Prof. Dr. Justina Barsyte
CEO and Senior Researcher at AdCogito Institute for Advanced Behavioral Research
Professor and Senior Researcher at Vilnius University.
The Head of the Consumer Decision-Making lab at Vilnius University
My research lines focus at the intersection of behavioral and marketing sciences. I work on novel approaches to help citizens make better decisions and smarter choices by testing how various decision-making insights can be applied to encourage positive changes in different domains – being more resilient to disinformation, making more sustainable decisions, changing unhealthy lifestyles and habits to healthier ones, increasing overall consumer welfare and wellbeing. My research lines are reflected in my ongoing grants and grant applications. For the last 15 years, I have been serving as a principal investigator (PI) on various research projects funded by the Horizon Europe and H2020 program, the Lithuanian Research Council, and the Fulbright program. The results of my work are published in journals listed by The UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™, the Financial Times TOP50 journals list, and the Association of Business Schools Academic Journal Guide (AJG) journal list.
Being myself born in the Soviet Union and witnessing the velvet Baltic revolution in my adolescence years, I was fascinated with the topic of foreign influence since my early academic encounters in 1996 – a time when many people in Europe and even in my native Lithuania were still optimistic and naïve about how Russia will evolve. The more I studied and stumbled across this country, the grimmer my view became. Having written my first academic publication on how Russian foreign policy geopolitical orientation changed after 9/11, I further focused on studying how citizens in other countries perceive Russia and are influenced by Russian firms in the marketplace. My dissertation addressed how foreign influence is exerted in historically connected markets and showed that consumer nostalgia acts as a countervailing force to consumer animosity in historically connected markets – people might hate Russia, but paradoxically, they still buy Russian (see Gineikienė and Diamantopoulos, 2017 ). This phenomenon is still relevant today when many people fall for FIMI without really being true supporters of offending states.
In the DE-CONSPIRATOR, together with my team – Živilė Kaminskienė and Agnė Zakarevičiūtė -, we work on the psychometric scale development that aims to assess receptivity to FIMI. This scale aims to understand the recipient side of FIMI better. Specifically, we ask questions like Who are people more receptive to FIMI? What sociodemographic features, values, worldviews, and attitudes do they have? How do they behave in online and offline environments? What makes them receptive to particular messages? What are the best ways to increase resilience to FIMI?
To develop this psychometric scale, we started with a qualitative stage (in-depth interviews and focus groups). Data obtained from this work will help us generate a pool of items that reflect the FIMI receptivity domains. We will further test our assumptions in quantitative surveys across multiple EU countries. The result of our task will be a hands-on online tool that will help people identify how much they are receptive to FIMI.
In later DE-CONSPIRATOR stages, starting from fall 2024, we will engage in experimental (A/B type) testing – how various social influence, moral and social norms-based interventions may be used to increase resilience to FIMI.