BEHAVIORAL LAB
MENDOZA COLLEGE OF BUSINESS
Investment: $1,615,000
The Mendoza College of Business’s Behavioral Lab helps business students understand and appreciate research, its processes, and how it applies to their future professional endeavors. The Lab supports 6-7 research projects per year that examine human behavior on topics including, but not limited to, diversity and inclusion, strategic management, team and leadership dynamics, consumption behavior, and investment decision-making. Undergraduate and graduate students work as research assistants in the Lab led by a research team of 10 core faculty members, while local community members, company employees, and the campus community are also invited to participate in experiments.
The new lab space will extend Mendoza’s capacity to engage more students in research and offer in-person studies to the campus and local communities. The Behavioral Lab will also bolster faculty recruitment by showcasing the resources and highlighting faculty research productivity.
FACULTY HIGHLIGHT
Timothy Hubbard is a pioneer in the management field, incorporating physiological data into strategic management experiments. In the behavioral lab, he tracks participants’ vision, measures their stress levels, and records their facial expressions. Tim is also a leader in his field, integrating virtual reality into his behavioral strategy lab experiments. VR allows Hubbard’s students to experience firsthand what it’s like to make decisions as a CEO. In his strategic management class, students run through a simulation where they must make quick decisions and then explain their thinking to a board before being questioned by a hostile reporter in a TV studio. “These are undergraduate and master’s students. They’re not CEOs and they’re not going to be for at least a few years,” he said. “But now, instead of just reading case studies about being a CEO, they have from the first day of class at least a taste of what a simulated few days as a chief executive officer could be like.”
