Temporary Sharing Prompts Unrestrained Disclosures That Leave Lasting Negative Impressions

Reto  Hofstetter; Roland  Rüppell; Leslie  John

Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | November 7, 2017

Temporary Sharing Prompts Unrestrained Disclosures That Leave Lasting Negative Impressions

by Reto Hofstetter, Roland Rüppell and Leslie John

Abstract

With the advent of social media, the impressions people make on others are based increasingly on their digital disclosures. Yet digital disclosures can come back to haunt, making it challenging for people to manage the impressions they make. In field and online experiments in which participants take, share, and evaluate “selfies” (self-photos), we show that paradoxically, these challenges can be exacerbated by temporary sharing media—technologies that prevent content from being stored permanently. Relative to permanent sharing, temporary sharing affects both whether and what people reveal. Specifically, temporary sharing increases compliance with the request to take a selfie (study 1) and induces greater disclosure risks (i.e., people exhibit greater disinhibition in their selfies, studies 1 & 2). This increased disclosure is driven by reduced privacy concerns (study 2). Yet observers’ impressions of sharers are insensitive to permanence (i.e., whether the selfie was shared temporarily versus permanently), and are instead driven by the disinhibition exhibited in the selfie (studies 4 - 7). As a result, induced by the promise of temporary sharing, sharers of uninhibited selfies come across as having worse judgment relative to those who share relatively discreet selfies (studies 1, 2, & 4-7)—an attributional pattern that is unanticipated by sharers (study 3), persistent days after the selfie has disappeared (study 5), robust to personal experience with temporary sharing (studies 6A & 6B), and holds even among friends (studies 7A & 7B). Temporary sharing may bring back forgetting, but not without introducing new (self-presentational) challenges.

Keywords: disclosure; privacy; Self-presentation; impression formation; social media; Behavior; Perspective; Online Technology;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Hofstetter, Reto, Roland Rüppell, and Leslie John. "Temporary Sharing Prompts Unrestrained Disclosures That Leave Lasting Negative Impressions." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 45 (November 7, 2017).

While selfish incentives typically outperform prosocial incentives, in the context of customer referral rewards, prosocial incentives can be more effective. Companies frequently offer “selfish” (i.e., sender-benefiting) referral incentives, offering customers financial incentives for recruiting new customers. However, companies can alternatively offer “prosocial” (i.e., recipient-benefiting) referral incentives. In two field experiments and an incentive-compatible lab experiment, recipient-benefiting referrals recruited more new customers than sender-benefiting referrals. In five additional experiments, we test a process account that invokes two countervailing forces: reputational benefits and action costs. First, at the referral stage, senders anticipate reputational benefits for referring when recipients receive a reward. As a result, recipient-benefiting referrals are just as effective as sender-benefiting referrals at this stage. Second, at the uptake stage, recipient-benefiting referrals are more effective than sender-benefiting referrals: recipient-benefiting referrals directly incentivize uptake (i.e., signing up for a new product or service), which is a high-effort action in referral programs. The preponderance of sender-benefiting (vs. recipient-benefiting) referral offers in the marketplace suggests these effects are unanticipated by marketers who design incentive schemes.

Leaders’ perceived authenticity – the sense that a leader is acting in accordance with her “true self” – is associated with positive outcomes for both employees and organizations alike. How might a leader foster this impression? Using field and experimental data, we test whether sensitive self-disclosures – for example, revealing an aversion to public speaking – make leaders come across as authentic and lead to positive outcomes, such as an enhanced desire to work with that leader (Studies 1, 2A, 2B, and 3). Stemming from our conceptual account, we show that these benefits emerge when the self-disclosure is mild to moderately sensitive in nature (Study 4) and made voluntarily (as opposed to by requirement) (Study 6) by a relatively high-status person (Study 5). Would-be disclosers do not intuit these positive consequences of self-disclosure (Study 7), suggesting that leaders may under-employ an effective tool for making a positive impression.

Article | BMJ: British Medical Journal | November 9, 2019

Effect of Revealing Authors' Conflicts of Interests in Peer Review: Randomized Controlled Trial

Leslie K. John, George Loewenstein, Andrew Marder and Michael Callaham

Objective: To assess the impact of disclosing authors’ conflict of interest declarations to peer reviewers at a medical journal.
Design: Randomised controlled trial.

Setting: The study was conducted within the manuscript review process at the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Participants: Reviewers (n=885 reviewers) who reviewed manuscripts submitted between June 2, 2014 and January 23, 2018 inclusive (n=1480 manuscripts).

Intervention: Reviewers were randomised to either receive (treatment) or to not receive (control) authors’ full ICMJE-format conflict of interest disclosures before performing their review. Reviewers rated the manuscripts as usual on eight quality ratings and were then surveyed to obtain “counterfactual scores”—i.e., the scores they believed they would have given had they been assigned to the opposite arm—as well as attitudes toward conflicts of interest. .

Main outcome measures: The primary outcome measure was the overall quality score that reviewers assigned to the manuscript upon submitting their review (1 to 5 scale). The trial had 99% power to detect a .4 point difference, determined previously by editors to be the minimal significance threshold for a difference in score that would influence their editorial decision. Secondary outcomes looked at the scores the reviewers submitted for the seven more specific quality ratings as well as counterfactual scores elicited in the follow-up survey.

Results: Providing authors’ conflict of interest disclosures did not affect reviewers’ ratings of manuscript quality (Mcontrol=2.70 out of 5, SD=1.11; Mtreatment=2.74 out of 5, SD=1.13; mean difference=0.04, 95% CI=-0.05 to 0.14), even for manuscripts with disclosed conflicts (Mcontrol=2.85 out of 5, SD=1.12; Mtreatment=2.96 out of 5, SD=1.16; mean difference=0.11, 95% CI=-0.05 to 0.26). Similarly, there was no effect of the treatment on any of the other seven quality ratings the reviewers assigned. Reviewers acknowledged conflicts of interest as an important issue and believed they could correct for them when disclosed. Yet, their counterfactual scores did not differ from actual scores (Mactual=2.69, Mcounterfactual=2.67; difference in means=0.02, 95% CI=-0.02 to -0.01). When conflicts were reported, a comparison of different source types (e.g., government, for-profit corporation, etc.) found no difference in impact.

Conclusions: Current ethical standards require conflict of interest disclosure for all scientific reports. As currently implemented, this practice demonstrated no impact on any quality ratings of real manuscripts being evaluated for publication by real peer reviewers.

Keywords: conflicts of interest; peer review; randomized controlled trial; scientific publication; Conflict of Interests; Journals and Magazines; Science;

Citation:

John, Leslie K., George Loewenstein, Andrew Marder, and Michael Callaham. "Effect of Revealing Authors' Conflicts of Interests in Peer Review: Randomized Controlled Trial." BMJ: British Medical Journal 367, no. 8221 (November 9, 2019). View Details

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