Jillian J. Jordan
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Jillian Jordan is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches Negotiations in the MBA elective curriculum.
Jillian Jordan is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches Negotiations in the MBA elective curriculum.
Professor Jordan’s research investigates moral behavior and the psychology that surrounds it, with a focus on the role of reputation. When and why do individuals and organizations make costly sacrifices for moral causes, including through acts of prosociality and punishment of wrongdoers? And how are these decisions influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by our incentives to appear virtuous in the eyes of others?
Professor Jordan investigates the factors that shape moral reputations, with the goal of illuminating the reputational incentives that individuals and organizations face. She also explores how these reputational incentives influence moral decision-making, and when reputation serves to align self-interest with collective goals versus create perverse incentives. Through this work, she aims to uncover how reputation systems shape behavior, what the consequences are for society, and how we might leverage reputation motives for social good.
She has asked questions like: How does reputation fuel expressions of moral outrage, condemnation, and punishment? How does becoming a victim of wrongdoing shape one’s moral reputation? Is “virtue signaling” eroding the quality of moral and political discourse? Why do we hate hypocrites, and how can individuals and organizations engage morally (e.g., by expressing moral opinions, spearheading prosocial initiatives, or calling out bad behavior) while limiting the risk that they will be condemned as hypocrites if their own moral track-records fall short of perfection?
Professor Jordan earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale University and an A.B. in Psychology, summa cum laude, from Harvard University. Prior to joining HBS, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dispute Resolution Research Center at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Her work has been published in numerous academic journals and media outlets including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Harvard Business Review, and The New York Times.
- Journal Articles
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- Ghezae, Isaias, Jillian J. Jordan, Izzy Gainsburg, Mohsen Mosleh, Gordon Pennycook, Robb Willer, and David Rand. "Partisans neither Expect nor Receive Reputational Rewards for Sharing Falsehoods over Truth Online." PNAS Nexus 3, no. 8 (August 2024). View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., and Roseanna Sommers. "Sexual Assault Victims Face a Penalty for Adjacent Consent." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 34 (August 20, 2024). View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J. "A Pull versus Push Framework for Reputation." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 27, no. 9 (September 2023): 852–866. View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., and Nour S. Kteily. "How Reputation Does (and Does Not) Drive People to Punish Without Looking." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 28 (July 11, 2023). View Details
- Kassirer, Samantha, Jillian J. Jordan, and Maryam Kouchaki. "Giving-by-proxy Triggers Subsequent Charitable Behavior." Art. 104438. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 105 (March 2023). View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., and Roseanna Sommers. "When Does Moral Engagement Risk Triggering a Hypocrite Penalty?" Art. 101404. Special Issue on Honesty and Deception edited by Maurice E. Schweitzer, Emma Levine. Current Opinion in Psychology 47 (October 2022). View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., and Maryam Kouchaki. "Virtuous Victims." Science Advances 7, no. 42 (October 15, 2021). View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., Erez Yoeli, and David Rand. "Don't Get It or Don't Spread It: Comparing Self-interested versus Prosocial Motivations for COVID-19 Prevention Behaviors." Art. 20222. Scientific Reports 11 (2021). View Details
- Capraro, Valerio, Jillian J. Jordan, and Ben Tappin. "Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 94 (May 2021). View Details
- Martin, Justin W., Jillian J. Jordan, David G. Rand, and Fiery Cushman. "When Do We Punish People Who Don't?" Cognition 193 (December 2019). View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., and David G. Rand. "Signaling When Nobody Is Watching: A Reputation Heuristics Account of Outrage and Punishment in One-shot Anonymous Interactions." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 118, no. 1 (January 2020). View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J. "Which Accusations Stick?" Nature Human Behaviour 2, no. 1 (January 2018): 19–20. View Details
- Perc, Matjaž, Jillian J. Jordan, David G. Rand, Zhen Wang, Stefano Boccaletti, and Attila Szolnoki. "Statistical Physics of Human Cooperation." Physics Reports 687 (May 8, 2017): 1–51. View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., and David G. Rand. "Third-Party Punishment as a Costly Signal of High Continuation Probabilities in Repeated Games." Journal of Theoretical Biology 421 (May 21, 2017): 189–202. View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., Roseanna Sommers, Paul Bloom, and David G. Rand. "Why Do We Hate Hypocrites? Evidence for a Theory of False Signaling." Psychological Science 28, no. 3 (March 2017): 356–368. View Details
- Jordan, Matthew R., Jillian J. Jordan, and David G. Rand. "No Unique Effect of Intergroup Competition on Cooperation: Non-competitive Thresholds Are as Effective as Competitions between Groups for Increasing Human Cooperative Behavior." Evolution and Human Behavior 38, no. 1 (January 2017): 102–108. View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., Moshe Hoffman, Martin A. Nowak, and David G. Rand. "Uncalculating Cooperation Is Used to Signal Trustworthiness." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 31 (August 2, 2016): 8658–8663. View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom, and David G. Rand. "Third-party Punishment as a Costly Signal of Trustworthiness." Nature 530, no. 7591 (2016): 473–476. View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., Katherine McAuliffe, and David G. Rand. "The Effects of Endowment Size and Strategy Method on Third Party Punishment." Experimental Economics 19, no. 4 (December 2016): 741–763. View Details
- McAuliffe, Katherine, Jillian J. Jordan, and Felix Warneken. "Costly Third-party Punishment in Young Children." Cognition 134 (January 2015): 1–10. View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., Valerio Capraro, and David G. Rand. "Heuristics Guide the Implementation of Social Preferences in One-Shot Prisoner's Dilemma Experiments." Art. 6790. Scientific Reports 4 (2014). View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., Katherine McAuliffe, and Felix Warneken. "Development of In-Group Favoritism in Children's Third-Party Punishment of Selfishness." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 35 (September 2, 2014): 12710–12715. View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., David G. Rand, Samuel Arbesman, James H. Fowler, and Nicholas A. Christakis. "Contagion of Cooperation in Static and Fluid Social Networks." PLoS ONE 8, no. 6 (June 2013). View Details
- Book Chapters
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- Jordan, Jillian J., Alexander Peysakhovich, and David G. Rand. "Why We Cooperate." Chap. 6 in The Moral Brain: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, edited by Jean Decety and Thalia Wheatley. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. View Details
- Working Papers
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- Dhaliwal, Nathan, Jillian J. Jordan, and Pat Barclay. "Modest Victims: Victims Who Decline to Broadcast Their Victimization Are Seen As Morally Virtuous." Working Paper, August 2024. View Details
- Jordan, Jillian J., and Nour Kteily. "Punitive but Discerning: Reputation Can Fuel Ambiguously-Deserved Punishment, but Does Not Erode Sensitivity to Nuance." Working Paper, December 2020. View Details
- Cases and Teaching Materials
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- Jordan, Jillian, and Kathleen McGinn. "Not Everyone’s Cup of Coffee: Organizing the Café Industry." Harvard Business School Case 925-004, September 2024. View Details
- Additional Information