David DeSteno, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University | Faculty Affiliate, Global Resilience Institute
Boston, MA, UNITED STATES
Professor DeSteno's focus is on the impact affective states have on decision making and behavior
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Biography
Dr. DeSteno’s research centers on the impact affective states have on decision making and behavior. His lab takes a multilevel and multiprocess approach to examining the psychological functions, phenomenologies, and sequelae that are associated with distinct emotional states. Current projects focus on the effects of emotions on several types of social judgment (e.g., moral decision making, risk assessment, attitude change, trust) as well as on behaviors fundamental to social living (e.g., trust and cooperation, prosocial action, organizational behavior, altruism, aggression).
Areas of Expertise (9)
Aggression
Organizational Behavior
Attitude Change
Emotion and Social Judgment
Human Moral Behavior
Influence of Emotion on Social Cognition and Decision Making
Moral Decision Making
Trust
Altruism
Education (4)
Yale University: Ph. D., Social Psychology 1996
Yale University: M.Phil, Social Psychology 1994
Yale University: M.S., Social Psychology 1993
Vassar College: A.B., Psychology 1990
General and Departmental Honors, Phi Beta Kappa
Links (4)
Media Appearances (5)
OPINION: Can you make people trust you?
ABS CBN
2018-07-10
Prof. David DeSteno is the director of the Social Emotions Research Group at the Northwestern University. In the book "The Truth About Trust," he said that humans learned to trust each other when they started forming families. Couples needed to be sure that each partner would stay around to feed and protect their offspring...
How to Cultivate Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride on Your Team
Harvard Business Review
2018-02-20
As a leader, what traits should you cultivate in your employees? Grit – the ability to persevere in the face of challenges? Sure. A willingness to accept some sacrifices and work hard toward a successful future are essential for the members of any team. But I believe there’s another component that matters just as much: grace. I don’t mean the ability to move elegantly or anything religious. Rather, I mean qualities of decency, respect, and generosity, all of which mark a person as someone with whom others want to cooperate...
Using willpower to reach your New Year's resolutions? Don't, says psychologist
CBC Radio
2018-01-19
Given up on your New Year's resolutions already? You're not alone. Research shows that only eight per cent of resolutions are kept throughout the year, while fully 25 per cent fail within the first week. Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno says that's because we're going about it wrong, because using willpower to change our habits simply doesn't work...
We’re Teaching Grit the Wrong Way
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2018-03-18
Let’s face it, for most students academic work isn’t intrinsically enjoyable. Even for the highly motivated ones, studying certain subjects or going to certain classes can feel like pulling teeth, especially if it stands in the way of more pleasurable options like watching television or checking updates on Facebook. But, of course, choosing short-term pleasures too frequently bodes ill for eventual success...
The Only Way to Keep Your Resolutions
The New York Times
2017-12-29
New Year’s Eve is a time to set goals: to eat better, to save more money, to work harder, to drink less. It’s Day 1 on the road to a “new you.” But this road, as we all know, is difficult to follow. Humans are notoriously bad at resisting temptation, especially (as research confirms) if we’re busy, tired or stressed. By Jan. 8, some 25 percent of resolutions have fallen by the wayside. And by the time the year ends, fewer than 10 percent have been fully kept...
Articles (5)
Gratitude Increases Third-Party Punishment
PsyArXiv
Jonathan Vayness, David DeSteno
2018 Third-party punishment occurs when a perpetrator of a transgression is punished by another person who was not directly affected by the transgression (ie, a third-party). Given gratitude's demonstrated ability to enhance both cooperation and the value people place on future-rewards relative to present ones, its capacity to increase third-party punishment was investigated. In this experiment, participants were randomly assigned to experience one of three emotional states (ie, gratitude, happiness, or neutrality) prior to making decisions about how much of a previous financial endowment they would spend to punish a person who transgressed against another at differing degrees within the context of a dictator game...
Enhancing compassion: Social psychological perspectives
Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science
Paul Condon, David DeSteno
2017 Historically, social psychologists are known for demonstrating the power of situations to reduce compassionate impulses and prosocial behavior. The simple presence of other people, for example, can decrease the rates at which people act to help others. Yet more recent findings also point to the power of situations to evoke other-oriented emotional states that increase intentions and actions to help others and build relationships...
Role of speaker cues in attention inference
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Jin Joo Lee, Cynthia Breazeal, David DeSteno
2017 Current state-of-the-art approaches to emotion recognition primarily focus on modeling the nonverbal expressions of the sole individual without reference to contextual elements like the co-presence of the partner. In this paper, we demonstrate that the accurate inference of listeners' social-emotional state of attention depends on also accounting for the nonverbal behaviors of their storytelling partner, namely their speaker cues. To gain a deeper understanding of the role of speaker cues in attention inference, we conduct investigations into real world interactions of children storytelling with their peers. Through in-depth analysis of human-human interaction data, we first identify nonverbal speaker cues (ie, backchannel-inviting cues) and listener responses (ie, backchannel feedback) to later demonstrate how speaker cues can modify the interpretation of attention-related backchannels as well as …
Flat vs. expressive storytelling: young children’s learning and retention of a social robot’s narrative
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
Kory Westlund, M Jacqueline, Sooyeon Jeong, Hae W Park, Samuel Ronfard, Aradhana Adhikari, Paul L Harris, David DeSteno, Cynthia L Breazeal
2017 Prior research with preschool children has established that dialogic or active book reading is an effective method for expanding young children's vocabulary. In this exploratory study, we asked whether similar benefits are observed when a robot engages in dialogic reading with preschoolers. Given the established effectiveness of active reading, we also asked whether this effectiveness was critically dependent on the expressive characteristics of the robot. For approximately half the children, the robot's active reading was expressive; the robot's voice included a wide range of intonation and emotion (Expressive). For the remaining children, the robot read and conversed with a flat voice, which sounded similar to a classic text-to-speech engine and had little dynamic range (Flat). The robot's movements were kept constant across conditions. We performed a verification study using Amazon Mechanical …
The grateful are patient: Heightened daily gratitude is associated with attenuated temporal discounting.
Emotion
Leah Dickens, David DeSteno
2016 Past research has regularly linked the experience of affect to increased impatience and, thereby, decreased self-control. Given emerging work identifying the emotion gratitude as a fairly unique affective state capable of enhancing, rather than inhibiting, patience, the present study examined the association between chronically elevated gratitude and individual differences in temporal discounting. Participants' levels of gratitude were assessed in response to a standardized lab induction and then over a 3-week period prior to measurement of their financial patience in the form of an incentivized delay discounting task. Analyses revealed a strong relation between lab-based and naturally occurring gratitude levels, thereby confirming the validity of the daily online measures. Of import, mean levels of daily gratitude were significantly associated with increased patience in the form of …
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