Dr. Randy Stein
Role in the Center: Co-Director and Customer Insights Consulting Program Collaborator
Area of Speciality: Consumer Psychology and Insights
Dr. Randy Stein is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the College of Business Administration. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Yale University and spent many years working in the marketing research industry before joining Cal Poly Pomona. Dr. Stein researches how people’s decisions, social beliefs, and economic understanding are shaped by how they determine what is real and what’s not. His current investigations include how political leanings impact how people weigh anecdotal versus scientific evidence, how trust in institutions relates to people’s reasoning ability, and why people value products that are verified to be ineffective or inauthentic. He has also examined why people are attracted to shoddy personality tests and why pseudoscientific ideas proliferate among individuals and businesses. Recently, Dr. Stein published his research in Political Psychology and has had his work featured on TheConservation.com. He has also published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Social Psychological and Personality Science, and Consciousness and Cognition. Dr. Stein served as a Board Member for the Southern California Insights Association as well as an ad hoc reviewer for several publications including Psychological Science and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. In addition to his research accomplishments, Dr. Stein advised a graduate student on a research project presented at CPP’s annual RSCA conference and became a faculty mentor for three students on research funded by the Learn Through Discovery Projects Hatchery Program. Dr. Stein has taught several courses including Motivation and Market Behavior, Principles of Marketing Management, Advanced Marketing Research, and other marketing courses. Prior to joining the faculty of Cal Poly Pomona, Dr. Stein worked at Lieberman Research Worldwide where he executed advanced analytics on a wide range of studies for several Fortune 500 companies.
Read more about Dr. Randy Stein below!
Dr. Stein has served as a center faculty and faculty advisor to the Center for Customer Insights and Digital Marketing (CCIDM) since 2015 on a variety of issues, especially those issues about consumer psychology and market research educational programs. In that capacity, Dr. Stein co-runs the Customer Insights Consultancy (CIC) Program in which they train the next generation of insights researchers. Dr. Stein has also been a co-advisor of the Analytics and Marketing Insights (AMI) club since 2015. Center students landed in some of the most prominent market research companies and brands in the world.
- “We Should Hear from Both Sides: Ideological Differences Between Liberal and Conservative Attitudes Toward Scientific and Experiential Evidence,” (With Alex Swan & Michelle Sarraf [student collaborator]), Political Psychology, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12706
- “Evaluating the Validity of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Theory: A Teaching Tool and Window into Intuitive Psychology,” (With Alex Swan), Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12434
- “Deeply Confusing: Conflating Difficulty With Deep Revelation on Personality Assessment,” (With Alex Swan), Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1948550618766409
- “’Trumping’ conformity: Urges towards conformity to ingroups and nonconformity to morally opposed outgroups,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 34-40, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.12.007
- “The Distinct Affective Consequences of Psychological Distance and Construal Level,” (With Lawrence Williams and Laura Galguera-Garcia), Journal of Consumer Research, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1086/674212
- “The Pull of the Group: Conscious Conflict and the Involuntary Tendency Towards Conformity,” Consciousness and Cognition, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.04.009
- Co-advisor to Jarrod Griffin, Guillermo (“Billy”) Marquez, Jillian N. Munoz, and Mitchell A. Pickering, who won second place at 2020 GfK NextGen Data Science Hackathon, held March 20 – March 30, 2020, for the team’s proposed smart car tech product named, Guardian by Google., GfK Press Release.
- Board member, Southern California Insights Association, 2016-2018
- Ad hoc reviewer for the Association for Consumer Research and Society for Consumer Psychology conferences,
- Ad hoc reviewer for journals including Science, Nature Scientific Reports, Psychological Science, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
