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• Article | Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin | October 2020

  What Goes Down When Advice Goes Up: Younger Advisers Underestimate Their Impact

  Ting Zhang and Michael S. North

  Common wisdom suggests that older is wiser. Consequently, people rarely give advice to older individuals—even when they are relatively more expert—leading to missed learning opportunities. Across six studies (N=3,445), we explore the psychology of advisers when they are younger (reverse advising), the same age (peer advising), or older (traditional advising) than their advisees. Study 1 shows that advisers avoid reverse advising interactions because they perceive that their relative youth makes them less effective. However, when compared to advisees’ actual perceptions, reverse advisers are misguided as they underestimate their effectiveness when giving general life advice (Study 2a-2b) as well as tactical advice (Studies 3-4). This misperception is in part driven by advisers’ beliefs about their own competence and others’ receptivity. Finally, we demonstrate an intervention that mitigates advisers’ misguided beliefs (Study 5). Contrary to advisers’ own perceptions, these findings illustrate that being relatively young can also mean being an impactful adviser.

  Keywords: advice; expertise; Knowledge Sharing; Experience and Expertise; Age; Perception;

  Citation:

  Zhang, Ting, and Michael S. North. "What Goes Down When Advice Goes Up: Younger Advisers Underestimate Their Impact." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 46, no. 10 (October 2020): 1444–1460.  View Details

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• Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

  Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views

  M. Yeomans, J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen and F. Gino

  We examine “conversational receptiveness”—the use of language to communicate one’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. We develop an interpretable machine-learning algorithm to identify the linguistic profile of receptiveness (Studies 1A-B). We then show that in contentious policy discussions, government executives who were rated as more receptive—according to our algorithm and their partners but not their own self-evaluations—were considered better teammates, advisors, and workplace representatives (Study 2). Furthermore, using field data from a setting where conflict management is endemic to productivity, we show that conversational receptiveness at the beginning of a conversation forestalls conflict escalation at the end. Specifically, Wikipedia editors who write more receptive posts are less prone to receiving personal attacks from disagreeing editors (Study 3). We develop a “receptiveness recipe” intervention based on our algorithm. We find that writers who follow the recipe are seen as more desirable partners for future collaboration and their messages are seen as more persuasive (Study 4). Overall, we find that conversational receptiveness is reliably measurable, has meaningful relational consequences, and can be substantially improved using our intervention.

  Keywords: receptiveness; natural language processing; disagreement; Interpersonal Communication; Relationships; Conflict Management;

  Citation:

  Yeomans, M., J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen, and F. Gino. "Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 160 (September 2020): 131–148.  View Details

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• Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

  Feeling Authentic Serves as a Buffer Against Rejections

  F. Gino and M. Kouchaki

  Social exclusion is a painful yet common experience in many people’s personal and professional lives. This research demonstrates that feeling authentic serves as a buffer against social rejection, leading people to experience less social pain. Across five studies, using different manipulations of authenticity, different paradigms to create social exclusion, and different measures of feeling rejected, we found that experiencing authenticity led participants to appraise situations as less threatening and to experience lower feelings of rejection from the social exclusion. We also found that perceived threat explains these effects. Our findings suggest that authenticity may be an underused resource for people who perceive themselves to be, or actually are, socially excluded or ostracized. This research has diverse and important implications: Interventions that increase authenticity could be used to reduce perceptions of threatening situations and the pain of impending exclusion episodes in situations ranging from adjustment to college to organizational orientation programs.

  Keywords: Authenticity; social exclusion; Threat; Decision Making; Perception; Relationships;

  Citation:

  Gino, F., and M. Kouchaki. "Feeling Authentic Serves as a Buffer Against Rejections." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 160 (September 2020): 36–50.  View Details

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