Hi all,

I've graduated in Business Management/ Marketing a year ago and currently I am a Psychology student (undergrad). The reason why I took up Psychology is that what I have learned at Faculty of Business seemed too out of real life for me, I wanted to add some "human touch" to my education with psychology. I really enjoy fields of Cognitive, but especially Social Psychology and I'm very much interested in works of Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely and others. COnsumer decision making and persuasion are of my special interest.

I want to become a PhD student at my former faculty, department of Marketing, and would like to hear some advice from you guys on what the research topic could be. I do not know much about current research topics in this field, what is "in" and what is "out", also I don't want to start a research just to dicover that all my questions have been answered before. I just feel kind of lost, my prospective research advisor wants to hear what topic I want to focus on and there are just so many to choose from!

So any idea of yours would be appreciated and warmly welcomed!

Thank you,


Mike (Masaryk University, Czech Rep.)

Then find out by reading the literature within your field. You may want to narrow the literature down by following what you find interesting and then just keep on reading.

The whole point of a PhD is that you do independent research.

I am currently doing a PhD which includes psychology and finance.  My work is based around ideas from Tversky and Kahneman. I think there are endless opportunities in this field.  Most of the research from the Heuristics and Bias field comes from experimental research. So a good PhD idea might be the application of it to real world scenarios (such as marketing).  Just because a controlled experiment shows something, it doesn't mean that people act that way in the real world. Have a look at Gigerenzer's research or even the research of Gary Klein. 

A word of warning about doing a PhD which covers two disciplines. Its hard work and difficult to find a supervisor and examiner who believes in the same approach as you.  Good luck.

Potatoes

Thank you Potatoes, you gave me something to chew on! Actually, experiments and application of their results in real life are one of the thing I am most interested in.

I did't mean my original post as "do it for me" request, I just wanted to broaden my horizons with insights from people already doing some research. So I'm sorry if you got me wrong here.

Anyway, thank you both, guys!