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• Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | March 2020

  The Boss Has the Wrong Idea

  Katherine B. Coffman, Alison Wood Brooks, Judith A. Clair, Katherine Chen, Manuela Collis and Kathleen L. McGinn

  Teaching Note for HBS Nos. 920-023 and 920-024.

  Citation:

  Coffman, Katherine B., Alison Wood Brooks, Judith A. Clair, Katherine Chen, Manuela Collis, and Kathleen L. McGinn. "The Boss Has the Wrong Idea." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 920-053, March 2020.  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

  Topic Preference Detection: A Novel Approach to Understand Perspective Taking in Conversation

  Michael Yeomans and Alison Wood Brooks

  Although most humans engage in conversations constantly throughout their lives, conversational mistakes are commonplace— interacting with others is difficult, and conversation re-quires quick, relentless perspective-taking and decision making. For example: during every turn of every conversation, people must decide: Should we stay on this topic or switch to another one? In this paper, we introduce topic preference detection—accurately predicting a conversation partner’s topic preferences (i.e., what they want to talk about)—as a novel approach to evaluate perspective taking. Across synchronous and asynchronous conversations between people in close relationships and among strangers, we find that people want to accommodate their partner's topic preferences in conversation. However, they routinely fall short in learning what other people prefer, compared to benchmark models that rely on natural language processing algorithms to detect topic preferences from people's conversational behavior. Even after a ten-minute face-to-face conversation, people were still missing important cues to their partner's topic interest. Compared to earlier perspective-taking paradigms, our work suggests that topic preference detection captures many naturalistic elements of perspective taking, and demonstrates that conversation can fail to produce mutual understanding, even when people want to accommodate each other’s preferences.

  Keywords: natural language processing; Interpersonal Communication; Perspective; Decision Making; Perception;

  Citation:

  Yeomans, Michael, and Alison Wood Brooks. "Topic Preference Detection: A Novel Approach to Understand Perspective Taking in Conversation." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-077, February 2020.  View Details

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• Article | Current Opinion in Psychology | February 2020

  The Many Minds Problem: Disclosure in Dyadic vs. Group Conversation

  Gus Cooney, Adam M. Mastroianni, Nicole Abi-Esber and Alison Wood Brooks

  What causes people to disclose their preferences or withhold them? Declare their love for each other or keep it a secret? Gossip with a coworker or bite one’s tongue? We argue that to understand disclosure, we need to understand a critical and often overlooked aspect of human conversation: group size. Increasing the number of people in a conversation creates systematic challenges for speakers and listeners, a phenomenon we call the many minds problem. Here, we review the substantial implications that group size is likely to have on how much people disclose, what they disclose, and how they feel about it.

  Keywords: disclosure; Interpersonal Communication; Behavior;

  Citation:

  Cooney, Gus, Adam M. Mastroianni, Nicole Abi-Esber, and Alison Wood Brooks. "The Many Minds Problem: Disclosure in Dyadic vs. Group Conversation." Special Issue on Privacy and Disclosure, Online and in Social Interactions edited by L. John, D. Tamir, M. Slepian. Current Opinion in Psychology 31 (February 2020): 22–27.  View Details

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