Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(724)
- Faculty Publications (282)
- Article
Moral Traps: When Self-serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior
By: Stephanie C. Lin, Julian Zlatev and Dale T. Miller
Two assumptions guide the current research. First, people's desire to see themselves as moral disposes them to make attributions that enhance or protect their moral self-image: When approached with a prosocial request, people are inclined to attribute their own... View Details
Keywords: Morality; Attributions; Decision Making; Prosocial Behavior; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Perception
- 2017
- Working Paper
Equality and Equity in Compensation
By: Jiayi Bao and Andy Wu
Equity compensation is widely used for incentivizing skilled employees, particularly in new technology businesses. Traditional theories explaining why firms offer equity suggest that workers with higher rank should receive compensation packages more heavily weighted in... View Details
- Article
Normative Judgments and Individual Essence
By: Julian De Freitas, Kevin P. Tobia, George E. Newman and Joshua Knobe
A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over
time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the
next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types... View Details
Keywords: Concepts; Essentialism; Normative Factors; Persistence; True Self; Morality; Identity; Moral Sensibility; Perception
- March 2017
- Article
Creativity in Unethical Behavior Attenuates Condemnation and Breeds Social Contagion: When Transgressions Seem to Create Little Harm
By: Scott S. Wiltermuth, Lynne C. Vincent and F. Gino
Across six studies, people judged creative forms of unethical behavior to be less unethical than less creative forms of unethical behavior, particularly when the unethical behaviors imposed relatively little direct harm on victims. As a result of perceiving behaviors... View Details
- March 2017
- Article
Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status
By: T. B. Bitterly, A.W. Brooks and M. E. Schweitzer
Across eight experiments, we demonstrate that humor can influence status, but attempting to use humor is risky. The successful use of humor can increase status in both new and existing relationships, but unsuccessful humor attempts (e.g., inappropriate jokes) can harm... View Details
- March 2017
- Article
Why Do We Hate Hypocrites? Evidence for a Theory of False Signaling
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Roseanna Sommers, Paul Bloom and David G. Rand
Why do people judge hypocrites, who condemn immoral behaviors that they in fact engage in, so negatively? We propose that hypocrites are disliked because their condemnation sends a false signal about their personal conduct, deceptively suggesting that they behave... View Details
- January 26, 2017
- Article
Executives and Salespeople Are Misaligned—and the Effects Are Costly
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Christopher Wallace
This article discusses the results of a survey of senior executives, middle managers, and sales people from companies across a variety of industries. The survey focused on questions about how well their companies’ strategies informed six critical elements of their... View Details
- Article
Social Recycling Transforms Unwanted Goods into Happiness
By: Grant Edward Donnelly, Cait Lamberton, Rebecca Walker Reczek and Michael I. Norton
Consumers are often surrounded by resources that once offered meaning or happiness but that have lost this subjective value over time—even as they retain their objective utility. We explore the potential for social recycling—disposing of used goods by allowing other... View Details
- 2017
- Article
True Happiness: The Role of Morality in the Concept of Happiness
By: Jonathan Phillips, Julian De Freitas, Christian Mott, June Gruber and Joshua Knobe
Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents' psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has... View Details
- November 2016
- Case
But, It's For a Good Cause
By: Elizabeth Keenan and John Gourville
Companies have long tried to enhance consumers’ perceptions of their firms and the products they sell in a variety of ways. Such efforts include the development of a brand image that the public views favorably, as in the case of Apple. It extends to the development of... View Details
- Article
Managing Perceptions of Distress at Work: Reframing Emotion as Passion
By: Elizabeth Baily Wolf, Jooa Julia Lee, Sunita Sah and Alison Wood Brooks
Expressing distress at work can have negative consequences for employees: observers perceive employees who express distress as less competent than employees who do not. Across five experiments, we explore how reframing a socially inappropriate emotional expression... View Details
- August 2016
- Article
The Role of (Dis)similarity in (Mis)predicting Others' Preferences
By: Kate Barasz, Tami Kim and Leslie K. John
Consumers readily indicate liking options that appear dissimilar—for example, enjoying both rustic lake vacations and chic city vacations or liking both scholarly documentary films and action-packed thrillers. However, when predicting other consumers’ tastes for the... View Details
- Article
Learning from Potentially Biased Statistics: Household Inflation Perceptions and Expectations in Argentina
By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
When forming expectations, households may be influenced by perceived bias in the information they receive. In this paper, we study how individuals learn from potentially biased statistics using data from both a natural experiment and a survey experiment during a... View Details
- Article
The Radical Flank Effect and Cross-occupational Collaboration for Technology Development during a Power Shift
By: Emily Truelove and Katherine C. Kellogg
This 12-month ethnographic study of an early entrant into the U.S. car-sharing industry demonstrates that when an organization shifts its focus from developing radical new technology to incrementally improving this technology, the shift may spark an internal power... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
What Factors Drive Director Perceptions of Their Board's Effectiveness?
By: Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Richard Ellis Crum
We use a survey of directors to collect data on their ratings of board effectiveness as well as board internal dynamics and key processes. Controlling for many of the governance metrics examined by prior research, we find that directors’ ratings of their boards’... View Details
- November 2015
- Article
When Doing Good Is Bad in Gift-giving: Mis-predicting Appreciation of Socially Responsible Gifts
By: Lisa A. Cavanaugh, F. Gino and Gavan J. Fitzsimons
Gifts that support a worthy cause (i.e., "gifts that give twice"), such as a charitable donation in the recipient's name, have become increasingly popular. Recipients generally enjoy these gifts, which not only benefit others in need but also make recipients feel good... View Details
- October–December 2015
- Article
Reducing Bounded Ethicality: How to Help Individuals Notice and Avoid Unethical Behavior
Research on ethics has focused on the factors that help individuals act ethically when they are tempted to cheat. However, we know little about how best to help individuals notice unethical behaviors in others and in themselves. This paper identifies a solution:... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Leading Socially Responsible, Value-Creating Corporations
By: Daniel A Brown, Rakesh Khurana and James O'Toole
We explore the role of the corporate leader in creating value for stakeholders throughout three eras: one of naïve idealism, one of naïve cynicism, and an emerging era of rugged idealism. We explain how the role of the corporate leader and society's perceptions of this... View Details
- August 19, 2015
- Article
The Slow Decay and Quick Revival of Self-deception
By: Zoe Chance, Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely
People demonstrate an impressive ability to self-deceive, distorting misbehavior to reflect positively on themselves—for example, by cheating on a test and believing that their inflated performance reflects their true ability. But what happens to self-deception when... View Details
- July 2015
- Article
The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Investment Recommendations: Analysts' Perceptions and Shifting Institutional Logics
By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
We explore the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings on sell-side analysts' assessments of firms' future financial performance. We suggest that when analysts perceive CSR as an agency cost, due to the prevalence of an agency logic, they produce... View Details