The Psychology of Desire

Wilhelm Hofmann, PhD, is Professor of Social and Economic Cognition at the University of Cologne, Germany. He also has taught and conducted research at the University of Würzburg (Germany), the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Dr. Hofmann has written more than 60 professional publications, including two books. His research is concerned with desire, self-control, and moral behavior, particularly the emergence of impulses and desires, the role of executive functioning in self-control and health behavior, and the connection among self-control, morality, and happiness. In his methodological approach, he strives to combine the rigor of experimental research with the ecological validity and richness of behavioral data from everyday life.

Loran F. Nordgren, PhD, is Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and Codirector of the Human Ecology Lab at Northwestern, which aims to develop, extend, and test psychological theory through immersive field research. His research broadly considers the basic psychological processes that guide how we think and act. Much of Dr. Nordgren’s research examines how people maintain self-control in the face of desire, how people think about desire, and how people’s beliefs about desire inform their self-control strategies. He is a recipient of the Theoretical Innovation Award in Social Psychology from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.