About

Derek D. Rucker holds the Sandy & Morton Goldman Professorship of Entrepreneurial Studies in Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. His research broadly focuses on social rank, compensatory consumption, persuasion, and consumer behavior. His work seeks to understand what makes advertising effective and the motives that underlie consumer consumption, and has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Dr. Rucker teaches Advertising Strategy at Kellogg, a course that emphasizes the application of basic psychological principles to understand how to plan and execute successful advertising campaigns. He has received recognition for his teaching excellence, including the Top Elective Professor Award, the Sidney J. Levy Award, and being a finalist for the L.G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award. His academic positions include being the Sandy & Morton Goldman Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies in Marketing and a Professor of Marketing at Kellogg, as well as holding previous roles as an Associate Professor and Assistant Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University. His educational background includes a PhD in Psychology from Ohio State University, an MA in Psychology from Ohio State University, and a BA in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Marketing
• Business
• Economics
• Cognitive psychology
• Microeconomics
• Geography
• Statistics
• Psychotherapist
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• Status decoded: How actors and observers shape the meaning of stealth symbols

  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · 2026-01-20

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Compensatory Consumption

  2025-03-11 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  People do not always achieve the glorious goals they set for themselves. Employees may be denied their dream promotion, aspiring athletes may fail to make a professional team, and students may be denied admittance to their dream university. These disappointments can devastate individuals by fostering a self-discrepancy between their desired view of themselves and how they end up viewing themselves. To deal with these self-discrepancies people often engage in compensatory consumption, which represents a shift in consumption habits (e.g., what people buy and/or how they display their purchases). In the current chapter, we offer a primer on compensatory consumption by discussing the basic tenets of Self-Discrepancy Theory (SDT) as well as research on the phenomenon. In addition to a review of prior research efforts, we present original data that documents the occurrence of compensatory consumption in three countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. We then present a second survey that documents the occurrence of five distinct forms of compensatory consumption: direct resolution, symbolic self-completion, escapism, fluid compensation, and dissociation. Finally, we identify crevices and chasms in the scientific literature that we use to motivate future areas for inquiry.

  PublisherDOI

• Social hierarchy and social influence

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-02-17 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Persuasion via Intermediaries: The Pull of Extremity

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• On the evolution of psychological theory: Advancing from empirical effects to single‐process explanations to multi‐process models

  Consumer Psychology Review · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper presents a framework on the evolution of psychological theory in both consumer psychology and psychology more generally, moving from empirical observations of relationships to explanatory multi‐process models. The authors argue that psychological research appears unnecessarily inhibited, at times, to effects‐based or single‐process explanations of causal relationships. Such approaches, while fruitful for planting seeds of ideas, may limit the growth of psychological research. To provide a path to deeper theory building, involving more explanatory and predictive models, the authors introduce an approach based on the evolutionary stages of theory. This approach involves stating the necessary conditions to advance an evolutionary stage, along with visual examples of theory and empirical examples largely from the literature in consumer psychology. The upshot is a framework aimed to align scholars in understanding how to think about and discuss theoretical contributions. Finally, by adopting this approach, the authors suggest that psychological science can better address current challenges, such as the replication crisis, and foster more impactful research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding the belief–behavior gap: Insights from attitudes research

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2025-12-21 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Belief change does not always lead to behavior change. This belief–behavior gap has received considerable atention, particularly in the context of misinformation. We expand upon ideas in the literature by offering additional insight derived from research on attitudes. Specifically, we propose that lessons from attitudes research can be applied to the belief–behavior relationship to further understand when belief change will and will not promote behavior change. We discuss the role of attitudes in determining how beliefs shape behavior, the value of measuring and targeting attitudes in research on behavior change, and factors that can influence the attitude–behavior relationship as a means to gain insight into the belief–behavior relationship. As part of our review, we also offer recommendations as to how belief‐targeting interventions might be improved to increase their impact on downstream behavior.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Softening the blow or sharpening the blade: Examining the reputational effects of satire.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2025-02-13 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  = 2,040) using memes and videos, causal evidence is provided that nonpolitical satire can cause greater damage to a target's reputation than direct criticism. Evidence that satire renders targets as less human, and thus more prone to more reputational damage is explored via both mediation and moderation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Unnecessarily divided: Civil conversations reduce attitude polarization more than people expect.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2025-11-13

  articleSenior author

  People with opposing attitudes can learn from one another through civil discourse and debate. Yet, people routinely avoid discussing their differences of opinion, preferring instead to discuss their attitudes with like-minded others. We propose that people lack interest in discussing their differences of opinion, in part, because they expect such conversations are unlikely to change their own and others' attitudes. Importantly, we find these expectations are systematically miscalibrated: Civil conversations reduce attitude polarization more than people anticipate. Participants with opposing attitudes toward cats and dogs (Study 1 and Supplemental Study S1), cancel culture (Studies 2 and 4), and Joe Biden's performance as president (Study 5) underestimated how much their own and others' attitudes would depolarize in spoken conversations. Moreover, participants retained somewhat less polarized attitudes 1 week later. Participants underestimated attitude change, because they misunderstood why their attitudes differed: Whereas participants inferred their attitudes differed, because they fundamentally disagreed; their attitudes actually differed, because they were focused on different aspects of these topics (Study 3). As such, having a conversation surfaced unexpected areas of agreement (Studies 2, 4, and 5). Importantly, participants became more interested in discussing their differences of opinion, when they were informed that their own and others' attitudes might depolarize in a conversation (Study 6 and Supplemental Study S2). In total, the current work reveals that miscalibrated expectations can create an unnecessary barrier to civil discourse, leaving people with diverse points of view more divided, more polarized, and less informed than they otherwise could be. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Frontiers of Hierarchy Research: Status, Power, and Inequality

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  Hierarchy is an essential component of social life, which emerges spontaneously and organize the social dynamics (Durkheim, 1960; Magee & Galinsky, 2008). Two of the most widely studied and fundamental hierarchical dimensions are status and power (Blader & Chen, 2012; Fiske, 2010; Kemper, 2006; Weber, 1964). Status is defined as the prestige, respect, and esteem that an individual or a group has in the eyes of others (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Magee & Galinsky, 2008) and power is defined as individuals’ asymmetric control over valuable resources (Blau, 1964; Greer et al., 2017; Magee & Galinsky, 2008). Previous studies on status and power have shown their impacts on a variety of important outcomes, such as social resources (Lin, 1999), emotions (Kemper, 2006), learning (Bunderson & Reagans, 2011), and goal seeking (Guinote, 2017). This symposium aims to contribute to continuing the discussion of social hierarchy in impacting social life with novel perspectives on both traditional concepts such as gender differences and competition/cooperation, and understudied yet important phenomena such as individual exploration and discrimination recognition. We believe that our symposium will help generate new perspectives and important questions regarding social hierarchy and its relationships with various constructs. We hope that it will facilitate sophisticated theorizing and rigorous empirical research in this line of research.

  PublisherDOI

• The vicious cycle of status insecurity.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2024-12-02 · 4 citations

  article

  (using ChatGPT), and more than a dozen experimental studies. To enhance generalizability and external validity, our experimental contexts include consulting pitches, venture capital competitions, and idea generation contests. To demonstrate discriminant validity, we differentiate status insecurity from self-esteem insecurity. Across the studies, status insecurity consistently decreased status sharing while status sharing reliably increased one's status. Ultimately, status insecurity paradoxically lowers one's status because it reduces the propensity to elevate and celebrate others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant F31MH012849

  NIH · $76k

Frequent coauthors

• Richard E. Petty

  The Ohio State University

  58 shared

• Adam D. Galinsky

  56 shared

• Zakary L. Tormala

  Stanford University

  37 shared

• David Dubois

  INSEAD

  23 shared

• Pablo Briñol

  21 shared

• Timothy Calkins

  14 shared

• Loran F. Nordgren

  13 shared

• Kristopher J. Preacher

  Vanderbilt University

  12 shared

Awards & honors

• Society for Consumer Psychology Distinguished Scientific Con…
• Society for Personality and Social Psychology Fellow
• Relationship Researchers Interest Group of the Society for P…
• Kellogg School of Management Top Elective Professor Award
• MSI Research Grant Award, Marketing Science Institute