Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto
About
Julie Huang attended the University of Maryland as an undergraduate. In 2011, she received her PhD from Yale University in psychology. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. In the fall of 2014, Dr. Huang will join the faculty at the College of Business at Stony Brook University.
Current Work:
Dr. Huang uses experimental methods to study how unconscious and/or goal-driven factors influence people's judgments and behaviors. Broadly stated, she examines how environmental and motivational factors interact to produce unintended consequences in people's judgments and behaviors.
Her first research line proposes that an individual's expressed judgments and behaviors can be understood as indirectly controlled by multiple conscious and unconscious goals. The Selfish Goal (Bargh & Huang, 2009; Huang & Bargh, forthcoming) argues that when a person is pursuing a goal, his/her perceptions and behaviors are systematically affected to increase the likelihood of attaining the goal's end-state--even when the goal isn't consciously desired, and even when the individual is unaware that the goal has been activated. This framework helps explain why people appear to behave inconsistently: because the most motivating goals he or she possesses is driving behavior.
In her empirical line of research, Dr. Huang identifies which goals, after being primed, might be particularly associated with unintended effects today. For instance, the pursuit of evolutionary goals oftentimes produces a spill-over effect that biases a person unconsciously in their subsequent judgments (Huang, Ackerman, & Sedlovskaya, in prep; Huang & Bargh, 2009). In subsequent lines of research, Dr. Huang examines how we can leverage knowledge of this link to intervene against unwanted interpersonal biases evoked by goal pursuit in contexts beneficial for both society and in business contexts (Huang, Ackerman, & Bargh, 2013; Huang, Ackerman, & Sedlovskaya, in prep; Huang, Sedlovskaya, Ackerman, & Bargh, 2011).
Research Area(s):
- Psychology
- Business and Management
