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About

Kathleen Vohs, Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Land O'Lakes Chair in Marketing, works to understand and communicate the basics of how people think, feel, and behave in order to make sense of marketplace and organizational outcomes. Vohs' research specialties include self-control, the hidden costs of decision making, the psychology of money, the difference between a meaningful and happy life, and heterosexual sexual negotiations. She has authored more than 250 scholarly publications and has been the editor of 9 books. Vohs has received several awards and honors. Vohs won a SAGE Young Scholar Award in the field of social and personality psychology (2008) and was named the International Society for Self and Identity Outstanding Early Career Award winner (2009). At the University of British Columbia, she received the Canada Research Chair in Marketing Science and Consumer Psychology. At the University of Minnesota, she was named a McKnight Land-Grant Professor (2007-2009) as well as a McKnight Presidential Fellow (2008-2010). The Carlson School appointed Vohs the Land O'Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing in 2011. In 2012, she became the Honorary Chair in Experimental Consumer Research in the Faculty of Economics and Business, Groningen University, the Netherlands. In 2014, she won the Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation (part of the German Ministry of Research and Education), which is a competition across all sciences, humanities, law, and economics. In 2014, she was named a 'Best Business School Professors Under 40' by Poets and Quants and 'Breakthrough Business Thinker to Watch' by Inc.com. In 2015, she was named a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuter's ISI Web of Science, a distinction given to the top 1% of all scholars worldwide based on citations. In 2015, she was awarded the Land O' Lakes Chair in Marketing and in 2016 she was named a University of Minnesota's Distinguished McKnight University Professor. In 2018, she was awarded the Society for Consumer Psychology Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, an honor bestowed upon scholars who make significant contributions to the field of consumer psychology. In 2018, the graduating class of 2018 Part-Time MBA students voted her Faculty of the Year, and she was named as one of the Top 25 Behavioral Economists by thebestschools.org, a member of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

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Skills

Experience

Distinguished McKnight University Professor

University of Minnesota (UMN)

Mar-2016 to Present

Publication

Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative

The current research tested the hypothesis that making many choices impairs subsequent self-control. Drawing from a limited-resource model of self-regulation and executive function, the auth...

Strength model of self-regulation as limited resource

The strength model of self-regulation holds that self-regulation operates by consuming a limited energy resource, thereby producing a state called ego depletion in which volition is curtaile...

The Strength Model of Self-Regulation: Conclusions From the Second Decade of Willpower Research

The strength model of self-regulation uses a muscle analogy to explain patterns of ego depletion, conservation of willpower, and improved performance after frequent exercise. Our 2007 overvi...

  • dott image January, 2018

Intellectual performance and ego depletion: Role of the self in logical reasoning and other information processing

Some complex thinking requires active guidance by the self, but simpler mental activities do not. Depletion of the self's regulatory resources should therefore impair the former and not the ...

Misguided Effort With Elusive Implications

In retrospect, the decision to use new, mostly untested procedures1 for a large replication project was foolish. When planning the Registered Replication Report (RRR) on ego depletion (Ha...

Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life

Being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences. A large survey revealed multiple differing predictors of happiness (controlling for meaning) and meaning...

Pragmatic Prospection: How and Why People Think about the Future

In the present, the past is more knowable than the future—but people think far more about the future than the past. Both facts derive from the principle that the future can be changed wher...

Free Will and Punishment: A Mechanistic View of Human Nature Reduces Retribution

If free-will beliefs support attributions of moral responsibility, then reducing these beliefs should make people less retributive in their attitudes about punishment. Four studies tested th...

Yes, But Are They Happy? Effects of Trait Self-Control on Affective Well-Being and Life Satisfaction

Does trait self-control (TSC) predict affective well-being and life satisfaction—positively, negatively, or not? We conducted three studies (Study 1: N = 414, 64% female, Mage = 35...

Motivation, personal beliefs, and limited resources all contribute to self-control

What effects do motivation and beliefs have on self-control? We tested this question using a limited resource paradigm, which generally has found that people show poor self-control after pri...