Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(903)
- Faculty Publications (268)
- 2016
- Article
Vicarious Contagion Decreases Differentiation—and Comes with Costs
By: Ovul Sezer and Michael I. Norton
Baumeister et al. propose that individual differentiation is a crucial determinant of group success. We apply their model to processes lying in between the individual and the group—vicarious processes. We review literature in four domains—attitudes, emotions, moral... View Details
- October 2016
- Case
Supercell
By: William R. Kerr, Benjamin F. Jones and Alexis Brownell
Supercell is a young Finnish smartphone game company with an unusual team structure and company philosophy. It is already one of Finland’s most valuable companies, and despite being only six years old, it has put up some impressive numbers: as of 2016, it has released... View Details
- 2016
- Chapter
Dishonesty Explained: What Leads Moral People To Act Immorally
By: F. Gino and D. Ariely
The last two decades have witnessed what seems to be an increasing number of cases of dishonesty, from corporate corruption and employee misconduct to questionable behaviors during the financial crisis and individual acts of unethical behavior in many spheres of... View Details
- 2016
- Chapter
How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass
By: F. Gino
Cheating, fraud, deception, uncooperative actions, and many other forms of unethical behavior are among the greatest personal and societal challenges of our time. While the media commonly focuses on the most sensational scams (e.g., Enron, Bernard Madoff), less... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-Based Taxation
U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice are shown to differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. A large share of respondents, and in some cases a large majority, resist the full equalization... View Details
- 2015
- Book
What Great Service Leaders Know and Do: Creating Breakthroughs in Service Firms
Based on decades of collective field experiences, the authors present anecdotal evidence in support of eight things that great service leaders know and do. Great service leaders know that (1) leading a breakthrough service is different, and they take steps to ensure... View Details
- July 2015 (Revised October 2016)
- Case
China Lodging Group (A)
By: Tatiana Sandino, Shelley Xin Li and Nancy Hua Dai
This case study explores the challenges of aligning middle management interests with company goals as a company navigates rapid growth in a dynamic industry. China Lodging Group, a Chinese hotel chain that opened about 2,000 hotels during its first decade in business,... View Details
- July 2015
- Article
Prosocial Norms in the Classroom: The Role of Self-regulation in Following Norms of Giving
By: P. R. Blake, M. Piovesan, N. Montinari, F. Werneken and F. Gino
Children who are prosocial in elementary school tend to have higher academic achievement and experience greater acceptance by their peers in adolescence. Despite this positive influence on educational outcomes, it is still unclear why some children are more prosocial... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
'Be Careless with That!' Availability of Product Upgrades Increases Cavalier Behavior Toward Possessions
By: Silvia Bellezza, Joshua M. Ackerman and Francesca Gino
Consumers are often faced with the opportunity to purchase a new, enhanced product (e.g., a new phone), even though the device they currently own is still fully functional. We propose that consumers act more recklessly with their current products and are less concerned... View Details
Keywords: Carelessness; Product Upgrade; Justification; Loss; Consumer Behavior; Attitudes; Product; Ownership
- March–April 2015
- Article
Why We Think We Can't Dance: Theory of Mind and Children's Desire to Perform
By: Lan Nguyen Chaplin and Michael I. Norton
Theory of Mind (ToM) allows children to achieve success in the social world by understanding others' minds. A study with 3–12 year olds, however, demonstrates that gains in ToM are linked to decreases in children's desire to engage in performative behaviors associated... View Details
- Article
The Not-So-Common-Wealth of Australia: Evidence for a Cross-Cultural Desire for a More Equal Distribution of Wealth.
By: Michael I. Norton, David T. Neal, Cassandra L. Govan, Dan Ariely and Elise Holland
Recent evidence suggests that Americans underestimate wealth inequality in the United States and favor a more equal wealth distribution (Norton & Ariely, 2011). Does this pattern reflect ideological dynamics unique to the United States, or is the phenomenon evident in... View Details
- 2014
- Book
Managerial Accounting: Making Decisions and Motivating Performance
By: Srikant M. Datar and Madhav Rajan
Managerial Accounting: Making Decisions and Motivating Performance enables future managers and business owners to attain the core skills they need to become integral members of their company’s decision-making teams. This new program from established authors... View Details
- 2014
- Book
Consumer Lending in France and America: Credit and Welfare
By: Gunnar Trumbull
Why did America embrace consumer credit over the course of the twentieth century, when most other countries did not? How did American policy makers by the late twentieth century come to believe that more credit would make even poor families better off? This book traces... View Details
- Article
The (Perceived) Meaning of Spontaneous Thoughts
By: Carey K. Morewedge, Colleen Giblin and Michael I. Norton
Spontaneous thoughts, the output of a broad category of uncontrolled and inaccessible higher-order mental processes, arise frequently in everyday life. The seeming randomness by which spontaneous thoughts arise might give people good reason to dismiss them as... View Details
- Article
Seeking the Roots of Entrepreneurship: Insights from Behavioral Economics
By: Thomas Astebro, Holger Herz, Ramana Nanda and Roberto A. Weber
There is a growing body of evidence that many entrepreneurs seem to enter and persist in entrepreneurship despite earning low risk-adjusted returns. This has lead to attempts to provide explanations—using both standard economic theory and behavioral economics—for why... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Thought Calibration: How Thinking Just the Right Amount Increases One’s Influence and Appeal
By: Daniella Kupor, Zakary L. Tormala, Michael I. Norton and Derek D. Rucker
Previous research suggests that people draw inferences about their attitudes and preferences based on their own thoughtfulness. The current research explores how observing other individuals make decisions more or less thoughtfully can shape perceptions of those... View Details
- June 2014
- Article
Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement
By: A.W. Brooks
Individuals often feel anxious in anticipation of tasks such as speaking in public or meeting with a boss. I find that an overwhelming majority of people believe trying to calm down is the best way to cope with pre-performance anxiety. However, across several studies... View Details
- April 2014
- Article
Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity
By: F. Gino and S. Wiltermuth
We propose that dishonest and creative behavior have something in common: they both involve breaking rules. Because of this shared feature, creativity may lead to dishonesty (as shown in prior work), and dishonesty may lead to creativity (the hypothesis we tested in... View Details
- February 2014
- Article
'Last-place Aversion': Evidence and Redistributive Implications
By: Ilyana Kuziemko, Ryan W. Buell, Taly Reich and Michael Norton
We present evidence from laboratory experiments showing that individuals are "last-place averse." Participants choose gambles with the potential to move them out of last place that they reject when randomly placed in other parts of the distribution. In... View Details
- January–February 2014
- Article
IDEO's Culture of Helping
By: Teresa Amabile, Colin M. Fisher and Julianna Pillemer
Leaders can do few things more important than encouraging helping behavior within their organizations. In the highest-performing companies, it is a norm that colleagues support one another's efforts to do the best work they can. That has always been true for efficiency... View Details