Mike Prentice, PhDPersonality and motivation scientist, educator, and research methods consultant

I am a personality and social psychologist who studies motivation, morality, and well-being. My work asks what people need in order to flourish, how values and goals shape everyday experience, and how media and new technologies such as AI fit into that picture. A thread running through much of it is the idea that feeling like a good person is a basic psychological need. I have developed that proposal from early experience sampling studies into a full theoretical account with a process model linking moral personality to well-being.

Over more than 15 years I have done research with teams in the United States, Canada, Austria, and Germany. These include the Beacon Project on moral character at Wake Forest University, the Rationality Enhancement Group at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien in Tübingen. I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Psychology of Communication and New Media at the University of Würzburg.

Teaching and mentoring have been part of every position I have held. I have taught more than 20 courses, from introductory psychology to psychometrics and statistical computing in R. I have mentored students at every stage of their education and research journeys, from advising undergraduate theses to dissertations. I also consult independently on study design, measurement, and data analysis. I am a first-generation college graduate and completed my PhD at the University of Missouri, where my dissertation was named the Distinguished Dissertation in the Social Sciences.