Choice Architects Reveal a Bias Toward Positivity and Certainty

David P. Daniels; Julian  Zlatev

Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Choice Architects Reveal a Bias Toward Positivity and Certainty

by David P. Daniels and Julian Zlatev

Abstract

Biases influence important decisions, but little is known about whether and how individuals try to exploit others’ biases in strategic interactions. Choice architects—that is, people who present choices to others—must often decide between presenting choice sets with positive or certain options (influencing others toward safer options) versus presenting choice sets with negative or risky options (influencing others toward riskier options). We show that choice architects’ influence strategies are distorted toward presenting choice sets with positive or certain options across thirteen studies involving diverse samples (executives, law/business/medical students, adults) and contexts (public policy, business, medicine). These distortions appear to primarily reflect decision biases rather than social preferences, and they can cause choice architects to use influence strategies that backfire.

Keywords: nudges; Biases; strategic decision making; social influence; Choice architects; choice architecture; Reflection effect; Certainty effect; Loss aversion; Decision Making; Risk and Uncertainty; Power and Influence;

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Citation:

Daniels, David P., and Julian Zlatev. "Choice Architects Reveal a Bias Toward Positivity and Certainty." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 151 (March 2019): 132–149.

What characteristics of an individual signal trustworthiness to other people? I propose that individuals who care about contentious social issues signal to observers that they have integrity and thus can be trusted. Critically, this signal conveys trustworthiness whether or not the target and the observer hold the same view on the issue. Five studies (N = 3,817) demonstrated the predicted effect of caring on integrity-based trust (Studies 1, 2, 3a, 3b, and 4)—even in cases of strong disagreement—across a variety of issues (Study 1) and when behavioral outcomes with real stakes were used (Studies 3a and 3b). This effect largely results from a perception of low-caring targets as particularly untrustworthy (Study 2). Additionally, participants trusted targets with staunchly opposing views about an issue even though they simultaneously disliked them (Study 4). These findings have important implications for how people form impressions of others and speak to potential interventions to help mitigate the growing ideological divide.

Article | Academy of Management Annals | 2019

Brokerage and Brokering: An Integrative Review and Organizing Framework for Third Party Influence

Nir Halevy, Eliran Halali and Julian Zlatev

Brokerage and brokering are pervasive and consequential organizational phenomena. Prevailing models underscore social structure and focus on the consequences that come from brokerage—occupying a bridging position between disconnected others in a network. By contrast, emerging models underscore social interactions and focus on brokering—the behavioral processes through which organizational actors shape others’ relationships. Our review led us to develop a novel framework as a means to integrate and organize a wide range of theoretical insights and empirical findings on brokerage and brokering. The Changing Others’ Relationships (COR) framework captures the following ideas that emerged from our review: (a) Different triadic configurations enable different forms of brokering, which in turn produce distinct effects on others’ relationships; (b) brokering is a multifaceted social influence process that can take the form of intermediation (connecting disconnected others) or modification (changing others’ preexisting relationships); (c) comparing social relations, for instance prebrokering versus postbrokering, reveals a broker’s impact; (d) brokering can influence others’ relationships positively or negatively; and (e) information and incentives are two principal means through which individuals change others’ relationships. Overall, the current review integrates multiple streams of research relevant to brokerage and brokering—including those on structural holes, organizational innovation, boundary spanning, social and political skill, workplace gossip, third-party conflict managers, and labor relations—and links each of the emergent themes identified in the current review to promising directions for future research on brokerage and brokering.

Keywords: brokerage; brokering; social interactions; Organizations; Relationships; Power and Influence; Framework;

Citation:

Halevy, Nir, Eliran Halali, and Julian Zlatev. "Brokerage and Brokering: An Integrative Review and Organizing Framework for Third Party Influence." Academy of Management Annals 13, no. 1 (2019): 215–239. View Details

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Current theories suggest that people understand how to exploit common biases to influence others. However, these predictions have received little empirical attention. We consider a widely studied bias with special policy relevance: the default effect, which is the tendency to choose whichever option is the status quo. We asked participants (including managers, law/business/medical students, and US adults) to nudge others toward selecting a target option by choosing whether to present that target option as the default. In contrast to theoretical predictions, we find that people often fail to understand and/or use defaults to influence others, i.e., they show “default neglect.” First, in one-shot default-setting games, we find that only 50.8% of participants set the target option as the default across 11 samples (n = 2,844), consistent with people not systematically using defaults at all. Second, when participants have multiple opportunities for experience and feedback, they still do not systematically use defaults. Third, we investigate beliefs related to the default effect. People seem to anticipate some mechanisms that drive default effects, yet most people do not believe in the default effect on average, even in cases where they do use defaults. We discuss implications of default neglect for decision making, social influence, and evidence-based policy.

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Choice Architects Reveal a Bias Toward Positivity and Certainty

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