Publications

Register to Read

December 2015
Article

Emotion and the Art of Negotiation: How to Use Your Feelings to Your Advantage

Negotiations can be fraught with emotion, but it's only recently that researchers have examined how particular feelings influence what happens during deal making. Here the author shares some key findings and advice. Anxiety leads to poor outcomes. You will be less... View Details

Keywords: Negotiation Style; Emotions

Register to Read

October 17, 2022
Article

Relational Diversity in Social Portfolios Predicts Well-Being

By: Hanne K. Collins, Serena F. Hagerty, Jordi Quoidbach, Michael I. Norton and Alison Wood Brooks

We document a link between the relational diversity of one’s social portfolio—the richness and evenness of relationship types across one’s social interactions—and well-being. Across four distinct samples, respondents from the United States who completed a preregistered... View Details

Keywords: Social Interaction; Social Engagement; Well-being; Happiness; Social and Collaborative Networks; Family and Family Relationships

February 2024
Article

Conveying and Detecting Listening in Live Conversation

By: Hanne Collins, Julia A. Minson, Ariella S. Kristal and Alison Wood Brooks

Across all domains of human social life, positive perceptions of conversational listening (i.e., feeling heard) predict well-being, professional success, and interpersonal flourishing. But a fundamental question remains: Are perceptions of listening accurate? Prior... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Behavior; Perception

2014
Article

Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men

By: Alison Wood Brooks, Laura Huang, Sarah Kearney and Fiona Murray

Entrepreneurship is a central path to job creation, economic growth, and prosperity. In the earliest stages of start-up business creation, the matching of entrepreneurial ventures to investors is critically important. The entrepreneur's business proposition and... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Entrepreneurship; Investment; Gender

Article

Don't Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety

By: Alison Wood Brooks, Julianna Schroeder, Jane Risen, Francesca Gino, Adam D. Galinsky, Michael I. Norton and Maurice Schweitzer

From public speaking to first dates, people frequently experience performance anxiety. And when experienced immediately before or during performance, anxiety harms performance. Across a series of experiments, we explore the efficacy of a common strategy that people... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Performance; Emotions

26 Nov 2001
Research & Ideas

How Toyota Turns Workers Into Problem Solvers

Healthcare Initiative, with broad community support, with cooperation from the Centers for Disease Control, and with backing from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Also, we've been testing these ideas with our students: Kent in the... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Johnston; Manufacturing; Transportation; Auto

19 Sep 2016
Research & Ideas

Why Isn't Business Research More Relevant to Business Practitioners?

important point: Once a scholar has conducted research that’s germane to practitioners, it’s important to let practitioners know that the research exists. “Ultimately, I conduct research to try to help people,” says HBS Assistant Professor Alison View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

17 Dec 2008
Lessons from the Classroom

‘Ted Levitt Changed My Life’

early principles of the company in an informal session at Levitt's Belmont home. Berolzheimer's family business was an industrial company, providing wood slats to pencil manufacturers; Levitt urged him to form a separate entity to focus... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Education; Retail

Teaching Interest

How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life

This is an Elective Curriculum course for HBS MBA students. People must converse effectively to achieve success in every aspect of business and life – from pitching ideas to giving feedback, brainstorming and making strategic decisions, from interviewing to firing.... View Details

Keywords: Conversation; Strategic Decisions; Interactions

Teaching Interest

Micro Topics in Organizational Behavior

Micro Topics in Organizational Behavior is a PhD seminar course exploring current and seminal research on individual, dyadic, small group, and intra-organizational behavior. Examples of topics at the individual level include emotions, cognition, and behavioral... View Details

Research Summary

Overview

Professor Brooks studies the psychology of conversation and emotion—topics at the intersection of how people think, feel, and interact. From pitching ideas to seeking advice, from asking questions to giving compliments, from talking about (or hiding) our feelings and... View Details

Keywords: Anxiety; Emotion; Emotion Regulation; Reappraisal; Negotiation; Trust; Performance

March 2018
Exercise

Does It Hurt To Ask?

Does It Hurt To Ask? (DIHTA) is an interactive exercise that pairs students (in groups of two) for a brief, spontaneous, open-ended conversation during class. Each student is given instructions to ask many questions (as many as possible) or few questions (ideally zero)... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Communication Strategy; Perception; Information; Power and Influence

Purchase

2004
Chapter

The Merchandising of Leadership

By: Jack Wood and Gianpiero Petriglieri

Keywords: Leadership

10 Aug 2016
Research & Ideas

Prospective Students Steer Clear of Schools Rocked by Scandal

references to vomit. Luca and his fellow researchers were curious whether the article would impact the number of applications the school received after the news spread. After all, the same phenomenon is well documented in the business world. When golfer Tiger View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Education

September 2020 (Revised June 2021)
Case

Gong: Resonating Conversational Insights

By: Alison Wood Brooks and Trevor Spelman

In 2015, Amit Bendov was struck by a realization about a new technology that might be able to transcribe musical notation in real-time, which eventually became known as Gong. Gong’s business proposition was simple: provide software that automatically captures,... View Details

Keywords: Applications and Software; Technological Innovation; Communication; Performance Effectiveness; Sales; Customer Satisfaction; Competitive Strategy

Educators

Purchase

2020
Working Paper

Topic Preference Detection: A Novel Approach to Understand Perspective Taking in Conversation

By: Michael Yeomans and Alison Wood Brooks

Although most humans engage in conversations constantly throughout their lives, conversational mistakes are commonplace— interacting with others is difficult, and conversation re-quires quick, relentless perspective-taking and decision making. For example: during every... View Details

Keywords: Natural Language Processing; Interpersonal Communication; Perspective; Decision Making; Perception

September 2017
Case

Harvard Men's Soccer

By: Alison Wood Brooks and Katherine Coffman

In the fall of 2016, the Crimson, Harvard’s undergraduate newspaper, broke a story revealing that the 2012 Harvard Men’s Soccer team had produced a sexually explicit “scouting report” about the Women’s Soccer team. The story generated national headlines and... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Ethics; Gender; Social Issues