Zakary Tormala

Professor Tormala received a BA in psychology from Arizona State University in 1996 and earned his PhD in social psychology from Ohio State University in 2003. From 2003-2007, Tormala served as an assistant professor of social psychology at Indiana University. In 2007, he joined the Stanford faculty as an associate professor at the Stanford GSB. Today, Tormala is the Laurence W. Lane Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the Stanford GSB.

Professor Tormala’s research focuses primarily on the topics of attitudes, persuasion, and social influence. He specializes in conducting lab and field experiments designed to enhance our understanding of attitude, belief, and behavior change. Tormala publishes extensively on these topics and has served on the editorial boards of the leading scientific journals in his field. He has also served as the Editor of Consumer Psychology Review (CPR) and Associate Editor at Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB). For his contribution to scholarly research, Tormala received the Society for Consumer Psychology’s Early Career Award in 2008, was named to the Marketing Science Institute’s list of Young Scholars in 2009, and received the Society for Consumer Psychology’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 2024. He is also an elected fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

At Stanford, Professor Tormala teaches courses on persuasion in the MBA program, the PhD program, and numerous executive education programs.