. Despite knowledge of their moral failings, individuals are often able to maintain the belief that they are moral people. This research explores one mechanism by which this paradoxical process occurs: the tendency to represent one's past immoral behaviors in concrete or mechanistic terms, thus stripping the action of its moral implications. Across five studies, we document this basic pattern and provide evidence that this process impacts evaluations of an act's moral wrongness. We further demonstrate an extension of this effect, such that when an apology describes an immoral behavior using mechanistic terms, it is viewed as less sincere and less forgivable, likely because including low-level or concrete language in an apology fails to communicate the belief that one's actions were morally wrong..
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People Mistake the Internet's Knowledge for their Own

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021)
View Article Online
People frequently search the Internet for information. Eight experiments (n = 1,917) provide evidence that when people “Google” for online information, they fail to accurately distinguish between knowledge stored internally—in their own memories—and knowledge stored externally—on the Internet. Relative to those using only their own knowledge, people who use Google to answer general knowledge questions are not only more confident in their ability to access external information; they are also more confident in their own ability to think and remember. Moreover, those who use Google predict that they will know more in the future without the help of the Internet, an erroneous belief that both indicates misattribution of prior knowledge and highlights a practically important consequence of this misattribution: overconfidence when the Internet is no longer available. Thinking with Google may cause people to mistake the Internet’s knowledge for their own.
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Conservatism Predicts Aversion to Consequential Artificial Intelligence

w/ Noah Castelo

PLOS One (2021)
View Article Online
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize society by automating tasks as diverse as driving cars, diagnosing diseases, and providing legal advice. The degree to which AI can improve outcomes in these and other domains depends on how comfortable people are trusting AI for these tasks, which in turn depends on lay perceptions of AI. The present research examines how these critical lay perceptions may vary as a function of conservatism. Using five survey experiments, we find that political conservatism is associated with low comfort with and trust in AI—i.e., with AI aversion. This relationship between conservatism and AI aversion is explained by the link between conservatism and risk perception; more conservative individuals perceive AI as being riskier and are therefore more averse to its adoption. Finally, we test whether a moral reframing intervention can reduce AI aversion among conservatives.
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Consumers as Naive Physicists: How Visual Entropy Cues Shift Temporal Focus and Influence Product Evaluations

w/ Gunes Biliciler and Raj Raghunathan

Journal of Consumer Research (2021)
View Article Online
Marketers often use images to promote their products. For example, an advertisement for kitchen tools might display the tools alongside various ingredients, or an advertisement for a bookstore might showcase pictures of the store’s interior. One underlying visual characteristic of such images is the degree of “entropy”—or disorder—in their content. Motivated by a fundamental principle from physics—namely, that entropy can only increase over time—the present research examines how entropy influences consumers’ judgments and decisions. Across two pilot studies and five experiments, we find that while high-entropy images shift consumers’ temporal focus to the past, low-entropy images shift their temporal focus to the future. These entropy-induced shifts in temporal focus influence consumers’ decisions. Specifically, consistent with the notion of “fit fluency,” we find that consumers evaluate past-related (e.g., vintage) products more favorably when they are accompanied by high-entropy images, and future-related (e.g., futuristic) products more favorably when they are accompanied by low-entropy images. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.
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How childhood adversity shapes susceptibility to COVID-19 scams

w/ Tito L.H. Grillo

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (2020)
View Article Online
COVID-19 scams promise to alleviate the physical and financial risks associated with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but in fact expose consumers to additional risk. The present research examines how one prominent and unequally distributed socioeconomic factor—resource availability during childhood—influences susceptibility to COVID-19 scams among U.S. adults. One pilot and five pre-registered studies (total N = 1595) provide evidence that childhood adversity may often confer a protective advantage; when environmental threat is low, adults raised in scarcity are less susceptible to scams than those raised in abundance. However, heightened environmental threat—such as evidence of a worsening global pandemic—holds different consequences for those with different socioeconomic backgrounds: whereas adults raised in abundance become less susceptible to scams when the world seems more threatening, adults raised in scarcity become more susceptible to scams under these conditions.
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Technology-Augmented Choice: How Digital Innovations Are Transforming Consumer Decision Processes

w/ Shiri Melumad, Rhonda Hadi, and Christian Hildebrand

Customer Needs and Solutions (2020)
View Article Online
This paper provides an overview of recent research that explores how digital technologies such as mobile devices, wearables, voice technology, and recommendation agents are transforming consumer decision-making. We advance a conceptual model of technology-augmented choice that describes how the three Ms of technology—mediums (i.e., device types), modalities (i.e., interaction interfaces), and modifiers (i.e., intelligent agents)—are becoming increasingly integral elements of consumer decision processes. For instance, today’s new technologies often help curate consideration sets, shape how options are evaluated, and even guide choices themselves. As a result, market choices must now be viewed as a joint function of both consumer preferences and the characteristics of the technological environment in which those preferences are expressed. We review examples of empirical research that characterize the interdependencies between technology and decision-making, including how smartphones transform user-generated content, voice technology affects consumer search, haptic interfaces shape product preferences, and search engines alter confidence in choice.
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On a "need-to-know" basis: How the distribution of responsibility between couples shapes financial literacy and financial outcomes

w/ John G. Lynch, Jr.

Journal of Consumer Research (2018)
View Article Online
Many people suffer from low levels of financial literacy. Educational interventions intended to increase financial know-how are typically unsuccessful. Why? In this research, we argue that people generally develop expertise on a “need to know” basis; they pay attention to what they think they need to know, when they think they need to know it. We further argue that the distribution of responsibility between relationship partners shapes what each individual believes s/he needs to know. Thus, many people may be ignorant about money because they think they have it covered; not because they know about money, but because they believe they don’t need to know about money. In this research, we explore how relationships shape the development of individual financial expertise. We show that increases in relationship length predict increases in financial literacy for those with high levels of financial responsibility ("household CFOs"), but not for those with low levels of financial responsibility (non-CFOs). These diverging trajectories of financial literacy, in turn, predict differences between household CFOs and non-CFOs in the ability to independently navigate the financial domain.
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Media usage diminishes memory for experiences

w/ Diana I. Tamir, Emma M. Templeton, and Jamil Zaki

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2018)
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People increasingly use social media to record and share their experiences, but it is unclear whether or how social media use changes those experiences. Here we present both naturalistic and controlled studies in which participants engage in an experience while using media to record or share their experiences with others, or not engaging with media. We collected objective measures of participants' experiences (scores on a surprise memory test) as well as subjective measures of participants' experiences (self-reports about their engagement and enjoyment). Across three studies, participants without media consistently remembered their experience more precisely than participants who used media. We did not find conclusive evidence that media use impacted subjective measures of experience. Together, these findings suggest that using media may prevent people from remembering the very events they are attempting to preserve.
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Brain drain: The mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity

w/ Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W. Bos

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (2017)
View Article Online
Download PDF of Article
Download PDF of Web Appendix
Our smartphones enable—and encourage—constant connection to information, entertainment, and each other. They put the world at our fingertips, and rarely leave our sides. Although these devices have immense potential to improve welfare, their persistent presence may come at a cognitive cost. In this research, we test the “brain drain” hypothesis that the mere presence of one’s own smartphone may occupy limited-capacity cognitive resources, thereby leaving fewer resources available for other tasks and undercutting cognitive performance. Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. Moreover, these cognitive costs are highest for those highest in smartphone dependence. We conclude by discussing the practical implications of this smartphone-induced brain drain for consumer decision-making and consumer welfare.
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Old Desires, New Media

w/ Diana I. Tamir

in The Psychology of Desire (Guilford Press, 2015)
Email for more information
"New media”—including televisions, computers, and smartphones—seem to offer simple solutions to complex social needs. With the change of a channel, we can connect with our “neighbor” Mr. Rogers or our “friends” on Friends; with the tap of a button, we can relive social events through Facebook photos or communicate with relationship partners on the other side of the earth. At times, these solutions may be real. At other times, however, our social minds may motivate behaviors that provide only the illusion of adaptive functioning. In this chapter, we provide an overview of how our widespread use of social media is encouraged by our social minds, and what it might mean for social outcomes. We explore the bases of our need for social connection, the brain’s reward system that motivates us to seek out social stimuli, and the mentalizing system that allows us to succeed in our social endeavors. We then turn to an analysis of how these components of our social minds contribute to our desire to find and create social connection through our screens. Finally, we offer some perspective on what this all might mean—whether our social minds are ruining or enhancing our relationships, both online and off.
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the myth of harmless wrongs in moral cognition: automatic dyadic completion from sin to suffering

w/ Kurt Gray and Chelsea Schein

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2014)
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When something is wrong, someone is harmed. This hypothesis derives from the theory of dyadic morality, which suggests a moral cognitive template of wrongdoing agent and suffering patient (i.e., victim). This dyadic template means that victimless wrongs (e.g., masturbation) are psychologically incomplete, compelling the mind to perceive victims even when they are objectively absent. Five studies reveal that dyadic completion occurs automatically and implicitly: Ostensibly harmless wrongs are perceived to have victims (Study 1), activate concepts of harm (Studies 2 and 3), and increase perceptions of suffering (Studies 4 and 5). These results suggest that perceiving harm in immorality is intuitive and does not require effortful rationalization. This interpretation argues against both standard interpretations of moral dumbfounding and domain-specific theories of morality that assume the psychological existence of harmless wrongs. Dyadic completion also suggests that moral dilemmas in which wrongness (deontology) and harm (utilitarianism) conflict are unrepresentative of typical moral cognition.
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Paying it Forward: generalized reciprocity and the limits of generosity

w/ Kurt Gray and Michael I. Norton

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2014)
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When people are the victims of greed or recipients of generosity, their first impulse is often to pay back that behavior in kind. What happens when people cannot reciprocate, but instead have the chance to be cruel or kind to someone entirely different—to pay it forward? In 5 experiments, participants received greedy, equal, or generous divisions of money or labor from an anonymous person and then divided additional resources with a new anonymous person. While equal treatment was paid forward in kind, greed was paid forward more than generosity. This asymmetry was driven by negative affect, such that a positive affect intervention disrupted the tendency to pay greed forward.
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give what you get: capuchin monkey (cebus apella) and four-year-old children pay forward positive and negative outcomes to conspecifics

w/ Kristi Leimgruber, Jane Widness, Michael I. Norton, Kristina Olson, Kurt Gray, and Laurie Santos

PLOS One (2014)
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The breadth of human generosity is unparalleled in the natural world, and much research has explored the mechanisms underlying and motivating human prosocial behavior. Recent work has focused on the spread of prosocial behavior within groups through paying-it-forward, a case of human prosociality in which a recipient of generosity pays a good deed forward to a third individual, rather than back to the original source of generosity. While research shows that human adults do indeed pay forward generosity, little is known about the origins of this behavior. Here, we show that both capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) and 4-year-old children pay forward positive and negative outcomes in an identical testing paradigm. These results suggest that a cognitively simple mechanism present early in phylogeny and ontogeny leads to paying forward positive, as well as negative, outcomes.
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Supernormal: How the Internet is changing our memories and our minds

Psychological Inquiry (2013)
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We are creatures of flesh and blood, living in a world of bits and bytes—a world shaped by the Internet. With the simple touch of a button or swipe of a finger, we can instantaneously access vast amounts of information (e.g., Ashton, 2009). A few more keystrokes, and we can interact with friends 10 time zones away (e.g., Thurlow, Lengel, & Tomic, 2004). Just a few more, and we may complete the transition to a digital life, transferring our identities from our physical bodies to online avatars (e.g., Bessiere, Seay, & Kiesler, 2007). When old cognitive tendencies and new technologies meet—when the world of flesh and blood collides with the world of bits and bytes—the Internet may act as a “supernormal stimulus,” hijacking preexisting cognitive tendencies and creating novel outcomes. The Internet is not changing the way we think, but it may be changing the outcomes of these ways of thinking—particularly in the domains of memory and information search.
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Mind-Blanking: When the mind goes away

w/ Daniel M. Wegner

Frontiers in Psychology (2013)
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Many times, people’s minds seem to go “somewhere else”—attention becomes disconnected from perception, and people’s minds wander to times and places removed from the current environment (e.g., Schooler et al., 2004). At other times, however, people’s minds may seem to go nowhere at all—they simply disappear. This mental state—mind-blanking—may represent an extreme decoupling of perception and attention, one in which attention fails to bring any stimuli into conscious awareness. In the present research, we outline the properties of mind-blanking, differentiating this mental state from other mental states in terms of phenomenological experience, behavioral outcomes, and underlying cognitive processes. Seven experiments suggest that when the mind seems to disappear, there are times when we have simply failed to monitor its whereabouts—and there are times when it is actually gone.
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the harm-made mind: victimization augments perceptions of the mind of vegetative patients, robots, and the dead

w/ Andrew Olsen and Daniel M. Wegner

Psychological Science (2013)
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People often think that something must have a mind to be part of a moral interaction. However, the present research suggests that minds do not create morality, but that morality creates minds. In four experiments, we find that observing intentional harm to an otherwise unconscious entity—a vegetative patient, a robot, or a corpse—leads to augmented attribution of mind to that entity. A fifth experiment reconciles these results with extant research on dehumanization by showing that victimizing conscious entities leads to reduced mind attribution, suggesting that the effects of victimization vary according to the victim’s preexisting mental status. People seem to make an intuitive cognitive error when unconscious entities are placed in harm’s way. They assume that if a moral harm occurs, then there must be someone there to experience that harm—a harm-made mind. These findings have implications for political policies concerning right-to-life issues.


Research: working papers

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Overcoming Temptation: Incentive Design for Intertemporal Choice

w/ Michael C. Mozer, Shruthi Sukumar, Camden Elliott-Williams, and Shabnam Hakimi

View working paper on arXiv
Individuals are often faced with temptations that can lead them astray from long-term goals. We’re interested in developing interventions that steer individuals toward making good initial decisions and then maintaining those decisions over time. In the realm of financial decision making, a particularly interesting approach is the prize-linked savings account: individuals are incentivized to make deposits by tying deposits to a periodic lottery that awards bonuses to the savers. Although these lotteries have been effective in motivating savers across the globe, they are a one-size-fits-all solution. We investigate whether customized bonuses can be more effective. We formalize a delayed-gratification task as a Markov decision problem and characterize individuals as rational agents subject to temporal discounting, costs associated with effort, and moment-to-moment fluctuations in willpower. Our theory is able to explain key behavioral findings in intertemporal choice. We created an online delayed-gratification game in which the player scores points by choosing a queue to wait in and patiently advancing to the front. Data collected from the game is fit to the model, and the instantiated model is then used to optimize predicted player performance over a space of incentives. We demonstrate that customized incentive structures can improve goal-directed decision making.

Popular Press

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Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking

w/ Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W. Bos

Harvard Business Review (March 2018)
View Article Online
Despite wanting to be in the moment, we often find ourselves captivated by our smartphones. We take pictures in the middle of family meals, send text messages during date night, and update our social media profiles while watching movies. At the same time, we are often interrupted passively by notifications of emails or phone calls. Clearly, interacting with our smartphones affects our ability to fully devote our minds to the experience at hand. But can our smartphones affect us even when we aren’t interacting with them—when they are simply nearby?
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How Google is Changing Your Brain

w/ Daniel M. Wegner

Scientific American (December 2013)
View Article Online
Email for PDF of full article
For millennia humans have relied on one another to recall the minutiae of our daily goings-on. Now we rely on the "Cloud”—and it is changing how we perceive and remember the world around us. In this invited feature article, Dan Wegner and I review some of our research on how—in the words of our editors—"the Internet has become the external hard drive for our memories."
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Scientific american: Mind matters

The Neuroscience of Everybody's Favorite Topic (July 2013)
Why do people spend so much time talking about themselves?
Read Article Online

What Boston Showed about Human Nature (April 2013)
In the seconds after the explosions came an answer to an ancient question: Are we by nature good, or bad?
Read Article Online

Winter Wakes Up Your Mind—and Warm Weather Makes it Harder to Think Straight (February 2013)
How temperature shapes difficult decisions
Read Article Online

Scientists Probe Human Nature—and Discover We Are Good, After All (November 2012)
Recent studies find our first impulses are selfless
Read Article Online

Men and Women Can't Be "Just Friends" (October 2012)
Researchers asked women and men "friends" what they really think—and got very different answers
     -->Most-read Scientific American article of 2012
     -->Selected press coverage: The Colbert Report
Read Article Online

What Internet Habits Say about Mental Health (August 2012)
Researchers find clues to depression in what people do online
(with Piercarlo Valdesolo)
Read Article Online

Teaching



Marketing &
Consumer Behavior

Statistics &
Methods

Psychology &
Decision-Making

Marketing & Consumer Behavior


Consumer Behavior in a Digital World (MBA, MSM, and BBA levels)
Professor and Course Creator, University of Texas at Austin (2015-present)
Average instructor evaluation, MBA: 4.81/5
Average instructor evaluation, MSM: 4.84/5
Average instructor evaluation, BBA: 4.95/5
*2021: Recipient of the Amplify Award for Fostering Diversity & Inclusion
*2020: Named Best 40 Under 40 Business School Professors by Poets & Quants
*2019: Recipient of CBA/Trammell Award for Best Assistant Professor at McCombs
*2016-19: Named to the BBA Faculty Honor Roll (4x)

Market Intelligence (MBA)
Post-doctoral Assistant
University of Colorado, Boulder (2014)

Statistics & Experimental Methods


Multivariate Analysis in Psychology (Graduate-level statistics)
Head Teaching Fellow, Harvard University (2012)
Teacher evaluation: 4.63/5
*Received the Derek Bok Award for Distinction in Teaching

Statistical and Experimental Methods (Undergraduate-level statistics)
Head Teaching Assistant, Furman University (2006-08)

Psychology & Decision-Making


Attention, and Decision-Making, and Identity (Undergraduate seminar)
Instructor and Course Creator, Harvard University (2011)
Instructor evaluation: 4.67/5
*Received the George W. Goethals Award for Excellence in Teaching

Psychological Science
Teaching Fellow, Harvard University (2011)
Teacher evaluation: 4.81/5
*Received the Derek Bok Award for Distinction in Teaching

Social Psychology
Teaching Fellow, Harvard University (2010-11)
Average teacher evaluation (two years): 4.53/5
*Received the Derek Bok Award for Distinction in Teaching

Psychology of Morality
Head Teaching Fellow, Harvard University (2010)
Teacher evaluation: 4.64/5
*Received the Derek Bok Award for Distinction in Teaching

Selected Student Comments:

“Honestly, the best course I have taken at McCombs. I have recommended it to every marketing student I know. I looked forward to every class and genuinely enjoyed what we learned. Each lecture was a great mix of informative and entertaining, and even the slides were all visually appealing!”    (Course: Consumer Behavior in a Digital World, BBA)

“This was a great course--probably my favorite I have taken at McCombs. Very relevant to marketing, but provides a great break from the standard case-based class. Professor Ward is very knowledgeable and makes the class fun. A+”    (Course: Consumer Behavior in a Digital World, MBA)

“Adrian is a phenomenal teacher. He is EXTREMELY engaging and had a very fair, balanced approach to the course. It was a pleasure to bounce ideas around with him every week. He really hit all the marks of a great teacher and then some.”    (Course: Identity, Attention, and Decision-Making)

“Adrian, like no other teacher I’ve ever had, arrived to class with a passion for the subject that inspired an equal passion within the rest of us. He’s smart, thoughtful, respectful, encouraging, funny, helpful and every other characteristic you hope your teacher has. Both as a person and as a teacher, he is truly exceptional.”    (Course: Psychological Science)

C.V.

You can download my CV here, or view it below.



And that's the end. Seriously, stop reading this. Go do something.