Amit Goldenberg

Amit Goldenberg

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets
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Amit Goldenberg
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Amit Goldenberg is an assistant professor in the Negotiation Organization & Markets unit, an affiliate with Harvard’s Department of Psychology, and a member of the Digital Data and Design Institute (D^3). Professor Goldenberg's research focuses on what makes people emotional in social and group contexts, and how such emotions can be changed when they are unhelpful or undesired. He is particularly interested in how technology is used for both emotion detection and regulation. 

In his work Professor Goldenberg tries to integrate between experimental psychology that examines behavior at the individual and collectives levels. To integrate these domains, he employs a multi-method approach that combines behavioral experiments, analysis of data from digital media, computational modeling and AI.

Featured Work
Hidden Brain: Collective Emotions
This week, we kick off our new series, Emotions 2.0, with a special double episode about the emotions we experience with other people. We often think that emotions like happiness or sadness live inside our individual minds. But if you’ve ever gone to a music concert in a big stadium or attended a political rally with like-minded voters, you know that emotions can move through crowds in powerful ways. We begin with psychologist Amit Goldenberg, who studies how emotions spread and ratchet up in intensity as more people experience them.
Podcast Interview on Emotions and Social Media

Eric chats with Amit Goldenberg, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Amit studies emotions in social interactions, for example in political contexts and on social media. He was a journalist and author before becoming an academic.

In this episode, Eric and Amit talk about how emotions operate in groups. Do crowds easily go “mad”? What emotions spread faster in groups? Why are we drawn to people more politically extreme than us? How is social media shaping our emotions and political behavior? Finally, Amit shares his journey from being a journalist to being a psychologist at a business school.

Managing Your Team’s Emotional Dynamic
Collective emotion, when a group of people shares an emotion, is often stronger than a single individual feeling that same emotion alone. So, how can leaders manage emotions, particularly negative ones, from taking over a team? Four strategies from psychology — situation modification, shifting attention or creating distraction, reappraisal, and response modulation — can help bring down the temperature.
Don’t Focus on the Most Expressive Face in the Audience
Research has shown that when speaking in front of a group, people’s attention tends to gets stuck on the most emotional faces, causing them to overestimate the group’s average emotional state. In this piece, the authors share two additional findings: First, the larger the group, the greater this attention bias. Second, the attention bias is stronger for faces expressing negative emotions than for faces expressing positive ones, meaning that our ability to judge a group’s emotional state isn’t just skewed towards more intense emotions — it is specifically biased toward more negative evaluations. Based on these findings, the authors suggest that when giving a talk or meeting a large group of people, we should attempt to intentionally scan the audience more evenly in order to counteract our natural attention biases and get a more accurate picture of the group’s overall emotional state.
To Overcome Resistance to DEI, Understand What’s Driving It

Employees often resist DEI initiatives, which of course hinders their effectiveness. The authors — experts in the resistance to social-change efforts — write that the key to overcoming resistance to any effort is figuring out why people are resisting. When it comes to DEI initiatives, they argue, people resist because they experience at least one of three forms of threat: status threat, merit threat, and moral threat. Depending on the kinds of threat they experience, they then tend to engage in three kinds of resistance: defending, denying, and distancing. The authors explain these forms of threat and resistance and then offer suggestions for how to overcome them.

Journal Articles
Editorials
Book Chapters
Presentations
  • Goldenberg, Amit. "Emotion Dynamics in Groups." Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, February 2021. View Details
  • Goldenberg, Amit. "What Makes Groups Emotional?" University of California, Riverside, February 2021. View Details
  • Goldenberg, Amit. "Amplification in the Evaluation of Emotional Expressions Over Time." Paper presented at the Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention, May 2021. (Virtual.) View Details
  • "Political Homophily and Acrophily." Paper presented at the Society for Affective Science Annual Conference, Society for Affective Science, April 2021. (Online.) View Details
  • Goldenberg, Amit. "Tie Selection Strategies." Paper presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Meeting, February 9–13, 2021. View Details
  • Goldenberg, Amit. "Collective Emotions." Emotions and Strategy: A Multi-Disciplinary Conversation at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, May 2020. View Details
  • Goldenberg, Amit, and J. J. Gross. "Network Selection Strategies." Paper presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention, New Orleans, LA, February 2020. View Details
Cases and Teaching Materials
Awards & Honors
Winner of the 2024 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, given by the Association for Psychological Science.
Selected as a 2023 Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science.
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