Lindsay Larson, Ph.D., professor of marketing, was born and raised in New York State. She studied learning and behavioral psychology as an undergraduate at Vassar College, where she worked on conditioning studies with birds and small mammals. As a graduate student in psychology at Yale University, she spent her first year working with Dr. Allan Wagner (Rescorla-Wagner Theory) on configural and elemental models in contingency learning. The remainder of her studies were completed with John A. Bargh, Ph.D., and Ezequiel Morsella, Ph.D., as a member of the (then) newly founded Automaticity in Cognition Motivation and Evaluation Laboratory. After completion of the doctorate, Larson held several faculty positions within Psychology Departments in New York, Vermont and Florida, teaching topics in Cognitive psychology, social psychology, human development, and organizational psychology. While living in Florida, she began work on a post-doctoral bridge into the field of marketing at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration, which was completed in 2011.

As a social psychologist, Larson’s research interests are focused on the nonconscious, automatic processes that act upon consumer emotion, judgment and decision-making. This interest has led to research projects on expertise and automaticity, pre-consumption mood states, design fluency, aesthetics, and the influence of activated mindsets. Her work has been published in several academic journals, a chapter in the book “Expressing Oneself / Expressing One’s Self; Communication, Cognition, Language and Identity,” and has been presented at a variety of psychology and marketing conferences. Along with her co-authors, her work recently received the Thomas Ponzurick best paper in conference award from the Association of Marketing Theory and Practice.

Larson currently teaches in the areas of marketing, consumer behavior and professional sales, and she received the Dean’s Citation for Excellence in Teaching in 2012.  She serves as co-director of the Center for Sales Excellence for the College of Business Administration.

Research Interests: Nonconscious influences on consumer decisions, Design and Aesthetics, Expertise and automaticity