Publications

March 1998
Teaching Note

Personality Types: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (TN)

By: David A. Thomas and Emily Heaphy

Describes a class design for teaching students about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The Ideal Organization exercise is the centerpiece of the class. It demonstrates that people with different cognitive types have distinct preferences for the type of... View Details

Keywords: Job Search; Working Conditions; Personal Development and Career; Situation or Environment; Perception; Integration

February 2024
Article

Are Many Sex/Gender Differences Really Power Differences?

By: Adam D. Galinsky, Aurora Turek, Grusha Agarwal, Eric M. Anicich, Derek D. Rucker, Hannah Riley Bowles, Nira Liberman, Chloe Levin and Joe C Magee

This research addresses the long-standing debate about the determinants of sex/gender differences. Evolutionary theorists trace many sex/gender differences back to natural selection and sex-specific adaptations. Sociocultural and biosocial theorists, in contrast,... View Details

Keywords: Gender; Genetics; Power and Influence; Social Issues

22 May 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Componential Theory of Creativity

Keywords: by Teresa M. Amabile

2014
Article

Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity

By: Jooa Julia Lee, Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats

People believe that weather conditions influence their everyday work life, but to date, little is known about how weather affects individual productivity. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we predict and find that bad weather increases individual productivity and that... View Details

Keywords: Productivity; Opportunity Cost; Distractions; Weather; Performance Productivity; Cognition and Thinking

October 2022
Article

When Listening Is Spoken

By: Hanne Collins

Feeling heard is critical to human flourishing—across domains, relationships are strengthened and individual well-being is enhanced when people feel listened to. High-quality conversational listening not only requires the cognitive processes of attention and... View Details

Keywords: Listening; Interpersonal Communication; Perception; Behavior

23 Aug 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Field Evidence on Individual Behavior & Performance in Rank-Order Tournaments

Keywords: by Kevin J. Boudreau, Constance E. Helfat, Karim R. Lakhani & Michael Menietti

15 May 2017
Working Paper Summaries

Flexing the Frame: TMT Framing and the Adoption of Non-Incremental Innovations in Incumbent Firms

Keywords: by Ryan Raffaelli, Mary Ann Glynn, and Michael Tushman

11 Oct 2017
Working Paper Summaries

Crime and Violence: Desensitization in Victims to Watching Criminal Events

Keywords: by Rafael Di Tella, Lucia Freira, Ramiro H. Gálvez, Ernesto Schargrodsky, Diego Shalom, and Mariano Sigman

2012
Article

Evidence for the Pinocchio Effect: Linguistic Differences Between Lies, Deception by Omissions, and Truths

By: Lyn M. Van Swol, Michael T. Braun and Deepak Malhotra

The study used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count and Coh-Metrix software to examine linguistic differences with deception in an ultimatum game. In the game, the Allocator was given an amount of money to divide with the Receiver. The Receiver did not know the precise... View Details

Keywords: Communication Intention and Meaning; Cognition and Thinking

March 1991 (Revised January 1993)
Background Note

Why Do Good Managers Choose Poor Strategies?

The uncertainty and complexity of most business environments make successful management a difficult art. Frequently, bright, experienced, well-educated people manage their companies into strategic distress. Many of these bad results are not simply a matter of bad luck.... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Prejudice and Bias; Business Strategy; Cognition and Thinking

Educators

23 May 2000
Research & Ideas

The Emerging Art of Negotiation

The psychological study of negotiation, once a mere sub-field of social psychology, can now draw on a wealth of work throughout many different segments of psychology: social psychology, cognitive psychology,... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

2018
Working Paper

Is Overconfidence a Motivated Bias? Experimental Evidence

By: Jennifer M. Logg, Uriel Haran and Don A. Moore

Are overconfident beliefs driven by the motivation to view oneself positively? We test the relationship between motivation and overconfidence using two distinct, but often conflated, measures: better-than-average (BTA) beliefs and overplacement. Our results suggest... View Details

Keywords: Self-perception; Overconfidence; Motivation; Better-Than-Average Effect; Specifically; Personal Characteristics; Perception; Motivation and Incentives; Cognition and Thinking

SSRN

14 Nov 2017
First Look

New Research and Ideas: November 14, 2017

experts to discuss how researchers can impact a broader audience, by lending their scientific expertise to pressing social issues, current events, and public debates. The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court cited View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

April 2011
Article

Ethical Breakdowns: Good People often Let Bad Things Happen. Why?

By: Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel

Companies are spending a great deal of time and money to install codes of ethics, ethics training, compliance programs, and in-house watchdogs. If these efforts worked, the money would be well spent. But unethical behavior appears to be on the rise. The authors observe... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Governance; Leadership; Behavior; Conflict of Interests

15 Jul 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Policy Bundling to Overcome Loss Aversion: A Method for Improving Legislative Outcomes

Keywords: by Katherine L. Milkman, Mary Carol Mazza, Lisa L. Shu, Chia-Jung Tsay & Max H. Bazerman

2015
Working Paper

Are CEOs Born Leaders? Lessons from Traits of a Million Individuals

By: Renée Adams, Matti Keloharju and Samuli Knüpfer

What makes a CEO? We merge data on the traits of more than one million Swedish males, measured at age 18 in a mandatory military enlistment test, with data on their service as a CEO of any Swedish company decades later. CEOs have higher cognitive and non-cognitive... View Details

Keywords: Personal Characteristics; Management Teams

SSRN

2008
Article

Learning (Not) to Talk About Race: When Older Children Underperform in Social Categorization

By: Evan P. Apfelbaum, Kristin Pauker, Nalini Ambady, Samuel R. Sommers and Michael I. Norton

The present research identifies an anomaly in sociocognitive development, whereby younger children (8 and 9 years) outperform their older counterparts (10 and 11 years) in a basic categorization task in which the acknowledgment of racial difference facilitates... View Details

Keywords: Transition; Age; Race; Society; Cognition and Thinking

2007
Working Paper

Recognizing the New: A Multi-Agent Model of Analogy in Strategic Decision-Making

By: Giovanni Gavetti and Massimo Warglien

In novel environments, strategic decision-making is often premised on analogy, and recognition lies at its heart. Recognition refers to a class of cognitive processes through which a problem is interpreted associatively in terms of something that has been experienced... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Decision Choices and Conditions; Mathematical Methods; Cognition and Thinking; Power and Influence

2023
Working Paper

The Complexity of Economic Decisions

By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber

We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Complexity; Perception; Consumer Behavior; Production