Jennifer Aaker

Dr. Jennifer Aaker (2013)

Jennifer Aaker (born January 15, 1967, California) is an American behavioural scientist and General Atlantic Professor and Coulter Family Fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is known for her research on time, money, and happiness. Aaker also focuses on the transmission of ideas through social networks, the power of story in decision making, and how to build global brands across cultures. She is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology and the Stanford Distinguished Teaching Award.

Quotes

• But what I realized was, I don’t really care about selling books,”
• “What does interest me is trying to help save the lives of people who might not have the tools, the money, the skills, or the contacts themselves.”
• As someone who was always attracted to oncology, to be able to take my field, my research, and my connections to help save lives — that was extremely gratifying,”
• In my own burnout and depression after this — because it was soul-crushing — Amit was showing me that there is power in humor, there is power in levity,” Aaker says. “I was seeing that if you don’t have enough humor and levity, you will burn out. That put me on a new research journey around understanding the behavioral science of humor — when and why it works.”
• That was not a surprise to me, personally,” Aaker says, “because I think subconsciously or not, I did try to create these different eras in my life and also in my research.”
• I saw parents that said, ‘I just want my kid to be happy,’” Aaker says. “Or I saw people getting depressed when they realized they were low and thought they should be happy, and then were doubly depressed because they weren’t. That got me thinking about whether there might be a difference between short-run happiness and what’s truly meaningful.”
• The result is clickbait rather than substance; life hacks rather than holistic solutions; echo-chambers than generate radicalism rather than understanding,” she said in a talk she gave to Stanford HAI in 2020. “And we are more susceptible than ever to short-term design serving up a stream of addictive content. Like junk food, technology serves up a sugar rush but fails to nourish us.”
• The way I learn is by teaching a new class,” she says. “That’s why I shift.”
• What we’re doing with this beautiful mindset research is diving more deeply into people’s subjective experience,” Aaker says. “Now, think about how interesting that is relative to AI — AI is not going to be able to have subjective experiences, at least for a while. This idea of what defines the human subjective experience is going to be a blossoming topic for the next decade or so. And I’m hoping this window of research will be able to add to that conversation — in a way that anyone could feel connected to.”
• To be able to take my research and my connections to help save lives — that was extremely gratifying.
  • Stanford GSB General Atlantic Professor Jennifer Aaker in a podcast Stanford Graduate School of Business (November 27,2023)