Interview With Emily Balcetis
Emily Balcetis is an Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University. She is interested in the conscious and nonconscious ways people fundamentally orient to the world. In particular, she focuses on how the motivations, emotions, needs, and goals people hold impact the basic ways people perceive, interpret, and ultimately react to information around them.
She advocates for an interactive cognitive system where psychological states constrain the basic manner in which we perceive and react to our worlds. Her work, then, explores motivational biases in visual and social perception and the consequential effects for behavior and navigation of the social world. In doing so, her research represents an intersection among social psychology, judgment and decision-making, social cognition, and perception.
Author / Professor
As an Associate Professor of Psychology and the director of the New York University Social Perception Action and Motivation research lab, Emily Balcetis has been described as a pioneer of the scientific investigation of behavioral science and motivation. She leads an international team of scholars, writers, artists, and advocates. In her research, she has uncovered previously unknown strategies that increase, sustain, and direct people's efforts to meet their goals. Her work has been supported by numerous national grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. Her TED talk has been viewed by over 4 million people.
