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• Working Paper | 2019

  Gendering of Question-Asking Chatbots

  Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans and Alison Wood Brooks

  Citation:

  Huang, Karen, Michael Yeomans, and Alison Wood Brooks. "Gendering of Question-Asking Chatbots." Working Paper, 2019.  View Details

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• Article | Journal of Experimental Psychology: General | April 2019

  Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures

  Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Nicole Abi-Esber, Ryan W. Buell, Laura Huang and Brian Hall

  People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across three online experiments and a field experiment of entrepreneurs, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate feelings of malicious envy in observers: revealing one’s failures. Despite a general reluctance to reveal one’s failures—as they are happening and after they have occurred—across four experiments, we find that revealing both successes and failures encountered on the path to success (compared to revealing only successes) decreases observers’ malicious envy. This effect holds regardless of the discloser’s status and cannot be explained by a decrease in perceived status of the individual. Then, in a field experiment at an entrepreneurial pitch competition, where pride displays are common and stakes are high, we find suggestive evidence that learning about the failures of a successful entrepreneur decreases observers’ malicious envy while increasing their benign envy in addition to decreasing their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s hubristic pride (i.e., arrogance) while increasing their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s authentic pride (i.e., confidence). These findings align with previous work on the social-functional relation of envy and pride. Taken together, our results highlight how revealing failures encountered on the way to success can be a counterintuitive yet effective interpersonal emotion regulation strategy.

  Keywords: Emotions; Perception; Interpersonal Communication; Communication Strategy;

  Citation:

  Brooks, Alison Wood, Karen Huang, Nicole Abi-Esber, Ryan W. Buell, Laura Huang, and Brian Hall. "Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 148, no. 4 (April 2019): 667–687.  View Details

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• Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

  Seeker Beware: The Interpersonal Costs of Ignoring Advice

  Hayley Blunden, Jennifer M. Logg, Alison Wood Brooks, Leslie John and Francesca Gino

  Prior advice research has focused on why people rely on (or ignore) advice and its impact on judgment accuracy. We expand the consideration of advice-seeking outcomes by investigating the interpersonal consequences of advice seekers’ decisions. Across nine studies, we show that advisors interpersonally penalize seekers who disregard their advice, and that these reactions are especially strong among expert advisors. This penalty also drives advisor reactions to a widely-recommended advice-seeking strategy: soliciting multiple advisors to leverage the wisdom of crowds. Advisors denigrate and distance themselves from seekers who they learn consulted others, an effect mediated by perceptions that their own advice will be disregarded. Underlying these effects is an asymmetry between advisors’ and seekers’ beliefs about the purpose of the advice exchange: whereas advisors believe giving advice is more about narrowing the option set by providing direction, seekers believe soliciting advice is more about widening the option set by gathering information.

  Keywords: advice; advice seeking; expertise; impression management; wisdom of crowds; Interpersonal Communication; Relationships; Behavior; Experience and Expertise; Perception; Judgments; Outcome or Result;

  Citation:

  Blunden, Hayley, Jennifer M. Logg, Alison Wood Brooks, Leslie John, and Francesca Gino. "Seeker Beware: The Interpersonal Costs of Ignoring Advice." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 150 (January 2019): 83–100.  View Details

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