Amit Goldenberg

Amit Goldenberg is an assistant professor in the Negotiation Organization & Markets unit and a psychologist by training. Professor Goldenberg's research focuses on the role of emotions in social interactions, particularly in the context of social and political issues. 

Professor Goldenberg earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University and an B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His research has been published in numerous academic journals and popular media outlets including Nature Human Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and CBS news.

Featured Work

On Twitter, Bad News Spreads Faster than Good

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."

What Prompted Capitol Rioters to Violence?

Amit Goldenberg discusses a new paper he co-authored that looks at the brain architecture commonalities of people who join and participate in extreme political acts.

Don’t Focus on the Most Expressive Face in the Audience

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.

Journal Articles

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Personal Website
• Google Scholar

Areas of Interest

• cognition
• conflict management
• emotions
• group dynamics
• technological change

In The News

In The News

• • 15 Jul 2021
  • CBS News

  On Twitter, Bad News Spreads Faster Than Good
• • 13 Jul 2021
  • HBS Working Knowledge

  Hate Spreads Faster on Twitter: Evidence from 44 News Outlets
• • 30 Nov 2020
  • Harvard Business Review

  Don’t Focus on the Most Expressive Face in the Audience
• • 29 Jan 2021

  What prompted Capitol rioters to violence?
• • 12 Mar 2021
  • Association for Psychological Science

  Missing the Crowd for the Faces: The Crowd-Emotion-Amplification Effect