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- January 2022
- Article
Rejections Make the Heart Grow Fonder: The Benefits of Articulating Risks When Declining Social Invitations
By: Ashley Whillans, Anne Wilson and Tobias Schlager (Shared Authorship)
Across six studies (N=3,591), we explore the interpersonal consequences of COVID-19 risk communication when rejecting social invitations. In Study 1, consumers underestimate the benefits and overestimate the social costs of explicitly rejecting social invitations for...
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- October 2021
- Article
Communicating Resource Scarcity and Interpersonal Connection
By: Grant E. Donnelly, Anne V. Wilson, Ashley V. Whillans and Michael I. Norton
Consumers often cite insufficient time or money as an excuse for rejecting social invitations. We explore the effectiveness of these excuses in preserving interpersonal relationships. Six studies—including perceptions of couples planning their wedding—demonstrate that...
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- Article
Elevate Employees, Don't Eliminate Them
By: Ryan W. Buell
The last major global shock—the 2008 recession—led to what economists call a “jobless recovery” as companies found they could get by with fewer employees. But post-pandemic, the author writes, managers should focus on changing employees’ roles instead. He has five key...
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- July 2021
- Article
Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, from canvassers supporting...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Virtual Watercoolers: A Field Experiment on Virtual Synchronous Interactions and Performance of Organizational Newcomers
By: Iavor Bojinov, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Jacqueline N. Lane
Do virtual, yet informal and synchronous, interactions affect individual performance outcomes of organizational newcomers? We report results from a randomized field experiment conducted at a large global organization that estimates the performance effects of “virtual...
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- May 2021
- Article
Choice Architecture in Physician–patient Communication: A Mixed-methods Assessments of Physicians’ Competency
By: J. Hart, Yadav, K., Szymanski, S., Summer, A., Tannenbaum, A., Zlatev, J., Daniels, D. and Halpern, S.D.
Background: Clinicians’ use of choice architecture, or how they present options, systematically influences the choices made by patients and their surrogate decision makers. However, clinicians may incompletely understand this influence....
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- Article
Emotional Acknowledgment: How Verbalizing Others' Emotions Fosters Interpersonal Trust
By: Alisa Yu, Justin M. Berg and Julian Zlatev
People often respond to others’ emotions using verbal acknowledgment (e.g., “You seem upset”). Yet, little is known about the relational benefits and risks of acknowledging others’ emotions in the workplace. We draw upon Costly Signaling Theory to posit how emotional...
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- May 2021
- Article
Making Doctors Effective Managers and Leaders: A Matter of Health and Well-Being
By: Lisa Rotenstein, Robert S. Huckman and Christine K. Cassel
The COVID-19 crisis has forced physicians to make daily decisions that require knowledge and skills they did not acquire as part of their biomedical training. Physicians are being called upon to be both managers—able to set processes and structures—and leaders—capable...
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- September 7, 2020
- Article
Remote Networking as a Person of Color
By: Laura Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo
In remote work situations, where people cannot rely on impromptu elevator conversations or water cooler chats with coworkers, the answer isn’t to turn inward. In fact, the need for networking is even more important. In particular, our interactions with people whose...
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- Article
Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views
By: M. Yeomans, J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen and F. Gino
We examine “conversational receptiveness”—the use of language to communicate one’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. We develop an interpretable machine-learning algorithm to identify the linguistic profile of receptiveness (Studies 1A-B). We then...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Does Who Helps You Impact Your Behavior? Examining the Effects of Social Interactions on Knowledge Sharing in Online Communities
By: Eunkwang Seo, Frank Nagle and Sonali K. Shah
Online communities provide vibrant forums for knowledge sharing and are increasingly being used by individual users and firms to source knowledge and create and capture value. Yet, there is much to learn about how the actions of community members affect other members,...
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- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside...
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- July 2020
- Teaching Plan
Girls Who Code
By: Brian Trelstad and Amy Klopfenstein
This teaching plan serves as a supplement to HBS Case No. 320-055, “Girls Who Code.” Founded 2012 by former lawyer Reshma Saujani, Girls Who Code (GWC) offered coding education programs to middle- and high school-aged girls. The organization also sought to alter...
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Keywords:
Communication;
Communication Strategy;
Spoken Communication;
Interpersonal Communication;
Demographics;
Age;
Gender;
Education;
Curriculum and Courses;
Learning;
Middle School Education;
Secondary Education;
Leadership Style;
Leadership;
Social Enterprise;
Nonprofit Organizations;
Social Psychology;
Attitudes;
Behavior;
Cognition and Thinking;
Prejudice and Bias;
Power and Influence;
Identity;
Social and Collaborative Networks;
Motivation and Incentives;
Society;
Civil Society or Community;
Culture;
Public Opinion;
Social Issues;
Technology;
Software;
Education Industry;
Technology Industry;
North and Central America;
United States
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Unexpected Benefits and Underlying Motivations for Communicating COVID-19 Contagion Risks When Rejecting In-Person Social Invitations
By: T. Schlager, A. Wilson and A.V. Whillans
Across five studies (N=3,071), we explore the interpersonal consequences of COVID risk communication when rejecting social invitations. In Study 1, people underestimate the benefits and overestimate the costs of rejecting social invitations for risk-related reasons. In...
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- July 2020
- Case
Karen Bruck: Growing Managers at MercadoLibre
By: Joshua D. Margolis, Fernanda Miguel and Mariana Cal
Karen Bruck, Corporate Sales Director at MercadoLibre, Latin America's largest e-commerce platform, needs to make a decision about one of her managers, who, while analytically savvy, has an approach that does not fit in with the company's culture.
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- July 2020
- Article
Tell It Like It Is: When Politically Incorrect Language Promotes Authenticity
By: J. Schroeder, M. Rosenblum and F. Gino
When a person’s language appears political—such as being politically correct or incorrect—it can influence fundamental impressions of him or her. Political correctness is “using language or behavior to seem sensitive to others’ feelings, especially those others who...
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- June 2020
- Article
In Generous Offers I Trust: The Effect of First-offer Value on Economically Vulnerable Behaviors
By: M. Jeong, J. Minson and F. Gino
Negotiation scholarship espouses the importance of opening a bargaining situation with an aggressive offer, given the power of first offers to shape concessionary behavior and outcomes. In our research, we identify a surprising consequence to this common prescription....
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi
In SIR models, homogeneous or with a network structure, infection rates are assumed to be exogenous. However, individuals adjust their behavior. Using daily data for 89 cities worldwide, we document that mobility falls in response to fear, as approximated by Google...
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- May 2020
- Article
To Be or Not to Be Your Authentic Self? Catering to Others' Expectations and Interests Hinders Performance
By: Francesca Gino, Ovul Sezer and Laura Huang
When approaching interpersonal first meetings (e.g., job interviews), people often cater to the target’s interests and expectations to make a good impression and secure a positive outcome such as being offered the job (pilot study). This strategy is distinct from other...
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- April 22, 2020
- Editorial
Why You Miss Those Casual Friends So Much
By: Gillian M. Sandstrom and A.V. Whillans
On a typical day, we interact with somewhere between 11 and 16 casual acquaintances—for example, the barista we see every morning or the colleague we greet in the hallway. During the Covid-19 pandemic, with many of us practicing physical distancing, these once-common...
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