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- April 2025
- Article
Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Elizabeth Friedman, Kannan Srinivasan, Ravi Dhar and Xupin Zhang
Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling... View Details
- January 2025
- Article
Reducing Prejudice with Counter-stereotypical AI
By: Erik Hermann, Julian De Freitas and Stefano Puntoni
Based on a review of relevant literature, we propose that the proliferation of AI with human-like and social features presents an unprecedented opportunity to address the underlying cognitive and affective drivers of prejudice. An approach informed by the psychology of... View Details
- 2025
- Book
Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves
We all struggle with difficult conversations, but we're often not very good at easy ones either. Though we do it all the time, conversation is one of the most complex, demanding, and delicate of all human tasks, rife with possibilities for misinterpretation and... View Details
Keywords: Interpersonal Communication
- December 2024
- Article
Proximate (Co-)Working: Knowledge Spillovers and Social Interactions
By: Maria P. Roche, Alexander Oettl and Christian Catalini
We examine the influence of physical proximity on between-start-up knowledge spillovers at one of the largest technology coworking hubs in the United States. Relying on the exogenous assignment of office space to the hub’s 251 start-ups, we find that proximity... View Details
- April 2024
- Article
Speaking up and Taking Action: Psychological Safety and Joint Problem-solving Orientation in Safety Improvement
By: Hassina Bahadurzada, Michaela J. Kerrissey and Amy C. Edmondson
Healthcare organizations face stubborn challenges in ensuring patient safety and mitigating clinician turnover. This paper aims to advance theory and research on patient safety by elucidating how the role of psychological safety in patient safety can be enhanced with... View Details
- March 2024
- Article
What Makes Groups Emotional
By: Amit Goldenberg
When people experience emotions in a group, their emotions tend to have stronger intensity and to last longer. Why is that? This question has occupied thinkers throughout history, and with the use of digital media it is even more pressing today. Historically, attention... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Conveying and Detecting Listening in Live Conversation
By: Hanne Collins, Julia A. Minson, Ariella S. Kristal and Alison Wood Brooks
Across all domains of human social life, positive perceptions of conversational listening (i.e., feeling heard) predict well-being, professional success, and interpersonal flourishing. But a fundamental question remains: Are perceptions of listening accurate? Prior... View Details
- October–December 2023
- Article
A Practical Guide to Conversation Research: How to Study What People Say to Each Other
By: Michael Yeomans, Katelynn Boland, Hanne K. Collins, Nicole Abi-Esber and Alison Wood Brooks
Conversation—a verbal interaction between two or more people—is a complex, pervasive, and consequential human behavior. Conversations have been studied across many academic disciplines. However, advances in recording and analysis techniques over the last decade have... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
The Old Boys' Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
Offices are social places. Employees and managers take breaks together and talk about
family and hobbies. In this study, we show that employees’ social interactions with their managers
can be advantageous for their careers, and that this phenomenon contributes to the... View Details
- June 2023
- Article
Are You Listening to Me? The Negative Link between Extraversion and Perceived Listening
By: Francis J Flynn, Hanne Collins and Julian Zlatev
Extraverts are often characterized as highly social individuals who are highly invested in their interpersonal interactions. We propose that extraverts' interaction partners hold a different view-that extraverts are highly social, but not highly invested. Across six... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Social Skills Improve Business Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial with Entrepreneurs in Togo
By: Stefan Dimitriadis and Rembrand Koning
Recent field experiments demonstrate that advice, mentorship, and feedback from randomly assigned peers improve entrepreneurial performance. These results raise a natural question: what is preventing entrepreneurs and managers from forming these peer connections... View Details
- November 2022
- Article
A Language-Based Method for Assessing Symbolic Boundary Maintenance between Social Groups
By: Anjali M. Bhatt, Amir Goldberg and Sameer B. Srivastava
When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Passing the Mic: Career and Firm Outcomes of Executive Interactions
By: Wei Cai, Ethan Rouen and Yuan Zou
We exploit a unique feature of conference calls to study one type of interaction among executives—directly inviting colleagues to respond to analysts’ questions. We find that the frequency of initiating interaction is positively associated with an executive’s ability,... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Social Interactivity in Live Video Experiences Reduces Loneliness
By: Benjamin T. Kaveladze, Robert R. Morris, Rosa Victoria Dimitrova-Gammeltoft, Amit Goldenberg, James J. Gross, Judd Antin, Melissa Sandgren and Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt
Background: Loneliness, especially when chronic, can substantially reduce one's quality of life. However, positive social experiences might help to break cycles of loneliness by promoting more prosocial cognitions and behaviors. Internet-mediated live video... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, from canvassers supporting... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Virtual Water Coolers: A Field Experiment on the Role of Virtual Interactions on Organizational Newcomer Performance
Designing management practices to better onboard organizational newcomers working remotely is a key priority for firms. We report results from a randomized field experiment conducted at a large global firm that estimates the performance effects of different types of... View Details
- September 7, 2020
- Article
Remote Networking as a Person of Color
By: Laura Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo
In remote work situations, where people cannot rely on impromptu elevator conversations or water cooler chats with coworkers, the answer isn’t to turn inward. In fact, the need for networking is even more important. In particular, our interactions with people whose... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Does Who Helps You Impact Your Behavior? Examining the Effects of Social Interactions on Knowledge Sharing in Online Communities
By: Eunkwang Seo, Frank Nagle and Sonali K. Shah
Online communities provide vibrant forums for knowledge sharing and are increasingly being used by individual users and firms to source knowledge and create and capture value. Yet, there is much to learn about how the actions of community members affect other members,... View Details
- June 2020
- Article
In Generous Offers I Trust: The Effect of First-offer Value on Economically Vulnerable Behaviors
By: M. Jeong, J. Minson and F. Gino
Negotiation scholarship espouses the importance of opening a bargaining situation with an aggressive offer, given the power of first offers to shape concessionary behavior and outcomes. In our research, we identify a surprising consequence to this common prescription.... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi
In SIR models, homogeneous or with a network structure, infection rates are assumed to be exogenous. However, individuals adjust their behavior. Using daily data for 89 cities worldwide, we document that mobility falls in response to fear, as approximated by Google... View Details