Maarten W. Bos
Post-Doctoral Fellow of Business Administration
Maarten Bos is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at the Harvard Business School. He holds a PhD in Psychology from Radboud University Nijmegen and a BA and MS in Psychology from the University of Amsterdam.
His work has been published in a number of leading academic journals, including Science, Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Journal of Consumer Psychology and has been covered in media outlets around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Turkey, India, Pakistan, South Korea, and China. His article, "A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Making Complex Decisions" ranked among the most popular blog articles on the Harvard Business Review website in 2011. In 2012, he was interviewed for HBS Working Knowledge, which resulted in the piece "The Unconscious Executive".
Recently, an interview with CNN resulted in a contribution to their 'Route to the Top'.
At HBS, he taught the doctoral course Behavioral Approaches to Decision Making, and co-taught lectures in Professor Amy Cuddy's second-year MBA class, Power & Influence.
When he is not publishing and receiving media attention, he enjoys large quantities of good food, music, and motorcycles.
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Research Summary
Overview
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Maarten W. Bos
Dr. Bos conducts research in three primary areas: decision making, sleep, and technology and psychology. In his research, he makes use of modern technology to both measure and influence performance— on a minute scale in the lab as well as on a larger scale outside of the lab.
Keywords: Decisions;
Power and Influence;
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Research Summary
Decision making
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Maarten W. Bos
Dr. Bos investigates how unconscious processes aid and improve performance. His work contests the common-sense notion that conscious deliberation always leads to the best outcomes. Dr. Bos and colleagues propose that, for complex decisions, the best outcomes result from a period of distraction that allows the unconscious to process information, rather than from conscious deliberation. He and his colleagues have studied this in the context of various consumer decisions as well as in predicting the outcome of sporting events.
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Research Summary
Sleep
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Maarten W. Bos
Most people spend about a quarter to a third of their lives sleeping. For an activity that is such a large part of our lives, we know very little about it. Dr. Bos is working together with the Center for Sleep and Cognition at the Harvard Medical School to investigate the ways sleep can aid decision making, as well as how sleep influences other factors of human behavior.
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Research Summary
Technology and psychology
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Maarten W. Bos
Many factors influence our behavior. Dr. Bos primarily focuses on the unconscious factors. His most recent work investigates how technology impacts our behavior and how it can be used to improve people's performance.