Publications

July 2022
Article

What Do I Make of the Rest of My Life? Global and Quotidian Life Construal across the Retirement Transition

By: Jeff Steiner and Teresa M. Amabile

Retirement means relinquishing the daily structure that work provides and the career-dependent meanings that it offers life narratives. The retirement transition can therefore involve contemplating both how to spend newly-freed daily time and the implications of... View Details

Keywords: Retirement Transition; Life Narrative; Construal Level Theory; Global Construal; Quotidian Construal; Meanings Of Work And Retirement; Retirement; Transition; Perspective

13 Jan 2003
Research & Ideas

The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It)

thinking? HBS Working Knowledge staffer Manda Mahoney questioned Zaltman about the new book, published by Harvard Business School Publishing. Mahoney: You state that 95 percent of all cognition occurs in the subconscious mind. How can... View Details

Keywords: by Manda Mahoney

January 2017
Article

The Dark Side of Going Abroad: How Broad Foreign Experiences Increase Immoral Behavior

By: Jackson G. Lu, Jordi Quoidbach, F. Gino, Alek Chakroff, William W. Maddux and Adam D. Galinsky

Due to the unprecedented pace of globalization, foreign experiences are increasingly common and valued. Past research has focused on the benefits of foreign experiences, including enhanced creativity and reduced intergroup bias. In contrast, the present work uncovers a... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Globalization; Behavior

Research Summary

Supply Chain Inventory Planning

My work studies management decision-making in demand and supply planning contexts with a focus on forecasting and inventory planning decisions. I examine these decision-making processes from both a supply chain (i.e. across firm) and an... View Details

2024
Working Paper

Categorical Processing in a Complex World

By: Marco Sammon, Thomas Graeber and Christopher Roth

In real-world news environments, quantitative information is rarely presented in isolation; it is characterized through qualitative comparisons with various reference levels. Company earnings, for example, are commonly compared to analyst forecasts, previous earnings,... View Details

Keywords: Announcements; Cognition and Thinking; Communication Strategy

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

SSRN

25 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

How Gender Stereotypes Kill a Woman’s Self-Confidence

cognitive ability in five areas: general science, arithmetic reasoning, math knowledge, mechanical comprehension, and assembling objects. They were asked to guess their total number of correct answers, as well as how their performance... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

January 2025
Case

Constitutional Fiction: John Miller & the Legitimacy of Family Constitutions

By: Lauren Cohen, Octavian Graf Pilati and Sophia Pan

John Miller sat reviewing his family’s Constitution, grappling with how best to implement and enforce its provisions. Designed to prevent ambiguity in governance, the Family Constitution set out core values and guidelines to promote harmony and cohesion among family... View Details

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Article

Technology, Identity, and Inertia: Through the Lens of 'The Digital Photography Company'

By: Mary Tripsas

Organizations often experience difficulty when pursuing new technology. Large bodies of research have examined the behavioral, social, and cognitive forces that underlie this phenomenon; however, the role of an organization's identity remains relatively unexplored.... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Disruptive Innovation; Organizational Culture; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Identity; Perception; Technology Adoption

2009
Article

Implicit Affect in Organizations

By: Sigal G. Barsade, Lakshmi Ramarajan and Drew Westen

Our goal is to integrate the construct of implicit affect—affective processes activated or processed outside of conscious awareness that influence ongoing thought, behavior, and conscious emotional experience—into the field of organizational behavior. We begin by... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Framework; Organizational Culture; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Emotions; Motivation and Incentives; Perspective

1990
Article

Social Influences on Creativity: Evaluation, Coaction, and Surveillance

By: T. M. Amabile, P. Goldfarb and S. C. Brackfield

Two experiments examined the effects of evaluation expectation and the presence of others on creativity. In both experiments, some subjects expected that their work would be evaluated by experts, and others expected no evaluation. Evaluation expectation was crossed, in... View Details

Keywords: Creativity; Social Psychology; Situation or Environment; Motivation and Incentives; Performance Evaluation

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Article

Guilt Enhances the Sense of Control and Drives Risky Judgments

By: Maryam Kouchaki, Christopher Oveis and F. Gino

The present studies investigate the hypothesis that guilt influences risk-taking by enhancing one's sense of control. Across multiple inductions of guilt, we demonstrate that experimentally induced guilt enhances optimism about risks for the self (Study 1), preferences... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Behavior; Emotions

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05 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

Lessons in Decision-Making: Confident People Aren't Always Correct (Except When They Are)

University of California, Santa Barbara. How does one measure confidence? In the first phase of the study, the team invited more than 2,000 people to perform 15 classic cognitive bias tasks, including: The “knapsack problem”—a strategic... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

March 2021
Article

Bayesian Signatures of Confidence and Central Tendency in Perceptual Judgment

By: Yang Xiang, Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke and Samuel Gershman

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the role of Bayesian noisy cognition in perceptual judgment, focusing on the central tendency effect: the well-known empirical regularity that perceptual judgments are biased towards the center of the... View Details

Keywords: Visual Perception; Bayesian Modeling; Perception; Judgments

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2025
Article

Emotion Regulation Contagion Drives Reduction in Negative Intergroup Emotions

By: Michael Pinus, Yajun Cao, Eran Halperin, Alin Coman, James J. Gross and Amit Goldenberg

When emotions occur in groups, they sometimes impact group behavior in undesired ways. Reducing group’s emotions with emotion regulation interventions can be helpful, but may also be a challenge, because treating every person in the group is often infeasible. One... View Details

Keywords: Emotion Contagion; Emotion; Emotion Regulation; Groups and Teams; Emotions; Conflict and Resolution

2008
Working Paper

Behavioral Aspects of Price Setting, and Their Policy Implications

By: Julio J. Rotemberg

This paper starts by discussing consumers' cognitive and emotional reaction to posted prices. Cognitively, some consumers do not appear to make effective use of price information to maximize their consumption-based utility. Emotionally, prices can induce regret and... View Details

Keywords: Inflation and Deflation; Price; Policy; Laws and Statutes; Consumer Behavior; Emotions

21 Jan 2009
First Look

First Look: January 21, 2009

sentiment. One explanation for this discrepancy is that consumers are motivated to use moral disengagement strategies to reduce cognitive dissonance when their desire for a product conflicts with their moral standards. In two studies we... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

April 2013
Article

Rx: Human Nature: How Behavioral Economics Is Promoting Better Health Around the World

By: Nava Ashraf

Why doesn't a woman who continues to have unwanted pregnancies avail herself of the free contraception at a nearby clinic? What keeps people from using free chlorine tablets to purify their drinking water? Behavioral economics has shown us that we don't always act in... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Economics; Motivation and Incentives; Zambia