Mark Conley

My work across contexts demonstrates how motivational language impacts key outcomes for organizations and entrepreneurs. Goal orientations (promotion and prevention) and states of goal pursuit (locomotion and assessment) explain some outcomes in entrepreneurship and innovation. To measure motivations, I build linguistic measurement tools suitable for extracting variables from conversations, correspondence, webpages, legal documents, blogs, and other archives.

Typically, I first measure psychological and motivational variables via a field observational study or archival reference. Then I proceed onto pre-registered experiments and replications to pin down causality and identify potential mediators.

My work has been published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Social Science Research, Academy of Management Journal, Science Advances, and Harvard Business Review.