ADAM ALTER

New York Times Bestselling Author at Anatomy of a Breakthrough

Adam Alter is a professor of marketing, and the Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He also holds an affiliated professorship in social psychology at NYU’s psychology department. In 2020 he was voted professor of the year by the faculty and student body at NYU's Stern School of Business, and was among the Poets and Quants 40 Best Professors Under 40 in 2017.

Alter is the New York Times bestselling author of two books: Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think Feel and Behave (Penguin Press, 2013), and Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (Penguin Press, 2017).

He has shared his ideas with thousands of people across dozens of audiences, including on the TED2017 mainstage in Vancouver, Canada—a talk viewed four million times and listed by TED's editorial team among the ten best TED talks in 2017—the Cannes Creativity Festival, the World Economic Forum, and with governments around the world, and at dozens of companies and non-profits, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Instagram, JP Morgan, Citi, Fidelity, Prudential, DonorsChoose, the Robin Hood Foundation, and Goldman Sachs. He has also been featured on NPR's Fresh Air, TED Radio Hour, All Things Considered, Science Friday, and Marketplace, and his writing has featured in, among other publications, the New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, WIRED, and Popular Science. Alter has also delivered lectures at numerous academic institutions, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Chicago.

Alter completed his undergraduate education at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where he graduated with a degree in psychology with first class honors, and the University Medal in psychology. Alter moved to Princeton University in 2004, and spent the following five years completing his Ph.D. in social psychology, focusing on how people reach the judgments and make the decisions that shape their lives. At Princeton, he held the Procter honorific dissertation fellowship, and a fellowship in the Woodrow Wilson Society of Scholars.