Nicole Abi-Esber is a doctoral student in Organizational Behavior (Psychology Track) at Harvard Business School. She received a B.A. from Tufts University in 2012 and an A.M. from Harvard University in 2014. She has previously worked as a product manager in tech startups across the Middle East, including Dubai and Tehran, and as a happiness researcher with the Government of Dubai. Most recently she was a research associate at the Behavioral Lab at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. She speaks Arabic, Spanish, and Persian (Farsi). Nicole's research interests include conversation dynamics and optimizing meetings.
Gus Cooney, Adam M. Mastroianni, Nicole Abi-Esber and Alison Wood Brooks
What causes people to disclose their preferences or withhold them? Declare their love for each other or keep it a secret? Gossip with a coworker or bite one’s tongue? We argue that to understand disclosure, we need to understand a critical and often overlooked aspect of human conversation: group size. Increasing the number of people in a conversation creates systematic challenges for speakers and listeners, a phenomenon we call the many minds problem. Here, we review the substantial implications that group size is likely to have on how much people disclose, what they disclose, and how they feel about it.
Cooney, Gus, Adam M. Mastroianni, Nicole Abi-Esber, and Alison Wood Brooks. "The Many Minds Problem: Disclosure in Dyadic vs. Group Conversation." Special Issue on Privacy and Disclosure, Online and in Social Interactions edited by L. John, D. Tamir, M. Slepian. Current Opinion in Psychology 31 (February 2020): 22–27.
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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.
