Research Lab
Our lab studies how people think about themselves and others, and how these perceptions shape consumer behavior. A central focus is the self—how identity and self-concept influence motivation, self-regulation, moral behavior, and responses to threats and stigma. We also examine humanization and dehumanization, exploring how perceptions of humanness, agency, and mental capacity shape responses to people, brands, objects, and emerging technologies such as generative AI. A third stream investigates consumer inference, asking how people use limited or imperfect cues to form judgments about products, people, and groups. Across these areas, our research seeks to understand the psychological processes that shape consumers’ judgments, choices, and goal-directed behavior.
Lab Members
Dongchan Lee
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
I study consumer lay theories and inference-making, and how the resulting beliefs shape judgments of products, brands, and other people. My current work extends this to artificial intelligence, exploring how consumers judge the products it recommends, the brands that use it, and the people it depicts.
Manisha Sanam
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
I'm a second-year PhD student in consumer behavior, and my research broadly focuses on marketplace morality. My current work studies how stereotypes about low-income groups show up in the marketplace, and I'm also interested in understanding ethical and unethical consumer practices. Before starting my PhD at Kellogg, I did my MBA at IIT Madras, India, and spent a few years as a Business Analyst at Ford. I then made the switch to academia, spending two years as a research assistant at IIM Udaipur before joining Kellogg. Outside of work, I love reading, and I picked up tango as a PhD-era hobby. I also like dabbling in crafts like pottery once in a while.
Anjali Singh
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
Anjali is a PhD student in Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management. She researches on trade-offs that consumers make in their healthcare decisions, and how psychological entitlement affects consumer behaviour. She received her Master's in Managerial and Financial Economics from HEC Paris in 2024, and was a research intern at INSEAD, France, before joining Kellogg. Beyond research, she enjoys yoga, badminton, and her tea collection! She can be reached at anjali.singh1@kellogg.northwestern.edu or linkedin.com/in/anjalikellogg
Samuel Su
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
Hi, you can call me Sam. I am a PhD candidate in Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, currently on the academic job market for 2026–27. I expect to receive my doctoral degree in June 2027. My research examines how consumers experience and value time. What I love about this is that our experience of time is not just objective like minutes of the clock. How we actually experience time is vast and varied across contexts: we form subjective perceptions of how fast time passes, how much of it we have, and how much it is worth. My work shows that these malleable temporal experiences shape what consumers value, how they make choices, and what they buy. Beyond this core stream, I study how consumers evaluate human–AI collaboration and how visual cues shape consumer inferences about products. Website: https://samuelsukellogg.github.io/
Swati Garg
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
I am a PhD student in Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. I am interested in how people make inferences about themselves and others, and how these inferences shape behavior and social perception. My current work examines how luxury consumption can backfire, exploring whether signals of status can undermine perceptions of competence. I am also interested in how people's self-concept shapes their behavior, including their relationships with their possessions and how they interpret their own actions.
Before joining Kellogg, I earned an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow and a degree in Chemical Technology from Delhi College of Engineering.
Erika Yang
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
Erika Yang is a PhD student in Behavioral Marketing at Kellogg. She studies how the self and social relationships shape consumer judgment. Her current projects study self-threat in service encounters, expert credibility, and customer value evolution during the customer journey.
