Melanie Langer is a Senior Research Fellow at INSEAD’s ESRI, the Ethics and Social Responsibility Institute. Melanie studies the information-processing and self-regulation processes that underlie antisocial versus prosocial behavior in response to threat. With Craig Smith, she is developing a model of integrative moral reasoning to support the identification of products and services for which marketing may be ethically impermissible. She is also interested in how the marketing of products and services can be targeted based on individual differences in ways of managing threat. She uses survey and experimental methods in addition to computational text and discourse analysis. In addition to this research, Melanie supports the development of ESRI, and research collaborations and activities in the domain of ethics and social responsibility.
Melanie previously worked as a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at New York University, an M.A. in French Cultural Studies at Columbia University in Paris with courses at the ENS, the EHESS, and Paris VII, and a B.S. in Psychology with the Philosophy Track from Yale University (cum laude, departmental distinction in psychology).
Her research has been published in academic journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Political Psychology, Advances in Political Psychology, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, and Biology Letters. She has also provided research-based consulting and contributed blog posts and articles on applying research-based strategies in business with Ethical Systems at NYU Stern’s Business and Society Program.
