Jillian J. Jordan

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.