More from the Author

• Article | Harvard Business Review | July–August 2020

  Sarcasm, Self-Deprecation, and Inside Jokes: A User's Guide to Humor at Work

  Brad Bitterly and Alison Wood Brooks

  Humor is widely considered essential in personal relationships, but in leaders, it’s seen as an ancillary behavior. Though some leaders use humor instinctively, many more could wield it purposefully. Humor helps build interpersonal trust and high-­quality work relationships and influences behaviors and attitudes that matter to leadership effectiveness, including employee performance, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and creativity.
  These benefits don’t come without potential costs. The guidelines in this article suggest ways to capture the benefits of humor while avoiding the downside risks.

  Keywords: managing people; humor; Leadership; Relationships;

  Citation:

  Bitterly, Brad, and Alison Wood Brooks. "Sarcasm, Self-Deprecation, and Inside Jokes: A User's Guide to Humor at Work." Harvard Business Review 98, no. 4 (July–August 2020): 96–103.  View Details

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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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