Hello,

Welcome to Sahoon's webpage

Sahoon is an assistant professor of Marketing at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He recently received a PhD in Marketing at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He studies creativity, creatively.

Specifically, his research investigates the effect of working on creative tasks on consumers' psychological states. For example, his first dissertation essay, published at the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2023, showed that generating new product ideas increases the idea generators' feelings of autonomy as well as fear of judgment by others. Such understanding of the consequences of creativity is a new field that opens the door to numerous novel insights. For instance, the fact that creative ideation increases consumers' feelings of autonomy served as the theoretical basis for his second dissertation essay, "Low power warm-up effect," published in JESP in 2023. This research looks at the effect of power on creativity over time. It offers an intervention to help low power individuals (e.g., low SES students/individuals and lower ranked employees) become more creative, which can provide important implications for companies, educators, and policy makers.

Sahoon's research interest also includes branding. In his third dissertation essay, he studies how consumers' feelings towards brands change when they participate in brands' crowdsourcing campaigns--thereby pioneering research that studies creativity as an IV, instead of a DV. In other words, instead of focusing on the antecedents of creativity (e.g., how to increase creative performance), he studies the consequences of being creative. Additionally, whereas most creativity research has looked at creative performance at a single time-point, he investigates creative performance over time.