Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(705)
- Faculty Publications (206)
- April 2019
- Article
Shooting the Messenger
By: Leslie John, Hayley Blunden and Heidi Liu
Eleven experiments provide evidence that people have a tendency to “shoot the messenger,” deeming innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable. In a preregistered lab experiment, participants rated messengers who delivered bad news from a random drawing as relatively... View Details
- Article
Maimonides' Ladder: States of Mutual Knowledge and the Perception of Charitability
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Kyle A. Thomas and Steven Pinker
Why do people esteem anonymous charitable giving? We connect normative theories of charitability
(captured in Maimonides’ Ladder of Charity) with evolutionary theories of partner choice to test predictions on how attributions of charitability are affected by states of... View Details
- Article
Seeker Beware: The Interpersonal Costs of Ignoring Advice
Prior advice research has focused on why people rely on (or ignore) advice and its impact on judgment accuracy. We expand the consideration of advice-seeking outcomes by investigating the interpersonal consequences of advice seekers’ decisions. Across nine studies, we... View Details
- Article
Optimality Bias in Moral Judgment
By: Julian De Freitas and Samuel G.B. Johnson
We often make decisions with incomplete knowledge of their consequences. Might people nonetheless expect others to make optimal choices, despite this ignorance? Here, we show that people are sensitive to moral optimality: that people hold moral agents accountable... View Details
- September 2018
- Supplement
From Beirut With Love (B): The Last Judgment
By: Christina R. Wing, Esel Y. Cekin and Samer Al-Rachedy
Keywords: Family Business; Family Conflicts; Sibling Rivalry; Second-generation; Foundation; Trust; Governance; Work-life Balance; Leadership; Leading Change; Transformation; Succession Planning; Management; Organizational Structure; Corporate Culture; Shareholder; Board Of Directors; Retail; Real Estate; Shopping Mall; Department Store; Growth; Lebanon; Middle East; Non-executive Chairman; Sustainability
- April 2018
- Article
Compromised Ethics in Hiring Processes? How Referrers' Power Affects Employees' Reactions to Referral Practices
By: Rellie Derfler-Rozin, Bradford Baker and F. Gino
In this paper, we explore referral-based hiring practices and show how a referrer’s power (relative to the hiring manager) influences other organizational members’ support (or lack thereof) for who is hired through perceptions of the hiring manager’s motives and... View Details
- Article
If You're Going to Do Wrong, at Least Do It Right: Considering Two Moral Dilemmas at the Same Time Promotes Moral Consistency
By: Netta Barak-Corren, Chia-Jung Tsay, Fiery Cushman and Max Bazerman
We study how people reconcile conflicting moral intuitions by juxtaposing two versions of classic moral problems: the trolley problem and the footbridge problem. When viewed separately, most people favor action in the former and disapprove of action in the latter,... View Details
- March 2018
- Article
How Context Affects Choice
By: Raphael Thomadsen, Robert P. Rooderkerk, On Amir, Neeraj Arora, Bryan Bollinger, Karsten Hansen, Leslie John, Wendy Liu, Aner Sela, Vishal Singh, K. Sudhir and Wendy Wood
Due to its origins in the literature on judgment and decision-making, context effects in marketing are construed exclusively in terms of how choices deviate from utility maximization principles as a function of how choices are presented (e.g., framing, sequence,... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
ArcelorMittal and the Ebola Outbreak in Liberia
By: Sophus A. Reinert, Sarah Nam, Sisi Pan and Eric Werker
During the summer of 2014, Alan Knight, general manager of corporate responsibility at the integrated steel and mining company ArcelorMittal, observed the unfolding of an Ebola epidemic in Liberia and other countries in West Africa with great concern. On the one hand... View Details
Keywords: Ebola; Epidemics; Ebola Private Sector Mobalization Group; EPSMG; Civil War; Sovereignty; Change Management; Judgments; Development Economics; Geopolitical Units; Globalized Firms and Management; Emerging Markets; Business and Community Relations; Business and Government Relations; Safety; War; Wealth and Poverty; Welfare; Crisis Management; Mining Industry; Liberia
- 2018
- Chapter
In Search of Moral Equilibrium: Person, Situation, and Their Interplay in Behavioral Ethics
By: Julia J. Lee and F. Gino
Book Abstract: This comprehensive and cutting-edge volume maps out the terrain of moral psychology, a dynamic and evolving area of research. In 57 concise chapters, leading authorities and up-and-coming scholars explore fundamental issues and current controversies. The... View Details
- 2018
- Conference Presentation
Learning to Recognize Objects Provides Category-orthogonal Features for Social Inference and Moral Judgment
By: J. De Freitas, A. Hafri, G. A. Alvarez and D. L. K. Yamins
- Article
Your Visual System Provides All the Information You Need to Make Moral Judgments about Generic Visual Events
By: Julian De Freitas and George A. Alvarez
To what extent are people's moral judgments susceptible to subtle factors of which they are unaware? Here we show that we can change people’s moral judgments outside of their awareness by subtly biasing perceived causality. Specifically, we used subtle visual... View Details
- November 7, 2017
- Article
Temporary Sharing Prompts Unrestrained Disclosures That Leave Lasting Negative Impressions
By: Reto Hofstetter, Roland Rüppell and Leslie John
With the advent of social media, the impressions people make on others are based increasingly on their digital disclosures. Yet digital disclosures can come back to haunt, making it challenging for people to manage the impressions they make. In field and online... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Biased Beliefs About Random Samples: Evidence from Two Integrated Experiments
By: Daniel J. Benjamin, Don A. Moore and Matthew Rabin
This paper describes results of a pair of incentivized experiments on biases in judgments about random samples. Consistent with the Law of Small Numbers (LSN), participants exaggerated the likelihood that short sequences and random subsets of coin flips would be... View Details
- Article
Pseudo-Set Framing
By: Kate Barasz, Leslie John, Elizabeth A. Keenan and Michael I. Norton
Pseudo-set framing—arbitrarily grouping items or tasks together as part of an apparent “set”—motivates people to reach perceived completion points. Pseudo-set framing changes gambling choices (Study 1), effort (Studies 2 and 3), giving behavior (Field Data and Study... View Details
Keywords: Framing Effects; Gestalt Psychology; Judgment; Judgments; Decision Making; Perception; Behavior
- September 2017
- Article
The Belief in a Favorable Future
By: Todd Rogers, Don A. Moore and Michael I. Norton
People believe that future others’ preferences and beliefs will change to align with their own. People holding a particular view (e.g., support of President Trump) are more likely to believe that future others will share their view than to believe that future others... View Details
- August 2017
- Case
Wake Up Call
By: David G. Fubini and Christine Snively
In 1993, three consultants at different stages in their careers must decide how to respond to what they considered to be unethical behavior from a partner at their firm. They each considered the potential consequences of reporting a senior colleague and the impact it... View Details
- August 2017
- Supplement
Wake Up Call (B)
By: David G. Fubini and Christine Snively
(B) case View Details
- Article
Is the Moral Domain Unique?: A Social Influence Perspective for the Study of Moral Cognition
By: J. Lees and F. Gino
The nature of the cognitive processes that give rise to moral judgment and behavior has been a central question of psychology for decades. In this paper, we suggest that an often ignored yet fruitful stream of research for informing current debates on the nature of... View Details
- Article
Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Jason Nemirow, Maxim Massenkoff and Steven Pinker
What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments?
We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental
model of people’s actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants... View Details