Leadership Talk with Olivia Kim

Many consumer behavior activities have been categorized as either utilitarian (devoid of any pleasure) or hedonic (something of pure pleasure). While extremely useful, this way of categorizing activities may miss out on the nuances of the qualitatively high (edifying) vs. low (gratifying) levels of pleasures. Based on the psychological and philosophical way of categorizing pleasure in qualitatively high vs. low levels, I show in 5 studies (N=1610) that there is a consensus regarding the inspiriting (to infuse spirit or life into; enliven) effect of edifying activities vs. gratifying activities and demonstrate that edifying activities are significantly more inspiriting compared to both gratifying and neutral activities. Taken together, I propose a novel categorization of pleasurable activities – edifying vs. gratifying – and robustly show that people’s actual post-activity states contradict the general pre-activity intuition of what may be less exhausting.

About Olivia Kim

Olivia Kim is a PhD Research Scholar at the department of Strategy and Management at the Norwegian School of Economics. She holds a BSc in Management Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a minor in Brain and Cognitive Science, an MBA from Seoul National University, and a two-year Master of Marketing from London Business School, concentrating in Consumer Behavior. Olivia has worked in consulting and educational business for 10+ years, where she focused on business development and consumer behavior.

The Leadership Talks series

Leadership Talks is a series of seminars about topics related to leadership, change and sustainability, project management and organizational psychology, hosted by the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at BI Norwegian Business School.