Adrian Ward is an associate professor of marketing in the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. He is an award-winning teacher of undergraduate and graduate courses on consumer behavior, decision-making, and the psychology of technology at Texas McCombs and Harvard University.

The primary focus of his work is understanding how consumers’ relationships with technology and other people influence attention, knowledge, and decision-making. His research has examined how the mere presence of one’s own smartphone affects cognitive capacity, how Googling for information affects consumers’ beliefs about their own knowledge, and how sharing responsibility with a relationship partner leads to the development of expertise on a “need-to-know basis.”

His research has been published in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Psychological Science, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. It has been covered by popular press outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Scientific American.

Before joining Texas McCombs, he received an M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard and spent two years as a senior research associate in the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado Boulder. Ward is also an honors graduate of Furman University with a B.S. in psychology and a B.A. in religion.