More from these Authors

• Article | Journal of Experimental Social Psychology | September 2018

  Religious Shoppers Spend Less Money

  Didem Kurt, J. Jeffrey Inman and Francesca Gino

  Although religion is a central aspect of life for many people across the globe, there is scant research on how religion affects people’s non-religious routines. In the present research, we identify a frequent consumption activity that is influenced by religiosity: grocery shopping. Using both field and laboratory data, we find that grocery spending decreases with religiosity. Specifically, we document that people who live in more religious U.S. counties spend less money on groceries and make fewer unplanned purchases. We also demonstrate this negative relationship by measuring religiosity at the individual level and employing a religious prime. That is, the more religious people are, the less willing they are to follow through on novel purchase opportunities that arise during their grocery shopping trips. This effect is consistent with the account that many religions emphasize the value of being prudent with money. Additional analysis supports our predicted indirect effect of religiosity on spending through frugality.

  Keywords: Religion; Spending; Consumer Behavior; Values and Beliefs;

  Citation:

  Kurt, Didem, J. Jeffrey Inman, and Francesca Gino. "Religious Shoppers Spend Less Money." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 78 (September 2018): 116–124.  View Details

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• Article | Harvard Business Review

  The Business Case for Curiosity

  Francesca Gino

  Although leaders might say they value inquisitive minds, in reality most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency. Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino elaborates on the benefits of and common barriers to curiosity in the workplace and offers five strategies for bolstering it. Leaders should hire for curiosity, model inquisitiveness, emphasize learning goals, let workers explore and broaden their interests, and have “Why?” “What if…?” and How might we…?” days. Doing so will help their organizations adapt to uncertain market conditions and external pressures and boost the business’s success.

  Keywords: Organizational Culture; Employees; Creativity; Cognition and Thinking; Learning; Decision Making; Performance Effectiveness;

  Citation:

  Gino, Francesca. "The Business Case for Curiosity." Harvard Business Review 96, no. 5 (September–October 2018): 48–57.  View Details

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• Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | August 28, 2018

  How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence

  Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer

  People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a reduction in individual exploration for novel answers) relative to independent problem solving. In contrast to prior work, which has focused on how the presence and network structure of social influence affect performance, here we investigate the effects of time. We show that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs. Human subjects solved the canonical traveling salesperson problem in groups of three, randomized into treatments with constant social influence, intermittent social influence, or no social influence. Groups in the intermittent social-influence treatment found the optimum solution frequently (like groups without influence) but had a high mean performance (like groups with constant influence); they learned from each other, while maintaining a high level of exploration. Solutions improved most on rounds with social influence after a period of separation. We also show that storing subjects’ best solutions so that they could be reloaded and possibly modified in subsequent rounds—a ubiquitous feature of personal productivity software—is similar to constant social influence: it increases mean performance but decreases exploration.

  Keywords: transparency; social influence; Collective Intelligence; Interaction; problem solving; collaboration; intermittant; Breaks; always on; communication technologies; communication; Communication; Design; Information; Management; Leadership; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Performance; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information Technology;

  Citation:

  Bernstein, Ethan, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer. "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 35 (August 28, 2018).  View Details

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