Lab Research Interests and Expertise
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How do high-achieving students, productive employees, or top-notch athletes achieve success at their goals? Our goal is to identify the mindsets and behaviors that make people effective, and to harness this knowledge to help many more people thrive. By enabling people to think more strategically and to use more effective strategies, we empower them to pursue their goals more effectively.
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Our research supports effective goal pursuit by:
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(1) identifying the mindsets and behaviors that foster strategic learning, performance, and well-being,
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(2) leveraging multiple methods (lab experiments, field RCTs, survey methods, and daily diaries) to rigorously study the processes by which they work, and
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(3) designing psychologically precise, scalable interventions to promote the adoption of adaptive mindsets and behaviors at scale.
Strategic Self-Regulation
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
- Abraham Lincoln
People all have goals that they want to accomplish, but the key question is how they go about achieving their goals. As Abraham Lincoln intuited, success in the face of challenge does not come simply from sheer effort or brute force, but is also a matter of searching for and implementing effective strategies.
Our research tries to better understand—and to improve—how strategically people regulate their cognition, affect, and behavior toward their goals. We do this by:
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Examining how people’s mindsets influence their strategy use and goal achievement (e.g., Chen et al., 2020, PNAS; Chen et al., 2025, Dev Psych; Chen et al., 2025, npj Science of Learning; Chen et al., 2015, PSPB; Chywl et al., 2020, PSPB; Ng et al., 2023, Educational Psychology);
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Investigating how people naturally manage their resources to achieve their goals (e.g., Chen et al., 2021, AERA Open; Chen et al., 2022, npj Science of Learning);
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Developing and testing scalable psychological interventions that guide people to pursue their goals strategically (e.g., Chen, Chavez, et al., 2017, Psych Science; Chen et al., 2022, npj Science of Learning; Chen et al., 2025, npj Science of Learning).
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Developing new theories about how to improve strategic thinking and behavior (Chen, 2025, Perspectives on Psychological Science; Chen et al., 2020, PNAS).
Motivating Well-Being
"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked... Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
- Viktor Frankl
We study the mindsets and behaviors that facilitate well-being, such as living a purposeful life, feeling passionate about work, and experiencing life satisfaction.
For example, do you think passion is to be found by seeking out the perfect job fit, or do you think that it is developed through experience over time in the profession? We call these the “Fit mindset” and “Develop mindset”, respectively (Chen et al., 2015, PSPB; Chen & Ellsworth, 2020, Passion for Work: Determinants and Consequences). These mindsets powerfully influence people’s future expectations of their well-being in different lines of work, the kinds of self-regulatory strategies that people employ to achieve passion, and even how much well-being they report in their lines of work.
We have developed and tested ways of invoking adaptive mindsets, examined cultural differences in beliefs, and tracked the effects of people’s mindsets about passion longitudinally over time (e.g., Chen et al., 2020, EJWOP; Chen et al., 2021, Frontiers in Psychology; Chwyl et al., 2020, PSPB; O'Keefe et al., 2021, JOB).
Scalable Interventions
"If you want to truly understand something,
try to change it."
- Kurt Lewin
We are passionate about research that can simultaneously improve society and refine psychological theories. In our work, theory and practice closely inform one another in a full-cycle approach (Mortensen & Cialdini, 2010). That is, ​we use psychological theory to design psychologically-precise interventions. Conducting rigorous, real-world research on our interventions, in turn, helps us refine practically useful theories.
For example, a Strategic Resource Use intervention we designed significantly improved students' self-reflection on their learning, and raised students' performance in introductory college statistics classes by an average of one-third of a letter grade (Chen et al., 2017, Psych Science). We have since scaled up that intervention through cutting-edge ECoach technology (Huberth et al., 2015, PLOS One) to reach more than 12,000 students across campus (Chen et al., 2022, npj Science of Learning). Our ongoing translational effectiveness research is analyzing even more recent efforts at scaling the intervention to reach over 50,000 students across more than 70 classes, and leveraging text analyses to understand how students engage with the intervention on their own (Chen, Rutten et al., in prep).
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We value empathy and respect in our intervention design; and societal impact and scalability in our intervention delivery. Hence, we often work closely with practitioners to address people's needs and challenges, we get feedback from those who understand the challenges firsthand, and we often leverage technology to make interventions more accessible and relatable.