Hi! This is my website. I received my PhD in Marketing from the University of Ghent (Belgium) in June 2018. I am assistant professor at the Geneva School of Economics and Management, at the University of Geneva (Switzerland).
IMPORTANT: SOON I WILL HIRE A PHD STUDENT at the University of Geneva (STARTING DATE AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2023). Email me (below) if you want to know more. Check this document for some preliminary, unofficial information.
(this is me)
My PsyArxiv page.
My ResearchGate.
My OSF page for some pre-prints and presentations about open science.
Here is my CV (the most up-to-date document for ongoing projects). You can also find up-to-date links to my preprints and papers on my CV.
My research interests.
I am a consumer psychologist. I typically draw from research in the judgment and decision-making and social psychology area.
I am generally interested in what people think of other people. I am looking at it from different points of view, to describe and explain lay psychological theories that people have about other consumers and other people. This has practical implications for when we, for example, have to make decisions for others, negotiate, or buy gifts.
Lately, I have started a few projects about consumer lay theories of others: what do we think of other consumption patterns? Daniel Villanova and me figured out that people think that others use the same products more often than they do. I think there are a lot of areas in which this independent variable can be applied within consumer research, so I am starting up a few projects in this overall area. With Evan Polman, Kaiyang Wu, and Anneleen van Kerckhove, we found that people believe that products are more effective for others – even when others are very similar to them. This paper has recently been published in Journal of Consumer Research and covered in the Wall Street Journal.
With my former advisor, Mario Pandelaere, we found that people believe that actions closer to a sequence are more likely to impact the overall outcome (think of a buzzer-beater if you know basketball). This paper has recently been published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
With Adam Wang, we found that slower responses are perceived as less sincere, because people think slower responses imply the suppression of a spontaneous thought (this paper has recently been published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and has received quite a lot of media coverage, for instance in the Guardian, Daily Mail, Die Welt, Yahoo India).
Having started my PhD in 2014, I am a son of the replication crisis. I think everyone should be involved in solving replication crisis in some way. I am writing up some replications with data collected by Gilad Feldman (mgto.org) and conducting my own replications with Master’s and PhD students within the consumer behavior literature. We published three of these in psychology journals, but many more are coming.
This shapes my teaching, too. I taught Marketing Research and Consumer Behavior. In both of these classes, I introduced students to the replication crises; to error detection tools, such as GRIM, GRIMMER, and statcheck; to the newest replicable literature on the subject matter, and to the appropriate software to do as much (not just SPSS, but also jamovi, R, and G*power). In the Marketing Research class, students had to design a replication of a finding in the marketing literature, and then analyze it and write it up using randomly-generated data.
In Geneva, I will teach Consumer Behavior and Sustainable Behavioral Science.
In general, I am concerned with the state of academia, which reproduces many of the class, gender, and racial divides of the outside world. This has very real human consequences. For instance, did you know that PhD students in Flanders have roughly double the chance of mental health issues compared to people with similar education? And did you know that 11% of Economics PhD students in the USA have suicidal ideation? This are problems that need to be recognized and tackled.
Anyway, if you want to collaborate with me or argue online, please email me (see above).
Ignazio Ziano 