Fascinating findings from the lab are often fueled by interesting — and interested — individuals. In this special episode of If/Then: Business, Leadership, Society, we pull back the curtain on our faculty’s research processes, revealing that behind every data point, there’s a human story of curiosity and discovery.
“Most academics say that you study your weaknesses,” says Baba Shiv, professor of marketing at Stanford GSB. As the self-professed “most irrational of decision-makers,” Shiv felt compelled to examine the interplay between the brain’s liking and wanting systems, questioning the fundamental assumption: “Is a good decision really based on reason or is it based on emotion?”
For Mohammad Akbarpour, professor of economics, the path to studying market design began with a love of mathematics and human psychology. “I realized that economics is somehow the right mix of thinking about humans and mathematics,” he explains. His research on welfare economics, challenging core assumptions about how money is valued regardless of one’s economic situation, stems from personal observations of economic disparity in his native Iran.
Deborah Gruenfeld, professor of organizational behavior, traces her fascination with power dynamics to early career experiences and family history. “I’ve had a sense of myself as someone who sees everything but doesn’t feel empowered to do anything,” she reflects. This perspective has driven her to explore how power affects human behavior, leading to insights into how even arbitrary positions of authority can dramatically alter one’s actions.
Research can be heady, but these faculty remind us that heart is also key. In this episode of If/Then, we see that behind every groundbreaking theory are real people, driven by curiosity to make sense of the world around them.
If/Then is a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business that examines research findings that can help us navigate the complex issues we face in business, leadership, and society. Each episode features an interview with a Stanford GSB faculty member.
Full Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Jenny Luna: Hi, I’m Jenny Luna, a producer on If/Then. During our first season we shared a variety of research on quite a few topics. We discussed everything from AI and decision making to digital currency and power dynamics in groups. But we found something consistent when we asked each professor what brought them to their work — why they do their research in the first place. Many had similar answers. Today, on this special episode of If/Then, we’re bringing you a more personal side from our professors.
Listen as we share clips of why they research what they research. In our episode “More Than a Feeling: The Keys to Making a Right Choice,” we talked with Baba Shiv, a professor of marketing at Stanford GSB. Shiv’s research exam is the interplay of the brain’s liking and wanting systems, and it’s implication for innovation and leadership. Here, he discusses what led him to his research. Here’s Baba Shiv and Kevin Cool.
(1:00)
Kevin Cool: So Baba, why do you study decision making? What led you to this area of research?
Baba Shiv: I am the most irrational of decision makers out there. And you know, most academics would say that you study your weaknesses. And one of my weaknesses is I’m very irrational as a decision maker in the sense that the rational thing to do is, when you’re making these very consequential decisions, you spend a lot of time deliberating on the decision, evaluate the pros and cons, talk to people, seek opinions, and make up your mind.
Most of my consequential decisions — who I’m going to marry, for example — took me about 30 minutes to decide. You know, my career path was going along, you know, becoming the CEO of a multinational company. And then one of my favorite professors in my MBA program, he kind of asked me a question, “Have you ever thought of becoming a professor?” And I said, “No, sir.” He said, “You should.” And then four and a half months later, he died in an air crash. And I go to his memorial, and I ask people, “Hey, did he ever ask you to be a professor?”
No one said yes, and I said, “Maybe he saw something in me.” That decision, to quit my kind of career path of becoming the CEO of a multinational company — and I was going down that path, and I knew I could be successful there — to completely abandon that and adopt a completely new course of action, not knowing what’s going to happen. I didn’t even know what a PhD was; that took me a couple of days.
So I’m one of the most irrational of decision makers, and that’s what got me to asking this fundamental question. And that is, is a good decision really based on reason, or is it based on emotion? And that’s been the hallmark of a lot of the work I do, asking these kind of fundamental questions where people have certain assumptions about human behavior, what is the appropriate thing to do? And I kind of question them and I say, “Why not the opposite?”
Jenny Luna: To learn more from Baba Shiv, and how to quote, “think like an artist,” tune into his episode from Season 1. Mohammad Akbarpour is an associate professor of economics and researches market design. Akbarpour is particularly interested in understanding how the kidney exchange market, school choice system, and labor markets evolve — and how to improve their designs. Here’s Mohammad Akbarpour sharing what drew him to study economics.
(3:25)
Kevin Cool: What drew you to, first of all, become an economist and to this research in particular?
Mohammad Akbarpour: The economics really came from the fact that I always loved mathematics, and I also loved looking at humans, reading novels, thinking about psychology. “Brothers Karamazov” was my favorite novel. And I realized that economics is somehow the right mix of thinking about humans and mathematics. I came to Stanford University as a PhD student in the school of engineering, and then I got a few economics classes. And I fell in love with economics, and then I switched to economics. So that’s how, really, it all started for me thinking about economics.
This particular research, I was uncomfortable by this assumption from day one. I saw it — this fact — and the whole economic spills on the fact that moving one dollar from A to B — or at least the whole Econ 101 is welfare-neutral. And coming from Iran, I was kind of in the middle class myself, but I had a lot of family members in a really small city five hours away from the capital who are really, really poor. And it was so clear that like one dollar to them is significantly different than one dollar to people that I was surrounded with in Tehran, in my university. So all of those really existed in my brain, and I was uncomfortable with this question.
And then with my two fantastic coauthors, they had different personal experiences, and we were talking about these topics. And we were like, “Do we want to commit a crime and do interpersonal utility comparison?” — and we wrote the papers. I do remember that when I told this to one of my friends, who is also an economist, he was like, “I think with probably of 5 percent, this paper is going to start a whole new way of thinking, and with probably of 95 percent, people are going to laugh at you.” And I was like, “I will take that bet.”
Kevin Cool: You’ll take the 5 percent.
Mohammad Akbarpour: Yeah, I will take the 5 percent. Life is too short to get the risk-less papers.
Jenny Luna: Hear more of this conversation in our episode “Is Money Really the Best Measure of Value?” In our third clip for today’s episode, we’ll share more from Kevin’s conversation with Deborah Gruenfeld, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford GSB. Deborah Gruenfeld studies power dynamics in groups. Like Szu-chi Huang, Baba Shiv, and many professors we spoke with on If/Then, her research comes from a personal place.
(6:01)
Kevin Cool: I‘m just curious, Deb. What drew you to this research in the first place?
Deborah Gruenfeld: So I’ve had a sense of myself as someone who kind of sees everything but doesn’t feel empowered to do anything. It’s been a personal struggle for me, just trying to find my own agency, I would say. Maybe because I’m a woman, maybe because I’m introverted, maybe because my dad was a Holocaust survivor, and I think some of his sense of powerlessness coming out of that trickle down in my life and in my family.
But I do have this one very vivid example that came to me after I started to think a little bit about power from a job that I had before I went into academia. So I worked for a short time between college and graduate school in public relations, and I, as a very junior person, was an assistant to a publicist. And our client was Jann Wenner, who’s the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine.
And he’s a very powerful entertainment industry executive, and it was definitely the most famous person I ever met at the time. And I went to a meeting in his office at 9:00 in the morning, and what happened in that meeting was really shocking to me. You know, having normal work conversations. He had a refrigerator right at the side of his desk, and he reached over and opened up the refrigerator, and took out of a bottle of vodka and took out a bag of onions.
And while we were talking, just the way you and I are talking now, he took the lid off the bottle and drank vodka straight out of the bottle in the meeting, and took the onions out and was snacking on onions. And I remember thinking like, “This is strange.” Like, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” I was looking at my boss; she wasn’t reacting. He seemed to think it was perfectly fine. He didn’t even offer to share anything with us.
But it really was an event that, as I started to think about power, really struck me that there’s something that happens to people in positions of power that leads them to stop self-regulating — stop trying to control their behavior in the ways that most of us are doing on a regular basis. And that was an intuition that I ended up doing a lot of work on, just trying to understand really the psychology of people in positions of power.
And very much consistent with what we saw, we just tend to find that when you take a random sample of people from any population you can think of, students or participants in studies — all of these are experimental studies that I did — and put them in some type of position where we’ve given them power over someone else in a totally arbitrary way, we find that they’re just much more likely to act on whatever impulses they have. And this is true for anybody who we put in these situations.
Jenny Luna: To learn more about power dynamics and hierarchy, listen to our episode “Navigating Workplace Dynamics with Deborah Gruenfeld.” Thank you for listening to this special episode of If/Then. Stay tuned for more special content, and for our second season. This episode was produced by Aech Ashe and me, Jenny Luna. Find more episodes of If/Then on our website, our YouTube channel, or find them wherever you get your podcasts.
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