Collective emotion, when a group of people shares an emotion, is often stronger than a single individual feeling that same emotion alone. So, how can leaders manage emotions, particularly negative ones, from taking over a team? Four strategies from psychology — situation modification, shifting attention or creating distraction, reappraisal, and response modulation — can help bring down the temperature.
Amit Goldenberg
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Amit Goldenberg is an assistant professor in the Negotiation Organization & Markets unit, an affiliate with Harvard’s Department of Psychology, and a member of the Digital Data and Design Institute (D^3). Professor Goldenberg's research focuses on what makes people emotional in social and group contexts, and how such emotions can be changed when they are unhelpful or undesired. He is particularly interested in how technology is used for both emotion detection and regulation.
In his work Professor Goldenberg tries to integrate between experimental psychology that examines behavior at the individual and collectives levels. To integrate these domains, he employs a multi-method approach that combines behavioral experiments, analysis of data from digital media, computational modeling and AI.
- Featured Work
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Research has shown that when speaking in front of a group, people’s attention tends to gets stuck on the most emotional faces, causing them to overestimate the group’s average emotional state. In this piece, the authors share two additional findings: First, the larger the group, the greater this attention bias. Second, the attention bias is stronger for faces expressing negative emotions than for faces expressing positive ones, meaning that our ability to judge a group’s emotional state isn’t just skewed towards more intense emotions — it is specifically biased toward more negative evaluations. Based on these findings, the authors suggest that when giving a talk or meeting a large group of people, we should attempt to intentionally scan the audience more evenly in order to counteract our natural attention biases and get a more accurate picture of the group’s overall emotional state.Employees often resist DEI initiatives, which of course hinders their effectiveness. The authors — experts in the resistance to social-change efforts — write that the key to overcoming resistance to any effort is figuring out why people are resisting. When it comes to DEI initiatives, they argue, people resist because they experience at least one of three forms of threat: status threat, merit threat, and moral threat. Depending on the kinds of threat they experience, they then tend to engage in three kinds of resistance: defending, denying, and distancing. The authors explain these forms of threat and resistance and then offer suggestions for how to overcome them.
Eric chats with Amit Goldenberg, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Amit studies emotions in social interactions, for example in political contexts and on social media. He was a journalist and author before becoming an academic.
In this episode, Eric and Amit talk about how emotions operate in groups. Do crowds easily go “mad”? What emotions spread faster in groups? Why are we drawn to people more politically extreme than us? How is social media shaping our emotions and political behavior? Finally, Amit shares his journey from being a journalist to being a psychologist at a business school.
Want to make a splash on Twitter? You have a better chance of getting noticed by saying something angry or insulting. So concludes a recent study that looked at the impact of both positive and negative tweets from news organizations of various political leanings. They found that, for both right-leaning and left-leaning media, "Negative news spreads farther through the current Twitter network than positive news."
A Social Media Fueled Bank Crisis, Perpetual Pessimism in Finance, & Tech's Layoff CleanseMorgan Housel and Doug Boneparth discuss how yelling "fire" in a crowded Twitter thread can lead to a crisis, why individuals always feel gloomy about their personal finances, and what the layoff wave in tech means for the industry's health moving forward. To break down the viral panic on Twitter that contributed to the 48-hour collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, we spoke with Amit Goldenberg, Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School and trained psychologist.
- Journal Articles
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- Shuman, Eric, Amit Goldenberg, Tamar Saguy, Eran Halperin, and Martijn van Zomeren. "When Are Social Protests Effective?" Trends in Cognitive Sciences (in press). (Pre-published online October 31, 2023.) View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit. "What Makes Groups Emotional." Perspectives on Psychological Science (forthcoming). (Pre-published online July 26, 2023.) View Details
- Schöne, Jonas P., David Garcia, Brian Parkinson, and Amit Goldenberg. "Negative Expressions Are Shared More on Twitter for Public Figures Than for Ordinary Users." PNAS Nexus 2, no. 7 (July 2023). View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, and Robb Willer. "Amplification of Emotion on Social Media." Nature Human Behaviour 7, no. 6 (June 2023): 845–846. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, Joseph M. Abruzzo, Zi Huang, Jonas Schone, David Bailey, Robb Willer, Eran Halperin, and James J. Gross. "Homophily and Acrophily as Drivers of Political Segregation." Nature Human Behaviour 7, no. 2 (February 2023): 219–230. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, Jonas Schöne, Zi Huang, Timothy D. Sweeny, Desmond C. Ong, Timothy Brady, Maria M. Robinson, David Levari, Jamil Zaki, and James J. Gross. "Amplification in the Evaluation of Multiple Emotional Expressions over Time." Nature Human Behaviour 6, no. 10 (October 2022): 1408–1416. View Details
- Kaveladze, Benjamin T., Robert R. Morris, Rosa Victoria Dimitrova-Gammeltoft, Amit Goldenberg, James J. Gross, Judd Antin, Melissa Sandgren, and Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt. "Social Interactivity in Live Video Experiences Reduces Loneliness." Frontiers in Digital Health 4:859849 (2022). View Details
- Wang, Ke, Amit Goldenberg, Charles Dorison, Jeremy Miller, Jennifer Lerner, and James Gross. "A Multi-country Test of Brief Reappraisal Interventions on Emotions During the COVID-19 Pandemic." Nature Human Behaviour 5, no. 8 (August 2021): 1089–1110. View Details
- Schöne, Jonas Paul, Brian Parkinson, and Amit Goldenberg. "Negativity Spreads More Than Positivity on Twitter after Both Positive and Negative Political Situations." Affective Science 2, no. 4 (December 2021): 379–390. View Details
- Bellovary, Andrea, Nathaniel Young, and Amit Goldenberg. "Left- and Right-Leaning News Organizations Use Negative Emotional Content and Elicit User Engagement Similarly." Affective Science 2, no. 4 (December 2021): 391–396. View Details
- Zmigrod, Leor, and Amit Goldenberg. "Cognition and Emotion in Extreme Political Action: Individual Differences and Dynamic Interactions." Current Directions in Psychological Science 30, no. 3 (June 2021): 218–227. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, Erika Weisz, Timothy D. Sweeney, Mina Cikara, and James Gross. "The Crowd Emotion Amplification Effect." Psychological Science 32, no. 3 (March 2021): 437–450. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, and James J. Gross. "Digital Emotion Contagion." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24, no. 4 (April 2020): 316–328. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, Timothy D. Sweeny, Emmanuel Shpigel, and James J. Gross. "Is This My Group or Not? The Role of Ensemble Coding of Emotional Expressions in Group Categorization." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 149, no. 3 (March 2020). View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, David Garcia, Eran Halperin, and James J. Gross. "Collective Emotions." Current Directions in Psychological Science 29, no. 2 (April 2020): 154–160. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, David Garcia, Eran Halperin, Jamil Zaki, Danyang Kong, Golijeh Golarai, and James J. Gross. "Beyond Emotional Similarity: The Role of Situation-specific Motives." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 149, no. 1 (January 2020): 138–159. View Details
- Editorials
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- Goldenberg, Amit. "Extreme Views Are More Attractive Than Moderate Ones." Scientific American (website) (April 19, 2023). View Details
- Shuman, Eric, Eric Knowles, and Amit Goldenberg. "To Overcome Resistance to DEI, Understand What’s Driving It." Harvard Business Review (website) (March 1, 2023). View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit. "Managing Your Team’s Emotional Dynamic." Harvard Business Review (website) (January 10, 2023). View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, and Erika Weisz. "Don't Focus on the Most Expressive Face in the Audience." Harvard Business Review (website) (November 30, 2020). View Details
- Book Chapters
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- Wolf, Svenja A., Amit Goldenberg, and Mickaël Campo. "Emotions and Emotion Regulation." In The New Psychology of Sport & Exercise: The Social Identity Approach, edited by S. Alexander Haslam, Katrien Fransen, and Filip Boen, 147–164. London: SAGE Publications, 2020. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, J. J. Gross, and Eran Halperin. "The Group Malleability Intervention: Addressing Intergroup Conflicts by Changing Perceptions of Outgroup Malleability." Chap. 15 in Handbook of Wise Interventions: How Social Psychology Can Help People Change, edited by Gregory M. Walton and Alia J. Crum. New York, NY: Guilford Press, 2020. View Details
- Presentations
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- Goldenberg, Amit. "Emotion Dynamics in Groups." Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, February 2021. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit. "What Makes Groups Emotional?" University of California, Riverside, February 2021. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit. "Amplification in the Evaluation of Emotional Expressions Over Time." Paper presented at the Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention, May 2021. (Virtual.) View Details
- "Political Homophily and Acrophily." Paper presented at the Society for Affective Science Annual Conference, Society for Affective Science, April 2021. (Online.) View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit. "Tie Selection Strategies." Paper presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Meeting, February 9–13, 2021. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit. "Collective Emotions." Emotions and Strategy: A Multi-Disciplinary Conversation at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, May 2020. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, and J. J. Gross. "Network Selection Strategies." Paper presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention, New Orleans, LA, February 2020. View Details
- Cases and Teaching Materials
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- Goldenberg, Amit, and Julian Zlatev. "Atlanta Ransomware Attack (A) and (B)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 923-039, February 2023. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, and Julian Zlatev. "Atlanta Ransomware Attack (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 923-010, August 2022. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, and Julian Zlatev. "Atlanta Ransomware Attack (A)." Harvard Business School Case 923-009, August 2022. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, and Max Bazerman. "Slice Labs: Creating a Fraud-free Online Insurance Platform." Harvard Business School Teaching Plan 922-019, December 2021. View Details
- Goldenberg, Amit, Max Bazerman, and Ruth Page. "Slice Labs: Creating a Fraud-free Online Insurance Platform." Harvard Business School Multimedia/Video Case 921-712, December 2021. View Details
- Additional Information
- Areas of Interest
- In The News