Joshua Ackerman

Joshua Ackerman is the Class of 1957 Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Prior to MIT Sloan, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University. In his work, Ackerman applies an evolutionary perspective to the psychological mechanisms that drive both conscious and nonconscious social coordination in consumer behavior. His research focuses on basic cognitive processing, such as attention and memory, as well as executive functioning and interpersonal cooperation. In his recent work on vicarious self-control, which was featured in Time Magazine, Ackerman showed that people’s ability to resist impulsive behaviors and push themselves to good long-term outcomes is intimately tied to the self-control behaviors of others in the social environment. Within consumer environments, social coordination can affect a range of preference formation, information processing, and decision-making processes.

Ackerman’s work has appeared in Psychological Science, Personality and Social Psychology Review, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Ackerman holds a BA in psychology and anthropology from Duke University and an MA and a PhD in social psychology from Arizona State University.