Stony Brook University Business Management

Tess Robertson is an assistant professor of management and is also associated with the interdisciplinary Center for Behavioral Political Economy. Dr. Robertson received her Ph.D. in evolutionary social psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and she has published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and Evolution and Human Behavior.

Research: My research generally asks the questions: How do we choose who to associate with and who to avoid & how do we detect and minimize the costs of social exclusion when it happens? Some of my work examines how people make selective choices about who to cooperate with and who not to. I also study the reverse of this: how people detect and respond to being ostracized or excluded. Throughout my work, I focus on the underlying emotional processes. I use a variety of methods, including experimental economics games, decision making tasks, social cognition measures, priming methods, and hormonal assays.

Teaching: Organizational behavior