Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(731)
- Faculty Publications (266)
- July 2022
- Article
The Developmental Origins and Behavioral Consequences of Attributions for Inequality
By: Antonya Marie Gonzalez, Lucia Macchia and Ashley V. Whillans
Attributions, or lay explanations for inequality, have been linked to inequality-relevant behavior. In adults and children, attributing inequality to an individual rather than contextual or structural causes is linked to greater support for economic inequality and less... View Details
- May 2022
- Case
Thinking Outside the Wine Box (A): Mekanism and the Franz for Life Campaign
This case provides an overview of “Franz for Life,” an advertising campaign that independent advertising agency Mekanism created and executed to revitalize the brand image of Franzia, a low-cost boxed wine. For several years, Franzia’s popularity declined among... View Details
- May 2022
- Article
How Status of Research Papers Affects the Way They Are Read and Cited
By: Misha Teplitskiy, Eamon Duede, Michael Menietti and Karim R. Lakhani
Although citations are widely used to measure the influence of scientific works, research shows that many citations serve rhetorical functions and reflect little-to-no influence on the citing authors. If highly cited papers disproportionately attract rhetorical... View Details
Keywords: Metrics; Influence; Status; Citations; Science; Measurement and Metrics; Research; Perception
- April 27, 2022
- Article
Inequality in Researchers' Minds: Four Guiding Questions for Studying Subjective Perceptions of Economic Inequality
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Shai Davidai, Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, Barnabas Szaszi, Martin Day, Stephanie Tepper, L. Taylor Phillips, M. Usman Mirza, Nailya Ordabayeva and Oliver P. Hauser
Subjective perceptions of inequality can substantially influence policy attitudes, public health metrics, and societal well-being, but the lack of consensus in the scientific community on how to best operationalize and measure these perceptions may impede progress on... View Details
- April 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Conflicts of Interest at Uptown Bank
By: Jonas Heese
In 2013, two employees debated whether to blow the whistle on their employer, Bell Bank, after completing an internal review that revealed undisclosed conflicts of interest. Bell Bank’s Asset Management business disproportionately invested clients’ money in Bell Bank’s... View Details
Keywords: Whistleblower; Whistleblowing; Mutual Funds; Conflicts Of Interest; Decision Making; Decisions; Judgments; Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Finance; Financial Institutions; Banks and Banking; Financial Management; Investment; Investment Funds; Governance; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Governance; Governance Compliance; Governance Controls; Policy; Law; Legal Liability; Social Psychology; Motivation and Incentives; Perception; Perspective; Trust; Financial Services Industry; North and Central America; United States
- April 2022
- Article
Consumers Value Effort over Ease When Caring for Close Others
By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Mary Steffel, Elanor F. Williams and Michael I. Norton
Many products and services are designed to make caregiving easier, from premade meals for feeding families to robo-cribs that automatically rock babies to sleep. Yet, using these products may come with a cost: consumers may feel they have not exerted enough effort.... View Details
- March–April 2022
- Article
Uncovering the Mitigating Psychological Response to Monitoring Technologies: Police Body Cameras Not Only Constrain but Also Depolarize
By: Shefali V. Patil and Ethan Bernstein
Despite organizational psychologists’ long-standing caution against monitoring (citing its reduction in employee autonomy and thus effectiveness), many organizations continue to use it, often with no detriment to performance and with strong support, not protest, from... View Details
- Article
From Immigrants to Americans: Race and Assimilation During the Great Migration
By: Vasiliki Fouka, Soumyajit Mazumder and Marco Tabellini
How does the arrival of a new minority group affect the social acceptance and outcomes of existing minorities? We study this question in the context of the First Great Migration. Between 1915 and 1930, 1.5 million African Americans moved from the U.S. South to Northern... View Details
- March 2022
- Article
How Much Does Your Boss Make? The Effects of Salary Comparisons
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
The vast majority of the pay inequality in an organization comes from differences in pay between employees and their bosses. But are employees aware of these pay disparities? Are employees demotivated by this inequality? To address these questions, we conducted a... View Details
Keywords: Salary; Inequality; Managers; Career Concerns; Pay Transparency; Wages; Equality and Inequality; Perception; Behavior
- Article
Policies to Influence Perceptions about COVID-19 Risk: The Case of Maps
By: Claudia Engel, Jonathan Rodden and Marco Tabellini
Choropleth disease maps have become an important tool for informing the public about the risks posed by COVID-19. In a survey conducted in the U.S. state of Georgia in June 2020, we randomly assigned respondents to view either of two maps. The first one reported... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Alleviating Time Poverty Among the Working Poor: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Field Experiment
By: A.V. Whillans and Colin West
Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal feld experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of... View Details
Keywords: Time; Subjective Well Being; Administrative Costs; Friction; Poverty; Well-being; Money; Perception; Kenya
- January 2022
- Article
Global Behaviors, Perceptions, and the Emergence of Social Norms at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Lukas Hensel, Marc Witte, Stefano Caria, Thiemo Fetzer, Stefano Fiorin, Friedrich M. Goetz, Margarita Gomez, Johannes Haushofer, Andriy Ivchenko, Gordon T. Kraft-Todd, Elena Reutskaja, Christopher Roth, Erez Yoeli and Jon M. Jachimowicz
We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens' and governments' responses at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reported... View Details
- 2022
- Conference Presentation
Organizational Competition: A Catalyst for Workplace Diversity and Desires for Uniqueness
By: Samantha N. Smith, Edward H. Chang, Erika L. Kirgios and Katherine L. Milkman
Competition is prevalent in organizations. For example, people often compete against their colleagues for status and recognition in the workplace or for opportunities for advancement. Workers also compete against others to get hired into organizations in the first... View Details
- December 10, 2021
- Editorial
Go Ahead and Ask for More Time on That Deadline
By: A.V. Whillans and A.V. Whillans
Unrealistic deadlines don’t help anyone—and yet more often than not, employees avoid asking for extensions even when they know more time would help them do a better job. Through a series of studies with more than 4,000 working adults, the author illustrates how despite... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Going Beyond the ‘Self’ in Self-Control: Interpersonal Consequences of Commitment Strategy Use
By: Ariella Kristal and Julian Zlatev
Commitment strategies are effective mechanisms individuals can use to overcome self-control problems. Across seven studies (and three supplemental studies), we explore the negative interpersonal consequences of commitment strategy use. In Study 1, using an incentivized... View Details
Keywords: Self-control; Willpower; Commitment Strategies; Goals and Objectives; Behavior; Strategy; Perception
- December 2021
- Article
Partisan Professionals: Evidence from Credit Rating Analysts
By: Elisabeth Kempf and Margarita Tsoutsoura
Partisan perception affects the actions of professionals in the financial sector. Using a novel dataset linking credit rating analysts to party affiliations from voter records, we show that analysts who are not affiliated with the U.S. president’s party downward-adjust... View Details
- October 15, 2021
- Article
Virtuous Victims
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Maryam Kouchaki
How do people perceive the moral character of victims? We find, across a range of transgressions, that people frequently see victims of wrongdoing as more moral than non-victims who have behaved identically. Across 15 experiments (total n = 9,355), we document this... View Details
- Article
Behavioral and Neural Representations en route to Intuitive Action Understanding
By: Leyla Tarhan, Julian De Freitas and Talia Konkle
When we observe another person’s actions, we process many kinds of information—from how their body moves to the intention behind their movements. What kinds of information underlie our intuitive understanding about how similar actions are to each other? To address this... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Communicating Resource Scarcity and Interpersonal Connection
By: Grant E. Donnelly, Anne V. Wilson, Ashley V. Whillans and Michael I. Norton
Consumers often cite insufficient time or money as an excuse for rejecting social invitations. We explore the effectiveness of these excuses in preserving interpersonal relationships. Six studies—including perceptions of couples planning their wedding—demonstrate that... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Directors' Perceptions of Board Effectiveness and Internal Operations
By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Rajesh Vijayaraghavan
We contribute to the growing literature on the effectiveness of corporate boards by examining the effect of two insights that have been largely unexplored in prior studies that use public data. First, since boards’ responsibilities are wide-ranging, more holistic... View Details