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- October 15, 2021
- Article
Virtuous Victims
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Maryam Kouchaki
How do people perceive the moral character of victims? We find, across a range of transgressions, that people frequently see victims of wrongdoing as more moral than non-victims who have behaved identically. Across 15 experiments (total n = 9,355), we document this...
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- Article
Behavioral and Neural Representations en route to Intuitive Action Understanding
By: Leyla Tarhan, Julian De Freitas and Talia Konkle
When we observe another person’s actions, we process many kinds of information—from how their body moves to the intention behind their movements. What kinds of information underlie our intuitive understanding about how similar actions are to each other? To address this...
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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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- October 2021
- Article
Confidence and Central Tendency in Perceptual Judgment
By: Yang Xiang, Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke and Samuel Gershman
This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the role of Bayesian noisy cognition in perceptual judgment, focusing on the central tendency effect: the well-known empirical regularity that perceptual judgments are biased towards the center of the...
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- October 2021
- Article
Directors' Perceptions of Board Effectiveness and Internal Operations
By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Rajesh Vijayaraghavan
We contribute to the growing literature on the effectiveness of corporate boards by examining the effect of two insights that have been largely unexplored in prior studies that use public data. First, since boards’ responsibilities are wide-ranging, more holistic...
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- September 17, 2021
- Article
AI Can Help Address Inequity—If Companies Earn Users' Trust
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kannan Srinivasan, Param Singh and Nitin Mehta
While companies may spend a lot of time testing models before launch, many spend too little time considering how they will work in the wild. In particular, they fail to fully consider how rates of adoption can warp developers’ intent. For instance, Airbnb launched a...
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- September 2021
- Article
Gender Stereotypes in Deliberation and Team Decisions
By: Katherine B. Coffman, Clio Bryant Flikkema and Olga Shurchkov
We explore how groups deliberate and decide on ideas in an experiment with communication. We find that gender biases play a significant role in which group members are chosen to answer on behalf of the group. Conditional on the quality of their ideas, individuals are...
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- September 2021
- Article
Perceptions on Undertaking Regular Asymptomatic Self-testing for COVID-19 Using Lateral Flow Tests: A Qualitative Study of University Students and Staff
By: Marta Wanat, Mary Logan, Jennifer A. Hirst, Charles Vicary, Joseph J. Lee, Rafael Perera, Irene Tracey, Gordon Duff, Peter Tufano, Thomas Fanshawe, Lazaro Mwandigha, Brian D. Nicholson, Sarah Tonkin-Crine and Richard Hobbs
Objectives: Successful implementation of asymptomatic testing programmes using lateral flow tests (LFTs) depends on several factors, including feasibility, acceptability and how people act on test results. We aimed to examine experiences of university students...
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- Article
The Pitfalls of Pricing Algorithms: Be Mindful of How They Can Hurt Your Brand
By: Marco Bertini and Oded Koenigsberg
More and more companies are relying on pricing algorithms to maximize profits. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning enables real-time price adjustments based on supply and demand, competitors’ activities, delivery schedules, and so forth. But...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
'Just Letting You Know…': Underestimating Others' Desire for Constructive Feedback
People often avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help fix a problem immediately. Indeed, in a pilot field study (N=155), only 2.6% of individuals provided feedback to survey administrators that the administrators had food or marker on their faces....
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Keywords:
Feedback;
Helping;
Prosocial Behavior;
Relationships;
Social Psychology;
Theory;
Perception
- August 2021
- Article
Anger Damns the Innocent
By: Katherine DeCelles, Gabrielle Adams, Holly S. Howe and Leslie K. John
False accusations of wrongdoing are common and can have grave consequences. In six studies, we document a worrisome paradox in perceivers’ subjective judgments of a suspect’s guilt. Specifically, we find that laypeople (online panelists; N = 4,983) use suspects’ angry...
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Keywords:
Morality;
Accusations;
Deception;
Guilt;
Affect;
Emotions;
Behavior;
Perception;
Judgments;
Decision Making
- Article
Are They Useful? The Effects of Performance Incentives on the Prioritization of Work Versus Personal Ties
By: Julia Hur, Alice Lee-Yoon and Ashley V. Whillans
Most working adults report spending very little time with friends and family. The current research explores the aspects of work that encourage employees to spend less time with personal ties. We show that incentive systems play a critical role in shaping how people...
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- July 2021
- Article
Consumers—Especially Women—Avoid Buying from Firms with Higher Gender Pay Gaps
By: Tobias Schlager, Bhavya Mohan, Katherine DeCelles and Michael I. Norton
We document a unique driver of consumer behavior: the public disclosure of a firm’s gender pay gap. Four experiments provide causal evidence that when firms are revealed to have gender pay gaps, consumers are less willing to pay for their goods, a reaction driven by...
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Keywords:
Pay Gap;
Perceived Wage Fairness;
Purchase Intention;
Gender;
Wages;
Fairness;
Perception;
Consumer Behavior
- July 2021
- Article
How Trust and Distrust Shape Perception and Memory
By: Ann-Christin Posten and Francesca Gino
Trust is a key ingredient in decision making, as it allows us to rely on the information we receive. Although trust is usually viewed as a positive element of decision making, we suggest that its effects on memory are costly rather than beneficial. Across nine studies...
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- Article
On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Impacts Labor Supply and Gender Norms
By: Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner, Rohini Pande, Erica Field and Charity Troyer Moore
Can increasing control over earnings incentivize a woman to work, and thereby influence norms around gender roles? We randomly varied whether rural Indian women received bank accounts, training in account use, and direct deposit of public sector wages into their own...
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- July–August 2021
- Article
Surfacing the Submerged State: Operational Transparency Increases Trust in and Engagement with Government
By: Ryan W. Buell, Ethan Porter and Michael I. Norton
Problem definition: As trust in government reaches historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs.
Academic/practical relevance: We propose that in co-productive settings like government services, peoples’ trust and...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Risk Sensitivity or Social Signaling? Unmasking Behaviors with Video Analytics
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kaiquan Xu and Kannan Srinivasan
In 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread globally, face masks were recommended in public settings to protect against and slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Why did people comply, or not, while shopping in 2020? Do these motivations relate to their shopping...
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- Article
Sizing Up Entrepreneurial Potential: Gender Differences in Communication and Investor Perceptions of Long-Term Growth and Scalability
By: Laura Huang, Priyanka D. Joshi, Cheryl J. Wakslak and Andy Wu
Female entrepreneurs have been found to face disadvantages as compared with male entrepreneurs, especially in acquiring the financial resources they need to sustain and grow their ventures. Across three studies, we examine how disparities in funding outcomes may be due...
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- Article
'Many Others Are Doing It, So Why Shouldn't I?': How Being in Larger Competitions Leads to More Cheating
By: Celia Chui, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino
In many spheres of life, from applying for a job to participating in an athletic contest to vying for a date, we face competition. Does the size of the competition pool affect our propensity to behave unethically in our pursuit of the prize? We propose that it does....
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Keywords:
Unethical Behavior;
Cheating;
Competitors;
Social Norms;
Ethics;
Behavior;
Competition;
Societal Protocols
- 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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