David Faro

David Faro received his PhD in Marketing at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 2006. Faro completed his undergraduate studies in business administration at Boston University and then worked for 5 years at the marketing department of a multi-national industrial products firm located in Turkey. David returned to school to complete a MSc. in Organizational Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and then moved to Chicago to begin the PhD program.

David Faro is broadly interested in consumers' judgments and behavior under uncertainty. In one line of research, David examines the influence of the presence of other people on consumer decisions and how accurate people are in predicting the preferences of others under uncertainty. David's dissertation research focuses on how consumers make judgment of elapsed time. This research examines the influence of consumers' strength of belief in a causal relationship between a particular action and outcome on their judgments of elapsed time. David shows that when consumers strongly believe that a particular product causes a benefit, they report shorter performance times for that product than consumers who are less confident about its effect, even when both groups have experienced the same exact product performance time.

Physiological, motivational or emotional factors are not responsible for this tendency; David finds that differences in consumers' beliefs are sufficient to produce divergent time judgment for identical experiences with a product. David proposes that people reverse the previously examined relationship between time and causality, whereby temporal proximity is a cue to causality, and instead base their time judgments on the strength of their causal beliefs. In several studies examining the underlying process, this research rules out general association strength and similarity as alternative accounts for this effect and shows that this tendency is muted when people are made aware of causal relationships for which temporal proximity is not as good of a cue to infer causality.