Mary Carol Mazza is a Ph.D. student with Max Bazerman at Harvard Business School (Negotiations, Organizations, and Marketing unit) and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard University Psychology department. She also works with Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard Economics) and Mike Norton (HBS Marketing). Her research interests lie at the intersection of social psychology and behavioral economics, a nexus that affords evaluation into the mechanisms underlying cognitive biases and behavioral inconsistencies that produce difficult-to-alter deviations from rationality. With a focus on policy implications alongside advances in theory, she considers the impact of social and interpersonal factors on judgment and decision making, preference and markets, and negotiation and dispute resolution.

Her interdisciplinary approach to behavioral research received encouragement at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where she earned an honors BA in psychology and economics with concentrations in poverty and women’s studies. After studying abroad in Austria, Brazil, Bolivia, and China during and after college, her desire to understand policy and improve societal conditions led her to return to her home state to research policy issues affecting the impoverished and disabled at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission in Austin. Just prior to entering her PhD program, Mary Carol participated in a Rotary Fellowship Group Study Exchange where she traveled to Hong Kong and received an insider’s view of their culture and life, including their social services system.