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- March 2025
- Article
Boomerasking: Answering Your Own Questions
By: Alison Wood Brooks and Michael Yeomans
Humans spend much of their lives in conversation, where they tend to hold many simultaneous motives. We examine two fundamental desires: to be responsive to a partner and to disclose about oneself. We introduce one pervasive way people attempt to reconcile these... View Details
- 2025
- Book
Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves
We all struggle with difficult conversations, but we're often not very good at easy ones either. Though we do it all the time, conversation is one of the most complex, demanding, and delicate of all human tasks, rife with possibilities for misinterpretation and... View Details
Keywords: Interpersonal Communication
- July 1, 2024
- Article
Research: Speed Matters When Companies Respond to Social Issues
By: Alison Wood Brooks, Jimin Nam, Maya Balakrishnan and Julian De Freitas
Companies and their leaders face new pressures to make public statements about controversial and sometimes divisive social and political issues. New research shows that timing matters: consumers perceive a relationship between speed and authenticity, and discount... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Conveying and Detecting Listening in Live Conversation
By: Hanne Collins, Julia A. Minson, Ariella S. Kristal and Alison Wood Brooks
Across all domains of human social life, positive perceptions of conversational listening (i.e., feeling heard) predict well-being, professional success, and interpersonal flourishing. But a fundamental question remains: Are perceptions of listening accurate? Prior... View Details
- October–December 2023
- Article
A Practical Guide to Conversation Research: How to Study What People Say to Each Other
By: Michael Yeomans, Katelynn Boland, Hanne K. Collins, Nicole Abi-Esber and Alison Wood Brooks
Conversation—a verbal interaction between two or more people—is a complex, pervasive, and consequential human behavior. Conversations have been studied across many academic disciplines. However, advances in recording and analysis techniques over the last decade have... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Speedy Activists: Firm Response Time to Sociopolitical Events Influences Consumer Behavior
By: Jimin Nam, Maya Balakrishnan, Julian De Freitas and Alison Wood Brooks
Organizations face growing pressure from their consumers and stakeholders to take public stances on sociopolitical issues. However, many are hesitant to do so lest they make missteps, promises they cannot keep, appear inauthentic, or alienate consumers, employees, or... View Details
- September 2023
- Exercise
Irrationality in Action: Decision-Making Exercise
By: Alison Wood Brooks, Michael I. Norton and Oliver Hauser
This teaching exercise highlights the obstacle of biases in decision-making, allowing students to generate examples of potentially poor decision-making rooted in abundant and unwanted bias. This exercise has two parts: a pre-class, online survey in which students... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Laughter on Call: Injecting Conversational Levity
By: Alison Wood Brooks, Michael Norton and F Katelynn Boland
- February 2023
- Teaching Note
SIMmersion: Simulating Crucial Conversations
By: Alison Wood Brooks and Julian Zlatev
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 923-040. View Details
- February 2023
- Case
SIMmersion: Simulating Crucial Conversations
By: Alison Wood Brooks, Julian Zlatev and F Katelynn Boland
This case introduces readers to SIMmersion, a company founded in 2002 that creates and sells training programs to firms, government agencies, educational institutions, and individuals (B2B and B2C). Their training programs are built around simulations (“sims”) that... View Details
- 2 Mar 2023 - 4 Mar 2023
- Conference Presentation
Speedy Activists: Firm Response Time to Sociopolitical Events Influences Consumer Behavior
By: Maya Balakrishnan, Julian De Freitas and Alison Wood Brooks
- October 17, 2022
- Article
Relational Diversity in Social Portfolios Predicts Well-Being
By: Hanne K. Collins, Serena F. Hagerty, Jordi Quoidbach, Michael I. Norton and Alison Wood Brooks
We document a link between the relational diversity of one’s social portfolio—the richness and evenness of relationship types across one’s social interactions—and well-being. Across four distinct samples, respondents from the United States who completed a preregistered... View Details
- 10 Nov 2022 - 13 Nov 2022
- Conference Presentation
Timely Statements: Swift Brand Activism Is the Most Effective and Memorable
By: Jimin Nam, Maya Balakrishnan, Julian De Freitas and Alison Wood Brooks
- Article
The Conversational Circumplex: Identifying, Prioritizing, and Pursuing Informational and Relational Motives in Conversation
By: Michael Yeomans, Maurice E. Schweitzer and Alison Wood Brooks
The meaning of success in conversation depends on people’s goals. Often, individuals pursue multiple goals simultaneously, such as establishing shared understanding, making a favorable impression, and persuading a conversation partner. In this article, we introduce a... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Feeling Seen: Leader Eye Gaze Promotes Psychological Safety, Participation, and Voice
By: Nicole Abi-Esber, Alison Wood Brooks and Ethan Burris
Psychological safety is a hallmark of effective team functioning. Although prior work shows that characteristics of the leader influence employee judgments of psychological safety (and subsequent decisions to speak up), we know very little about “the specific behaviors... View Details
- Article
What Is Your Status Portfolio? Higher Status Variance across Groups Increases Interpersonal Helping but Decreases Intrapersonal Well-being
By: Catarina R. Fernandes, Siyu Yu, Taeya M. Howell, Alison Wood Brooks, Gavin J. Kilduff and Nathan C. Pettit
Individuals belong to multiple groups across various domains of life, which in aggregate constitute a portfolio of potentially distinct levels of experienced status. We propose a two-factor model for assessing the effects of an individual’s status portfolio, based on... View Details
- 2020
- Article
Worry at Work: How Organizational Culture Promotes Anxiety
By: Jeremy A. Yip, Emma E. Levine, Alison Wood Brooks and Maurice E. Schweitzer
Organizational culture profoundly influences how employees think and behave. Established research suggests that the content, intensity, consensus, and fit of cultural norms act as a social control system for attitudes and behavior. We adopt the norms model of... View Details
Keywords: Anxiety; Norms; Stress; Culture; Tightness-looseness; Curvilinear; Organizational Culture; Emotions; Performance
- September 2020 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Gong: Resonating Conversational Insights
By: Alison Wood Brooks and Trevor Spelman
In 2015, Amit Bendov was struck by a realization about a new technology that might be able to transcribe musical notation in real-time, which eventually became known as Gong. Gong’s business proposition was simple: provide software that automatically captures,... View Details
- July–August 2020
- Article
Sarcasm, Self-Deprecation, and Inside Jokes: A User's Guide to Humor at Work
By: Brad Bitterly and Alison Wood Brooks
Humor is widely considered essential in personal relationships, but in leaders, it’s seen as an ancillary behavior. Though some leaders use humor instinctively, many more could wield it purposefully.
Humor helps build interpersonal trust and high-quality work... View Details
- March 2020
- Teaching Note
The Boss Has the Wrong Idea
By: Katherine B. Coffman, Alison Wood Brooks, Judith A. Clair, Katherine Chen, Manuela Collis and Kathleen L. McGinn
Teaching Note for HBS Nos. 920-023 and 920-024. View Details