Amit Kumar
University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business
“I am nominating Professor Kumar for his outstanding and lasting impact on me, and countless others who had the privilege of taking his course, The Science of Good Business. My time with Professor Kumar fundamentally shifted my understanding of business, ethics, and personal fulfillment. I can easily say the material we explored inspired how I conduct my work at Meta and how I engage with others. I should also note that it wasn’t just the course material that affected my behavior, it was the way Professor Kumar led with empathy and curiosity that inspired me as well. If I could relive his class again, I would in a heartbeat!” – Marcus Gallardo
Amit Kumar, 39, is an Assistant Professor of Marketing and Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the McCombs faculty, he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Cornell University and his A.B. in Psychology and Economics from Harvard University.
Professor Kumar’s research focuses on the scientific study of happiness and has been featured in popular media outlets such as The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Business Insider, CNBC, CNN, Forbes, Fortune Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Hidden Brain, The Huffington Post, National Geographic, The New York Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, Scientific American, Time Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
His scholarly work has been published in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Current Opinion in Psychology, Emotion, The Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, The Journal of Consumer Psychology, The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Psychological Science. He was recently recognized as a prestigious Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute, an award for a select few “identified as a likely leader of the next generation of marketing academics.” He has also been honored as a named Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.
BACKGROUND
At current institution since what year? 2018
Education: Ph.D. in Psychology, Cornell University; A.B. in Psychology and Economics, Harvard University
List of Undergraduate courses you teach: The Science of Good Business
TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR
I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when … folks at business schools started paying attention to the work I was doing. Honestly, this career probably chose me as much as I chose it. I’ve long been interested in understanding people—how they think, feel, and behave (and why they think, feel, and behave in the ways they do). In particular, I’m interested in better understanding the decisions we make in our everyday lives, especially with an eye towards informing straightforward ways in which our well-being can be improved. It turns out that this matters in the business world, too. Spending some time at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business really helped me get that I could conduct rigorous psychological research that has important real-world applications for people’s happiness in the business school environment.
What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it?
Throughout my career, a lot of my research has focused on the distinction between experiential and material consumption (that is, between money spent on doing—e.g., on travel, tickets to events, outdoor activities and recreation—versus money spent on having—e.g., on clothing, jewelry, furniture). These empirical investigations have demonstrated that experiences lead to enhanced pleasure during anticipation, provide hedonic benefits in retrospect in part through utility derived from storytelling, and have important downstream consequences in terms of fostering social connection, gratitude, and prosocial behavior.
I’ve also more recently been thinking about people’s beliefs about prosocial, or other-oriented, behavior and how this understanding squares with reality. Part of being a professor at a business school involves doing your work in a context where your colleagues are likely to argue that wise decisions are based on the expected value of a given action. What a psychological perspective can add to this is the notion that interpersonal mis-predictions can serve as a barrier to achieving happiness. People might sometimes behave rationally, or in accordance with their expectations, but if their expectations are misguided in some way, then they may still not act optimally. The big discovery here is that we sometimes systematically misestimate the costs and benefits of social interactions, and this can cause us to not focus on others enough, standing in the way of maximizing well-being. For instance, our empirical studies find that a little good doesn’t just go a long way—it can go even farther than we often expect. Not fully realizing the impact we have can result in missed opportunities for advancing welfare.
If I weren’t a business school professor, I’d be … Hmm; that’s a tough one. I suspect people are not very accurate when making this prediction, and that their imagined life tends to look a lot like their current life. That in mind, I’ve found over the years that I really enjoy sharing my research with audiences beyond academia—and that this sort of engagement makes my work feel more meaningful. So, my best guess is that I’d be a science journalist.
What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? My students would be able to answer this question far better than I can, but I believe it’s my passion about what I really think is critical for people to know.
One word that describes my first time teaching: Amped
Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: That folks will try to silo you into being either a poet OR a quant. The magic happens when you can simultaneously be both a poet AND a quant. Business schools are thought of as hubs for innovation, and so I’m somewhat surprised when I inevitably encounter other professors who want to stick to the status quo just because that’s the way things have historically been done.
The topics regarding human behavior I’m often interested in have traditionally been thought of as “soft skills” at business schools—but it’s possible to think about them in a “harder,” more analytical, more data-based, more scientific way. The marketing materials for my current institution feature the phrases “future focused” and “human centered.” I actually really like that they put these words down on paper, although I’ll note that it’s important for business schools to not just articulate their values but also enact them. I believe any professor who puts up barriers to breaking down disciplinary boundaries is simply delaying an inevitable future.
Professor I most admire and why: I’m super lucky to have been profoundly shaped by several mentors throughout my career. I suppose the one who stands out most is my doctoral advisor, Tom Gilovich at Cornell.
In a lot of ways, he is my Platonic ideal of what a professor is supposed to be like. Getting to be around him showed me how wonderful an academic life has the potential to be. I got to see how the mind of one of the most influential researchers of all time works, of course—how to really think through interesting questions, how to choose questions that people will care about in the first place, how to convince folks that what you’re doing matters.
But I also saw him balance this with being a dedicated and caring father, and with making time to play tennis and basketball. As a professor myself now, I sometimes wonder how he does all that he does.
One sort of beautiful aspect of academic life, though, is that wisdom is passed from generation to generation. A piece of advice that his own early collaborators, Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman, imparted on him is that really feeling free involves being disciplined. I reflect on this a lot when figuring out how to juggle all the important commitments one has as a professor. I’m still not very good at this, to be honest, but it helps to have Tom as an example. Tom and the late, great Stanford psychologist, Lee Ross, wrote a book called The Wisest One in the Room some years ago; I’ll just say that you can bet that if you’re in a room with Tom, he’s likely to be the wisest one in it.
TEACHING BUSINESS SCHOOL STUDENTS
What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? I really appreciate how much they care. I think of my students as future leaders and policymakers, and I’m very appreciative of the fact that they can go on to use the insights they’re learning about and turn this knowledge into action in order to actually help solve societal problems.
What is most challenging? Business school students often have a lot going on, which means that they are often trying to manage a lot of commitments at a given time. They’re often thinking about the job interview they have to go to right after class, or all of the messages they have to respond to, which can sometimes prevent them from really focusing on whatever happens to be in front of them in a given moment.
In one word, describe your favorite type of student: Curious
In one word, describe your least favorite type of student: Elsewhere
When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as … Fair
LIFE OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
What are your hobbies? As some of my research might suggest: I get a lot of enjoyment from food, from going to see live music, from travel—from consuming experiences (as opposed to material goods).
How will you spend your summer? I recently became a father for the first time, to an objectively cute child, so presumably mainly changing diapers and making silly faces. I don’t quite know how things change as an infant develops into a toddler, as I’ve never experienced this as a dad before, but I imagine that there will still be a lot of ridiculous attempts at kid humor in an effort to prompt laughter. Sometimes the sounds that come out of my mouth are even stupider than the looks I’m making while producing them. But we both seem to think it’s hilarious, at least for now. Objectively hilarious? I’m not sure.
Favorite place(s) to vacation: Given that aforementioned work on the myriad benefits of experiences, I certainly have very satisfying memories of fun international trips. Peru, Spain, and Thailand come to mind, among others. But I also get a lot these days out of travelling to see my family where I grew up in New Jersey. It helps to have an adorable nephew there who is usually almost as thrilled to see me as I am to see him.
Favorite book(s): I suppose I’ll use this question to actually say more about professors I admire. One of my favorite books about human behavior of all time is Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert. I was fortunate enough to be around Dan when this best-seller first came out. In fact, he let me take a course for PhD students he was teaching when it was first written, even though I was but an undergrad. That experience really helped make it clear to me that graduate school was something I might like to pursue. He’s continued to be incredibly supportive since then, too. When you’ve spent the early part of your career standing on the shoulders of giants in a field, as I have, an insecurity sometimes creeps up that you’ll always be in someone else’s shadow. In one of my more anxious moments, I expressed these sentiments to Dan, and without missing a beat, he responded with his typical Dan eloquence and said, “A student of Pavarotti whose main complaint is that he can only sing like Pavarotti is a lucky student indeed.” He was talking about Tom Gilovich then, but the point was well taken and made me appreciate just how much good fortune I’ve had in my career and in my life. That sentence is quite reflective of his brilliant writing in Stumbling on Happiness.
What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much? My all-time favorite show is probably Seinfeld. There’s something supremely comforting to me when I watch it. I used to watch it with my family when I was young and new episodes were still airing, I used to watch the reruns constantly when I was a bit older, and the pandemic led to me recently re-watching it in its entirety. I think it reminds me of New York, where I used to live, so perhaps it’s the nostalgia that comforts me. My favorite movie of all time is likely The Royal Tenenbaums. There’s something about Wes Anderson’s whimsy that gets me every time. This will probably make some of my former students smirk or chuckle because this aligns well with what they know about my millennial hipster taste in music.
What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? What a segue. Flawless. My musical inclinations got stuck somewhere in the early 2010s (think Vampire Weekend for a prototypical instantiation. In fact, James Hamblin once very publicly made fun of me in The Atlantic for using a Vampire Weekend concert ticket as an example of a recent experiential purchase I had made. I was a little embarrassed then, but I’ll own it now). I believe these preferences crystallized then because I used to drive a lot more when I was in graduate school, and my sweet ride at the time had a 4-disc CD changer. Incredible technology! The music that I’m streaming isn’t too different from those days.
THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS
If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this …
I think the business school of the future really needs to focus more on doing good in addition to doing well (note: these goals are not necessarily in conflict with each other). I’m sincerely filled with gratitude when students tell me how much they’ve gotten out of my course when they take it, but they also often mention that it’s unlike anything else they’ve experienced in business school. If students find learning about these topics so valuable, why aren’t there more offerings available for them to learn even more? It’s worth it for business schools to think about mission maximization so that students aren’t exclusively exposed to profit maximization as an outcome. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, says its “core purpose” is “to transform lives for the benefit of society.” The business school of the future would genuinely try to figure out whether the day-to-day experience for community members aligns with such a worthy purpose.
In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at …
Focusing on longer-term outcomes. An organization that does well is one that does well for a long time, and so it’s integral to success to consider long-term sustainability. When one does, it becomes clearer why companies should be thinking about multiple stakeholders, including (but not limited to) their customers, their employees, the environment, and the local community in which they operate.
I’m grateful for … Broadly, other people. Specific ones come to mind, to be sure, including family members, friends, colleagues, and students. Right now, I’d say that nothing makes my heart as feel as full as seeing my baby daughter, Maya, smile.
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