Publications

Article

The Tipping Point of Animacy: How, When, and Where We Perceive Life in a Face

By: Christine E. Looser and Thalia Wheatley

Faces capture humans' attention; yet, beyond aesthetic appreciation, it is presumably not the face itself that interests people but the mind behind it. Minds think, feel, and act in ways that have direct consequences for well-being, but despite their importance, how... View Details

Keywords: Social Psychology; Mind Perception; Face Perception; Identity; Cognition and Thinking

August 2012
Article

From Mind Perception to Mental Connection: Synchrony as a Mechanism for Social Understanding

By: Thalia Wheatley, Olivia Kang, Carolyn Parkinson and Christine E. Looser

Connecting deeply with another mind is as enigmatic as it is fulfilling. Why people ‘‘click’’ with some people but not others is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science. However, researchers from psychology and neuroscience are converging on a likely... View Details

Keywords: Neuroscience; Social Psychology; Interpersonal Communication; Relationships

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Article

Multivoxel Patterns in Face-sensitive Temporal Regions Reveal an Encoding Schema Based on Detecting Life in a Face

By: Christine E. Looser, J. Swaroop Guntupalli and Thalia Wheatley

More than a decade of research has demonstrated that faces evoke prioritized processing in a 'core face network' of three brain regions. However, whether these regions prioritize the detection of global facial form (shared by humans and mannequins) or the detection of... View Details

Keywords: Brain Imaging; Social Psychology; Mind Perception; Identity; Science; Cognition and Thinking

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Research Summary

Overview

Christine is interested in how people make decisions about the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others. Her research explores how people use visual cues in a face to infer the inner workings of another's mind. View Details

Keywords: Mind Perception; Interpersonal Communication; Social Psychology

May 2014
Article

Group Membership Alters the Threshold for Mind Perception: The Role of Social Identity, Collective Identification, and Intergroup Threat

By: Leor M. Hackel, Christine E. Looser and Jay J. Van Bavel

Human faces are used as cues to the presence of social agents, and the ability to detect minds and mental states in others occupies a central role in social interaction. In the current research, we present evidence that the human propensity for mind perception is bound... View Details

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Identity; Personal Characteristics; Cognition and Thinking

2007
Other Unpublished Work

Mind Over Matter? Similarities and Differences Between Perceived and Observed Networks

In spite of the rapid development of new methods for network analysis—relying on electronic data sources and sophisticated computational analysis—organizational scholars continue to rely largely on more traditional survey-based methods. We believe that the... View Details

Keywords: Surveys; Organizations; Social and Collaborative Networks

Article

The Pitfalls of Pricing Algorithms: Be Mindful of How They Can Hurt Your Brand

By: Marco Bertini and Oded Koenigsberg

More and more companies are relying on pricing algorithms to maximize profits. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning enables real-time price adjustments based on supply and demand, competitors’ activities, delivery schedules, and so forth. But... View Details

Keywords: Algorithmic Pricing; Dynamic Pricing; Price; Change; Information Technology; Brands and Branding; Perception; Consumer Behavior

April 2001 (Revised November 2001)
Case

AvantGo

By: Alan D. MacCormack and Kerry Herman

Richard Owen, CEO of AvantGo, is preparing for a meeting in which he will set the human resource policy for the firm going forward. It has been three months since the company's IPO, and given the tremendous cramp in hiring over the six months prior to the IPO, he knows... View Details

Keywords: Initial Public Offering; Management Teams; Selection and Staffing; Retention; Growth and Development Strategy; Performance Evaluation; Information Technology; Decisions; Information Technology Industry; Service Industry; United States

06 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

Did You Hear What I Said? How to Listen Better

hobbies. Every five minutes, they sent a prompt to ask participants whether their minds were wandering—or whether they thought their partner’s mind was wandering. The team found: Nearly a quarter of the time... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

2023
Working Paper

The Complexity of Economic Decisions

By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber

We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Complexity; Perception; Consumer Behavior; Production

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

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Behavior; Perception

2022
Chapter

Corporate Misconduct’s Relevance to Society through Everyday Misconduct

By: Eugene Soltes

Terms like "corporate misconduct" and "white-collar crime" typically bring to mind major scandals like Enron or Bernie Madoff. This popular perception overlooks another important—and in fact much more typical—type of deviance: "everyday misconduct." Everyday misconduct... View Details

Keywords: Research; Crime and Corruption; Society

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03 Mar 2010
What Do You Think?

To What Degree Does “Identity” Affect Economic Performance?

Summing Up Is "identity" a victim of competitiveness? A recent study of organizational behavior published by Timothy Kieningham and Lerzan Toksoy shows that employees' perceptions of their employers' levels of commitment to them... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

23 Oct 2012
First Look

First Look: October 23

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272712001028?v=s5 From Mind Perception to Mental Connection: Synchrony as a Mechanism for Social Understanding Authors:Thalia Wheatley, Olivia Kang,... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

May 2024
Article

The Effect of Configural Processing on Mentalization

By: Katrina Fincher, Ting Zhang, Asteya Percaya, Adam Galinsky and Michael W. Morris

Eight studies (N = 2,561) reveal that how we perceptually process a person’s face affects our capacity to understand their mind. Studies 1A and B indicate this relationship functions via two separate pathways: (a) indirectly by increasing our sensitivity to the... View Details

Keywords: Perception; Cognition and Thinking

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23 May 2017
First Look

First Look at New Ideas and Research: May 23, 2017

framing alters perceptions of (in)completeness, making intermediate progress seem less complete. In turn, these feelings of incompleteness motivate people to persist until the pseudo-set has been fulfilled. Publisher's link:... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

Article

Breakthroughs and the 'Long Tail' of Innovation

The largely erroneous perception that breakthroughs are impossible to predict arises from the tendency to focus on just the breakthroughs while ignoring the iterative process of invention and its distribution of outcomes. When all inventions are considered, they... View Details

Keywords: Diversity; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Independent Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Business Processes; Performance Capacity; Performance Improvement