PSY 357 Influence of Goal on Judgment and Decision Making
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH PROJECT

Faculty:
Arthur B. Markman, Ph.D.
Contact:
Kyungil Kim Kyungil@psy.utexas.edu
Arthur B. Markman Markman@psy.utexas.edu
Leora Orent Orent@psy.utexas.edu
Phone: 232-5481 (Markman Lab)
Description:
It is widely acknowledged that goals are crucial determinants of action. The motivational system is also critical for understanding addiction. Despite the centrality of goals to action in general and drug abuse in particular, the motivational system is quite poorly understood. We focus on principles of goal activation and the relationship between motivation and cognition. At the core of this work is an unexpected finding from a recent research of professor Markman that a strongly active goal appears to inhibit competing goals and thus to decrease people's preferences for objects that are not related to the strongly active goal. A typical way of our project is to manipulate people’s goal and observe their valuation and devaluation of various items.
Duties:
Interaction with participants and collection of experimental data. Piloting new experiments. Data analysis with sufficient experience.


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