Student Spotlight: Blake Nichols
Our second student spotlight of Spring 2022 is Blake Nichols, a 2nd year Ph.D. Student in Marketing at the Shidler Business School, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Read Blake’s story here:
Background and Research Interests
I am from Utah, but have lived in Oregon (5 years), Kenya (3 years), and Vietnam (8 years). Over my time living in Kenya (3 years) and Vietnam (8 years) and traveling to more than thirty countries, I have developed a fascination for how people are able to interact in social situations, especially when their cultures are highly different. Being from the US, I was influenced by my American culture, yet I was able to engage with individuals who shared very different cultures (e.g., languages, perspectives, and norms). While there was an occasional gaffe, we were able to connect, allowing me to form friendships or buy groceries at the market. This led to my current research interest in trust. Trust is a key component to allow for social interaction. The trustor and trustee engage with both expectations about the outcome of the engagement and about the partner’s trustworthiness. We use contextual cues to determine those expectations. My research focuses on understanding these cross-cultural expectation cues. My research takes a cultural psychology and institutional logic approach to understanding trust. I am also interested in sustainability and pro-environmental consumption (e.g. how people are driven by their care for the environment), and superstition and magical thinking.
While in Vietnam
I worked for 8 years in Vietnam. I was a lecturer at Foreign Trade University and Vietnam National University (where I still teach summers). I taught marketing, entrepreneurship, and logistics courses. I also installed their capstone program. Throughout my time in Vietnam, I also worked closely with entrepreneurs both as a collaborator and consultant. I helped start a school that teaches Vietnamese to expats, a company that makes limited-edition Vietnamese crafts, and a marketing consulting firm.
Additionally, I am on the board of directors for an organization called Keep Hanoi Clean. They organize cleaning events around Hanoi and work with other organizations (e.g., schools, government organizations) to encourage sustainable product use, such as bamboo straws and paper cups instead of plastic ones. I also helped establish the Vietnam-Oregon Initiative, which bridged investors from Oregon to manufacturers in Vietnam.
Current Projects
At present, I am working on an exploratory project that investigates cultural influences on diet selection. The study specifically investigates why individuals reduce their animal product intake (e.g., meat, cheese, etc) in favor of plant-based protein. This project uses data collected from the US, the UK, Japan, and China. I am also in the early stages of a project that investigates how adults without children redirect their nurturance energy toward certain consumption behaviors.
I recently also submitted a paper as a co-author that proposes a meta-theory for trust. We used the highest cited papers across seven management journals and attempted to reconcile their divergent conceptualizations of trust. I am also in the early stages of investigating the role of trust in value co-creation among individuals. In other words, how do individuals who have idiosyncratic needs enter trust relationships to access those needs. This paper takes a service-dominance logic approach to understand those trust interactions. Stay tuned for more on these!
As for my dissertation project, I haven’t started this yet, but it will be something related to trust!
Life outside of school?
Now that I am in school, I only study, haha, but while in Vietnam, I had many great opportunities: I was a founding member of an improv-troupe, I met my fiancé, I drove a motorbike across Vietnam and Laos, and I did a TEDx talk about the importance of networking.