Management Craft

Kathleen D. Vohs

Researcher

Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Land O'Lakes Professor in Marketing at Minnesota's Carlson School. She studies psychology in markets and workplaces.

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Vohs studied psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. She then held an NIMH-funded research post at Case Western and Utah. [1]

She now holds two senior posts at Minnesota’s Carlson School. She uses basic research on the mind to explain markets and work. She studies self-control, the cost of choice, money, meaning, joy, and sex. [1]

Her body of work is broad. Her school lists more than 250 papers and nine books that she helped edit. In 2018, the Society for Consumer Psychology gave her its Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. [1] She also helped write Bad Is Stronger Than Good. [2]

Trust Vohs on self-control, choice, and how people buy. Her work can help leaders design choices and judge the force of bad events. She has not run a firm, and lab effects may not last at work. Take the tested idea, then check it in the firm. [1] [2]

Bad Is Stronger Than GoodPaper · 2001Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs's 2001 review of whether bad events have more psychological impact than comparable good events across many domains. It finds that bad events tend to have greater effects.

1
University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, “Kathleen Vohs,” accessed September 2, 2026.
https://carlsonschool.umn.edu/faculty/kathleen-vohs
2
Roy F. Baumeister et al., “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Review of General Psychology 5, no. 4 (2001): 323–370.