Hal Hershfield from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management will receive a grant from the Imagination Institute at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, together with Diana Tamir of Princeton University, to fund their project on imagination exploration.
The Imagination Institute was founded in 2014 to stimulate scientific research on measuring, growing and improving imagination. The institute will be giving out nearly $3 million in grants to researchers at various institutions. The grants will further research on the development of new ways to assess and promote creativity.
“Many might think imagination can’t be measured,” said Christopher Stawski, vice president of strategic program initiatives at the John Templeton Foundation, which funds the Imagination Institute. “But by supporting this ambitious scientific research program we hope to better understand how to encourage and cultivate the imaginative capacities of individuals and society to increase human potential and flourishing.”
Hershfield and Tamir will receive $200,000 from the institute to study imagination experts: artists, musicians and creatives with a proven ability to generate highly imaginative output. To do so, they will use neural, behavioral and linguistic measures of their subjects’ capacity for simulation.
Hershfield is an assistant professor of marketing at UCLA Anderson School of Management. His research focuses on judgment and decision-making and social psychology, with a particular interest in how thinking about time can strongly affect decision-making and emotional experience.
Hershfield received his B.A. in psychology and English from Tufts University and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University. He was recently named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, and has received funding from the Templeton Foundation’s New Paths to Purpose Grant Program and the Russell Sage Foundation Small Grant in Behavioral Economics.
His work has been published in top journals, including Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and Journal of Marketing Research.
