Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(731)
- Faculty Publications (266)
- October 2020
- Article
What Goes Down When Advice Goes Up: Younger Advisers Underestimate Their Impact
By: Ting Zhang and Michael S. North
Common wisdom suggests that older is wiser. Consequently, people rarely give advice to older individuals—even when they are relatively more expert—leading to missed learning opportunities. Across six studies (N=3,445), we explore the psychology of advisers when they... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Financial Market Risk Perceptions and the Macroeconomy
By: Carolin E. Pflueger, Emil Siriwardane and Adi Sunderam
We propose a novel measure of risk perceptions: the price of volatile stocks (PVS), defined as the book-to-market ratio of low-volatility stocks minus the book-to-market ratio of high-volatility stocks. PVS is high when perceived risk directly measured from surveys and... View Details
- Article
Forgoing Earned Incentives to Signal Pure Motives
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Edward H. Chang, Emma E. Levine, Katherine L. Milkman and Judd B. Kessler
Policy makers, employers, and insurers often provide financial incentives to encourage citizens, employees, and customers to take actions that are good for them or for society (e.g., energy conservation, healthy living, safe driving). Although financial incentives are... View Details
- July–September 2020
- Article
Innovation Contest: Effect of Perceived Support for Learning on Participation
By: Olivia Jung, Andrea Blasco and Karim R. Lakhani
Background: Frontline staff are well positioned to conceive improvement opportunities based on first-hand knowledge of what works and does not work. The innovation contest may be a relevant and useful vehicle to elicit staff ideas. However, the success of the... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Older People Are Less Pessimistic About the Health Risks of COVID-19
By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer
A central question for understanding behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic, at both the individual and collective levels, is how people perceive the health and economic risks they face. We conducted a survey of over 1,500 Americans from May 6–13, 2020, to understand... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Changing Ingroup Boundaries: The Effect of Immigration on Race Relations in the U.S.
By: Vasiliki Fouka and Marco Tabellini
How do social group boundaries evolve? Does the appearance of a new outgroup change the ingroup's perceptions of other outgroups? We introduce a conceptual framework of context-dependent categorization, in which exposure to one minority leads to recategorization of... View Details
Keywords: In-group-out-group Relations; Immigration; Race; Attitudes; Boundaries; Prejudice and Bias
- March 2020
- Article
Is This My Group or Not? The Role of Ensemble Coding of Emotional Expressions in Group Categorization
By: Amit Goldenberg, Timothy D. Sweeny, Emmanuel Shpigel and James J. Gross
When exposed to others’ emotional responses, people often make rapid decisions as to whether these others are members of their group or not. These group categorization decisions have been shown to be extremely important to understanding group behavior. Yet, despite... View Details
- 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
- February 2020
- Article
Being 'Good' or 'Good Enough': Prosocial Risk and the Structure of Moral Self-regard
By: Julian Zlatev, Daniella M. Kupor, Kristin Laurin and Dale T. Miller
The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We propose that people’s efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Directors' Perceptions of Board Effectiveness and Internal Operations
By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Rajesh Vijayaraghavan
- November 2019
- Article
Procedural Justice and the Risks of Consumer Voting
By: Tami Kim, Leslie John, Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton
Firms are increasingly giving consumers the vote. Eight studies demonstrate that when firms empower consumers to vote, consumers infer a series of implicit promises—even in the absence of explicit promises. We identify three implicit promises to which consumers react... View Details
- September 2019
- Article
The Self-Presentational Consequences of Upholding One's Stance in Spite of the Evidence
By: Leslie John, Martha Jeong, Francesca Gino and Laura Huang
Five studies explore the self-presentational consequences of refusing to “back down” – that is, upholding a stance despite evidence of its inaccuracy. Using data from an entrepreneurial pitch competition, Study 1 shows that entrepreneurs tend not to back down even... View Details
- Article
The Feeling of Not Knowing It All
By: Haiyang Yang, Ziv Carmon, Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton
How do consumers assess their mastery of knowledge they have learned? We explore this question by investigating a common knowledge consumption situation: encountering opportunities for further learning. We argue and show that such opportunities can trigger a... View Details
- July 2019
- Article
The Gravitational Pull of Expressing Passion: When and How Expressing Passion Elicits Status Conferral and Support from Others
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Christopher To, Shira Agasi, Stéphane Côté and Adam D. Galinsky
Prior research attributes the positive effects of passion on professional success to intrapersonal characteristics. We propose that interpersonal processes are also critical because observers confer status on and support those who express passion. These interpersonal... View Details
- 2010
- Article
I May Not Agree With You, but I Trust You: Caring About Social Issues Signals Integrity
By: Julian Zlatev
What characteristics of an individual signal trustworthiness to other people? I propose that individuals who care about contentious social issues signal to observers that they have integrity and thus can be trusted. Critically, this signal conveys trustworthiness... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Learning to Become a Taste Expert
By: Kathryn A. Latour and John A. Deighton
Evidence suggests that consumers seek to become more expert about hedonic products to enhance their enjoyment of future consumption occasions. Current approaches to becoming expert center on cultivating an analytic mindset. In the present research the authors explore... View Details
- April 16, 2019
- Article
Research Confirms: When Receiving Bad News, We Shoot the Messenger
By: Leslie John, Hayley Blunden and Heidi Liu
Most jobs require us at some point to deliver bad news—whether it be a minor revelation such as a recruiter telling a prospective employee that there’s no wiggle room in salary, or something major, like when a manager must fire an employee. We dread such discussions... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures
People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across three online experiments and a field experiment of entrepreneurs, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate feelings of... View Details
- 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
- 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