Publications

Article

Leadership Is Associated with Lower Levels of Stress

By: Gary D. Sherman, J. J. Lee, A.J.C. Cuddy, Jonathan Renshon, Christopher Oveis, James J. Gross and Jennifer S. Lerner

As leaders ascend to more powerful positions in their groups, they face ever-increasing demands. This has given rise to the common perception that leaders have higher stress levels than non-leaders. But if leaders also experience a heightened sense of control—a... View Details

Keywords: Stress; Cortisol; Control; Leadership; Emotions; Power and Influence

09 Jun 2021
News

Employees Are Lonelier Than Ever. Here’s How Employers Can Help.

April 2019
Article

Rituals and Nuptials: The Emotional and Relational Consequences of Relationship Rituals

By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Ovul Sezer and Michael I. Norton

Four studies reveal the benefits of relationship rituals: couples with relationship rituals report more positive emotions and greater relationship satisfaction and commitment than those without them. We show that rituals are crucial for understanding consumption... View Details

Keywords: Rituals; Relationship Satisfaction; Relationships; Satisfaction; Spending; Behavior; Perception; Emotions

Article

The What and Why of Self-deception

By: Zoë Chance and Michael I. Norton

Scholars from many disciplines have investigated self-deception, but defining self-deception and establishing its possible benefits have been a matter of heated debate—a debate impoverished by a relative lack of empirical research. Drawing on recent research, we first... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking

Article

Emodiversity and the Emotional Ecosystem

By: Jordi Quoidbach, June Gruber, Moira Mikolajczak, Alexsandr Kogan, Ilios Kotsou and Michael I. Norton

Bridging psychological research exploring emotional complexity and research in the natural sciences on the measurement of biodiversity, we introduce—and demonstrate the benefits of—emodiversity: the variety and relative abundance of the emotions that humans experience.... View Details

Keywords: Health; Diversity; Emotions

12 Dec 2019
Research & Ideas

How to Turn Down the Boil on Group Conflict

Jeffrey Lees, a doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior and Psychology at Harvard Business School. In actuality, most people have a wildly inflated sense of just how negative the other side feels, according to a new paper that Lees... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

25 Apr 2007
Research & Ideas

Feeling Stuck? Getting Past Impasse

professionals may be confronted with a sense of psychological impasse and how they can free themselves. Martha Lagace: What sorts of thoughts, feelings, and images do people experience when they face an impasse? Timothy Butler: First,... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

08 Aug 2023
Research & Ideas

Black Employees Not Only Earn Less, But Deal with Bad Bosses and Poor Conditions

positive work culture, and a healthy work-life balance. “When we think about racial gaps in the United States, we tend to mostly measure relative income levels.” At a time when many companies are looking to recruit and retain more people... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

13 Jul 2021
Research & Ideas

Outrage Spreads Faster on Twitter: Evidence from 44 News Outlets

Negativity spreads faster than positivity online, and news organizations at both ends of the political spectrum are leveraging this tendency on Twitter, according to a new study. To test whether the broadcast news adage, “If it bleeds, it... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Media & Broadcasting

March 1983
Article

Brilliant but Cruel: Perceptions of Negative Evaluators

By: T. M. Amabile

Using edited excerpts from actual negative and positive book reviews, this research examined the hypothesis that negative evaluators of intellectual products will be perceived as more intelligent than positive evaluators. The results strongly supported the hypothesis.... View Details

Keywords: Social Psychology; Situation or Environment; Performance Evaluation; Perception; Status and Position; Attitudes; Prejudice and Bias; Power and Influence

Purchase

23 Jun 2023
HBS Case

This Company Lets Employees Take Charge—Even with Life and Death Decisions

Work: How the Pandemic Changed the Way We Collaborate How Long Does It Take to Improve an Organization’s Culture? Four Steps to Building the Psychological Safety That High-Performing Teams Need Today Feedback or ideas to share? Email the... View Details

Keywords: by Annelena Lobb; Health

2017
Article

True Happiness: The Role of Morality in the Concept of Happiness

By: Jonathan Phillips, Julian De Freitas, Christian Mott, June Gruber and Joshua Knobe

Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents' psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has... View Details

Keywords: Moral Cognition; Happiness; Moral Sensibility; Emotions; Well-being

Career Coach

Fran Davis

Fran has a Ph.D. in Psychology and has worked at Harvard for over 25 years. Over these three decades she has provided career coaching for MBA students, HBS Alumni, and in Executive Education programs and has taught View Details

13 May 2014
Working Paper Summaries

The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty

Keywords: by Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino & Maryam Kouchaki; Legal Services

24 Jul 2019
Lessons from the Classroom

Can These Business Students Motivate Londoners to Do the Right Thing?

here’s one that David Laibson and John List use in a recent article: “Behavioral economics uses variants of traditional economic assumptions (often with a psychological motivation) to explain and predict behavior, and to provide policy... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

October 2013
Article

The Cheater's High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior

By: N. E. Ruedy, C. Moore, F. Gino and M. Schweitzer

Many theories of moral behavior assume that unethical behavior triggers negative affect. In this paper, we challenge this assumption and demonstrate that unethical behavior can trigger positive affect, which we term a "cheater's high." Across six studies, we find that... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Satisfaction; Decision Making

Article

Price and Quality Decisions by Self-Serving Managers

By: Marco Bertini, Daniel Halbheer and Oded Koenigsberg

We present a theory of price and quality decisions by managers who are self-serving. In the theory, firms stress the price or quality of their products, but not both. Accounting for this, managers exploit any uncertainty about the cause of market outcomes to credit... View Details

Keywords: Causal Reasoning; Self-serving Bias; Strategic Orientation; Managerial Decision-making; Price; Quality; Decision Making; Theory

April 2020
Article

Collective Emotions

By: Amit Goldenberg, David Garcia, Eran Halperin and James J. Gross

When analyzing situations in which multiple people are experiencing emotions together—whether the emotions are positive or negative and whether the situations are online or offline—we are intuitively drawn to the emotions of each individual in the situation. However,... View Details

Keywords: Emotions; Social Psychology