Publications

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

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

Article

Give What You Get: Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus Apella) and 4-Year-Old Children Pay Forward Positive and Negative Outcomes to Conspecifics.

By: Kristin L. Leimgruber, Adrian F. Ward, Jane Widness, Michael I. Norton, Kristina R. Olson, Kurt Gray and Laurie R. Santos

The breadth of human generosity is unparalleled in the natural world, and much research has explored the mechanisms underlying and motivating human prosocial behavior. Recent work has focused on the spread of prosocial behavior within groups through paying-it-forward,... View Details

Keywords: Prosociality; Reciprocity; Cooperation; Gratitude; Affect; Behavior

2024
Working Paper

Behavioral Attenuation

By: Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke, Ryan Oprea and Jeffrey Yang

We report a large-scale examination of behavioral attenuation: due to information-processing constraints, the elasticity of people’s decisions with respect to economic fundamentals is generally too small. We implement more than 30 experiments, 20 of which were... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Behavioral Finance

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April 2023
Article

Inattentive Inference

By: Thomas Graeber

This paper studies how people infer a state of the world from information structures that include additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning from a customer review about a product’s quality requires accounting for the reviewer’s otherwise irrelevant... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Information Types; Behavior; Knowledge Acquisition

Article

Sizing Up Entrepreneurial Potential: Gender Differences in Communication and Investor Perceptions of Long-Term Growth and Scalability

By: Laura Huang, Priyanka D. Joshi, Cheryl J. Wakslak and Andy Wu

Female entrepreneurs have been found to face disadvantages as compared with male entrepreneurs, especially in acquiring the financial resources they need to sustain and grow their ventures. Across three studies, we examine how disparities in funding outcomes may be due... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Finance; Gender; Prejudice and Bias; Communication; Perception

Purchase

2010
Article

The Ethical Mirage: A Temporal Explanation as to Why We Are Not as Ethical as We Think We Are

By: A. E. Tenbrunsel, K. Diekmann, K A. Wade-Benzoni and Max Bazerman

This paper explores the biased perceptions that people hold of their own ethicality. We argue that the temporal trichotomy of prediction, action and recollection is central to these misperceptions: People predict that they will behave more ethically than they actually... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Values and Beliefs; Framework; Research; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Perception; Prejudice and Bias

Research Summary

Overview

Grant uses a combination of laboratory and field experiments to harness consumers' cognitive and affective resources to increase their well-being. Consumers make countless daily decisions in the pursuit of happiness -- whether and how to spend or save their money, what... View Details

Keywords: Well-being; Judgment And Decision Making; Health; Prosocial Behavior

October 2012
Article

Honesty Requires Time (and Lack of Justifications)

By: Shaul Shalvi, Ori Eldar and Yoella Bereby-Meyer

Recent research suggests that refraining from cheating in tempting situations requires self-control, which indicates that serving self-interest is an automatic tendency. However, evidence also suggests that people cheat to the extent that they can justify their... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Cognition and Thinking

Article

Ownership Dilemmas: The Case of Finders Versus Landowners

By: Peter DiScioli, Rachel Karpoff and Julian De Freitas

People sometimes disagree about who owns which objects, and these ownership dilemmas can lead to costly disputes. We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying people’s judgments about finder versus landowner cases, in which a person finds an object on someone... View Details

Keywords: Ownership Dilemma; Finders; Psychology And Law; Ownership; Property; Law; Social Psychology

fall 2008
Article

Toward a Theory of Behavioral Operations

By: Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano

Human beings are critical to the functioning of the vast majority of operating systems, influencing both the way these systems work and how they perform. Yet most formal analytical models of operations assume that the people who participate in operating systems are... View Details

Keywords: Management Systems; Operations; Mathematical Methods; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Perspective; Theory

*Joined Harvard Faculty: 1991
Prior Faculty Appointments: Northwestern University, 1968-75;
University of Pittsburgh, 1975-91

*Doctoral Degree in Sociology Received from: The John Hopkins University;
MBA Degree Received from: The University of... View Details

Keywords: advertising; apparel; automotive; beverage; biotechnology; consumer products; entertainment; financial services; food; health care; marketing industry; pharmaceuticals; retailing; sports; telecommunications

November 2018
Article

Global Evidence on Economic Preferences

By: Armin Falk, Anke Becker, Thomas Dohmen, Benjamin Enke, David Huffman and Uwe Sunde

This article studies the global variation in economic preferences. For this purpose, we present the Global Preference Survey (GPS), an experimentally validated survey data set of time preference, risk preference, positive and negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust... View Details

Keywords: Economic Preferences; Economics; Behavior; Surveys; Analytics and Data Science; Global Range

July 1989
Article

Immunizing Children Against the Negative Effects of Reward

By: B. A. Hennessey, T. M. Amabile and M. Martinage

Two studies were conducted to examine the effect of intrinsic motivation training on children's subsequent motivational orientation and creativity in an expected reward situation. Past research has demonstrated the overjustification effect: Children who work on an... View Details

Keywords: Creativity; Motivation and Incentives; Training; Early Childhood Education; Learning; Teaching

Felipe Csaszar is a professor of strategy and chair of the Strategy Department at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. His research examines how decision structures influence key organizational outcomes, such as innovation, financial performance, and... View Details

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

2009
Working Paper

A Decision-making Perspective to Negotiation: A Review of the Past and a Look into the Future

By: Chia-Jung Tsay and Max H. Bazerman

Through the decision-analytic approach to negotiations, the past quarter century has seen the development of a better dialog between the descriptive and the prescriptive, as well as a burgeoning interest in the field for both academics and practitioners. Researchers... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Ethics; Negotiation; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Emotions