Raj Raghunathan

Raj Raghunathan (Dr. Rajagopal Raghunathan) is Professor of Marketing at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin ,^[1] researcher and author of the book "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy",^[2][3] that reveals the traits of people that can get in the way of happiness and explores the habits that lead to happiness.^[4][5]

Education and career

Raghunathan graduated from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani in 1989 and obtained an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in 1992.

He earned his PhD from the Stern School of Business, New York University in 2000, and is professor of marketing at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Raghunathan's work juxtaposes theories from psychology, behavioral sciences, decision theory and marketing to explain connections between affect and consumption behavior.

Raghunathan was recognized as a Marketing Science Young Scholar in 2006,^[6] and was awarded the National Science Foundation Career Grant Award in 2007, for the period 2007 – 2013.

Raghunathan is an associate editor at the Journal of Consumer Psychology, guest Associate Editor at the Journal of Marketing Research, and on the editorial boards of Journal of Marketing and Journal of Consumer Research.^[7]

The course

Raghunathan observations, that the more visible the achievements of the smart and successful – work promotions, pay rises, fancy holidays and bigger homes – the more unfulfilled and distracted they seem overall, led him to researching happiness and identifying why certain psychological traits can get in the way of one's well-being.^[8] After teaching his ideas in his MBA class, he designed a Massive open online course (MOOC) on the subject.

The 6-week long online course on Coursera^[9] is called A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment, also referred to as ALOHAF for short and has had over 75,000 enrollments.^[10] It was featured as a Top 10 course by Coursera for several weeks.

The course draws content from a variety of fields, including positive psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral decision theory. The course features guest appearances by several well-known psychologists and thought leaders like Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational and Irrationally Yours), Ed Diener (Dr. Happiness), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow).

The book

Raghunathan's book, 'If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?', was published in April 2016 by Penguin Random House.^[11][12][13] In the book, the behaviors that deflate one’s happiness are called as happiness sins. Behaviors that overcome the happiness sins are happiness habits. The author describes 7 habit-sin pairs in the chapters. He also recommends exercises/activities for each pair that gets one started on the habits. The book refers the author's own research as well as the works of others from the various fields of behavioral economics, neuroscience, organizational behavior, consumer behavior, positive psychology etc. The book has been translated into 7 languages.

See also

• Philosophy of happiness
• Positive psychology
• Behavioral economics

References

External links

• Curriculum vitae
• Raj Raghunathan's Website