Publications

Educators

16 Mar 2015
Research & Ideas

Advice on Advice

In business, good advice is priceless. Managers who are anxious and confused when confronted with corporate challenges can find that a piece of sound advice from a colleague can instill a sense of calm and clarity that leads to more thoughtful and strategic business... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

13 Mar 2007
First Look

First Look: March 13, 2007

Working PapersInitiating Divergent Organizational Change: The Enabling Role of Actors' Social Position Author:Julie Battilana Abstract This study addresses the paradox of embedded human agency, or the contradiction between actors'... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

19 Jul 2017
Research & Ideas

Why Government 'Nudges' Motivate Good Citizen Behavior

conserve our cognitive resources,” Beshears says. “If we used System 2 the entire day, we’d get too tired.” Nudges tend to work with System 1 thinking, he says, because they make certain choices the more natural and convenient option.... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

18 Mar 2008
First Look

First Look: March 18, 2008

implications of incorporating behavioral and cognitive factors into models of operations. Specifically, we address three questions: 1) What is a behavioral perspective on operations? 2) What might be the intellectual added value of such a... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

1996
Book

Creativity in Context

By: T. M. Amabile

Keywords: Creativity; Theory; Research; Motivation and Incentives; Situation or Environment; Organizational Culture; Measurement and Metrics; Personal Characteristics; Cognition and Thinking; Performance; Performance Evaluation; Social Psychology

05 May 2008
Research & Ideas

Connecting with Consumers Using Deep Metaphors

mind. One is Coca-Cola's "I'd like to teach the world to sing," which invokes the deep metaphor of connection and the ability of the brand to bring diverse people together. It also engaged the deep metaphor of social balance by... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Consumer Products

18 May 2016
Research & Ideas

Unethical Amnesia: Why We Tend to Forget Our Own Bad Behavior

actions gradually become less clear than other memories—a phenomenon the authors of the paper call “unethical amnesia.” Moreover, forgetting wrongdoings of the past makes us more likely to misbehave in the future. “We are social beings,... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

07 Aug 2013
What Do You Think?

Is There Still a Role for Judgment in Decision-Making?

Summing Up What is the Proper Role of Judgment in Decision-Making? There is a seemingly universal (and currently popular) quest for rational processes—what Hamilton Carvalho terms "cognitive repairs"—to counter the foibles of human judgment. Nevertheless, the... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

March 2011
Article

Zoom In, Zoom Out

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Zoom buttons on digital devices let us examine images from many viewpoints. They also provide an apt metaphor for modes of strategic thinking. Some people prefer to see things up close, others from afar. Both perspectives have virtues. But they should not be fixed... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Cognition and Thinking; Perspective; Leadership; Opportunities; Decisions

July 2020
Teaching Plan

Girls Who Code

By: Brian Trelstad and Amy Klopfenstein

This teaching plan serves as a supplement to HBS Case No. 320-055, “Girls Who Code.” Founded 2012 by former lawyer Reshma Saujani, Girls Who Code (GWC) offered coding education programs to middle- and high school-aged girls. The organization also sought to alter... View Details

25 Jul 2013
Research & Ideas

Why Unqualified Candidates Get Hired Anyway

People make snap judgments all the time. That woman in the sharp business suit must be intelligent and successful; the driver who just cut me off is a rude jerk. These instant assessments, when we attribute a person's behavior to innate characteristics rather than... View Details

Keywords: by Anna Secino; Education; Employment

Article

The (Perceived) Meaning of Spontaneous Thoughts

By: Carey K. Morewedge, Colleen Giblin and Michael I. Norton

Spontaneous thoughts, the output of a broad category of uncontrolled and inaccessible higher-order mental processes, arise frequently in everyday life. The seeming randomness by which spontaneous thoughts arise might give people good reason to dismiss them as... View Details

Keywords: Spontaneous Thoughts; Self-Insight; Meaning; Attribution; Judgment And Decision Making; Decision Making; Cognition and Thinking

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March 2011
Article

Talking Past Each Other?: Cultural Framing of Skeptical and Convinced Logics in the Climate Change Debate

By: Andrew J. Hoffman

This article analyzes the extent to which two institutional logics around climate change—the climate change “convinced” and the climate change “skeptical” logics—are truly competing or talking past each other in a way that can be described as a logic schism. Drawing on... View Details

Keywords: Climate Change; Values and Beliefs; Cognition and Thinking; News; Conflict and Resolution

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2022
Working Paper

Stories, Statistics and Memory

By: Thomas Graeber, Christopher Roth and Florian Zimmermann

For most decisions, we rely on information encountered over the course of days, months or years. We consume this information in various forms, including abstract summaries of multiple data points – statistics – and contextualized anecdotes about individual instances... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Information Types; Media; Cognition and Thinking

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13 May 2013
Research & Ideas

How to Spot a Liar

tellers. Among the findings related to nonstrategic cues: On average, liars used more swear words than did truth tellers—especially in cases where the recipients voiced suspicion about the true amount of the endowment. "We think this may be due to the fact that it... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

22 Jan 2019
First Look

New Research and Ideas, January 22, 2019

objective fluency scores from the language change recipients at five points over a period of two years. Using variable and person-centered exploratory analyses, our results suggest that recipients’ negative affective responses to the language change precede their View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

2016
Working Paper

The Empirical Economics of Online Attention

By: Andre Boik, Shane Greenstein and Jeffrey Prince

In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but instead for consumer attention. We model and characterize how households allocate their scarce attention in arguably the largest market for attention: the Internet. Our characterization of household... View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Competition; Behavior; Resource Allocation; Household; Cognition and Thinking

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01 Oct 2014
What Do You Think?

Is Too Much Focus a Problem?

Summing Up What Are the Antidotes to Too Much Focus? Individuals and organizations suffer from too much focus much of the time. That was the sense of the majority of responses to this month's column. Respondents didn't stop there. They described why it happens and what... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

July 2019
Article

'Forward Flow': A New Measure to Quantify Free Thought and Predict Creativity

By: Kurt Gray, Stephen Anderson, Eric Evan Chen, John Michael Kelly, Michael S. Christian, John Patrick, Laura Huang, Yoed N. Kenett and Kevin Lewis

When the human mind is free to roam, its subjective experience is characterized by a continuously evolving stream of thought. Although there is a technique that captures people’s streams of free thought—free association—its utility for scientific research is undermined... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Creativity; Forecasting and Prediction