Human Behavior & Decision-Making
Human Behavior & Decision-Making
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- 2014
- Book
The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See
By: Max BazermanThis book will examine the common failure to notice critical information due to bounded awareness. The book will document a decade of research showing that even successful people fail to notice the absence of critical and readily available information in their environment due to the human tendency to focus on a limited set of information. This work is still in its formative stages, and I welcome comments about how bounded awareness affects you and your organization and how you have created solutions to such problems.
- 2014
- Book
The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See
By: Max BazermanThis book will examine the common failure to notice critical information due to bounded awareness. The book will document a decade of research showing that even successful people fail to notice the absence of critical and readily available information in their environment due to the human tendency to focus on a limited set of information. This...
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- 2014
- Article
Time, Money, and Morality
By: F. Gino and C. MogilnerMoney, a resource that absorbs much daily attention, seems to be present in much unethical behavior thereby suggesting that money itself may corrupt. This research examines a way to offset such potentially deleterious effects—by focusing on time, a resource that tends to receive less attention than money but is equally ubiquitous in our daily lives. Across four experiments, we examine whether shifting focus onto time can salvage individuals' ethicality. We found that implicitly activating the construct of time, rather than money, leads individuals to behave more ethically by cheating less. We further found that priming time reduces cheating by making people reflect on who they are. Implications for the use of time versus money primes in discouraging or promoting dishonesty are discussed.
- 2014
- Article
Time, Money, and Morality
By: F. Gino and C. MogilnerMoney, a resource that absorbs much daily attention, seems to be present in much unethical behavior thereby suggesting that money itself may corrupt. This research examines a way to offset such potentially deleterious effects—by focusing on time, a resource that tends to receive less attention than money but is equally ubiquitous in our daily...
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- Article
Past, Present and Future Research on Multiple Identities: Toward an Intrapersonal Network Approach
Psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers have long recognized that people have multiple identities—based on attributes such as organizational membership, profession, gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and family role(s) and that these multiple identities shape people's actions in organizations. The current organizational literature on multiple identities, however, is sparse and scattered and has yet to fully capture this foundational idea. I review and organize the literature on multiple identities into five different theoretical perspectives: social psychological; microsociological; psychodynamic and developmental; critical; and intersectional. I then propose a way to take research on multiple identities forward using an intrapersonal identity network approach. Moving to an identity network approach offers two advantages: first, it enables scholars to consider more than two identities simultaneously, and second, it helps scholars examine relationships among identities in greater detail. This is important because preliminary evidence suggests that multiple identities shape important outcomes in organizations, such as individual stress and well-being, intergroup conflict, performance, and change. By providing a way to investigate patterns of relationships among multiple identities, the identity network approach can help scholars deepen their understanding of the consequences of multiple identities in organizations and spark novel research questions in the organizational literature.
- Article
Past, Present and Future Research on Multiple Identities: Toward an Intrapersonal Network Approach
Psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers have long recognized that people have multiple identities—based on attributes such as organizational membership, profession, gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and family role(s) and that these multiple identities shape people's actions in organizations. The current organizational literature on...
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- March 2014
- Article
Cheating More for Less: Upward Social Comparisons Motivate the Poorly Compensated to Cheat
By: Leslie K. John, George Loewenstein and Scott RickIntuitively, people should cheat more when cheating is more lucrative, but we find that the effect of performance-based pay rates on dishonesty depends on how readily people can compare their pay rate to that of others. In Experiment 1, participants were paid 5 cents or 25 cents per self-reported point in a trivia task, and half were aware that they could have received the alternative pay rate. Lower pay rates increased cheating when the prospect of a higher pay rate was salient. Experiment 2 illustrates that this effect is driven by the ease with which poorly compensated participants can compare their pay to that of others who earn a higher pay rate. Our results suggest that low pay rates are, in and of themselves, unlikely to promote dishonesty. Instead, it is the salience of upward social comparisons that encourages the poorly compensated to cheat.
- March 2014
- Article
Cheating More for Less: Upward Social Comparisons Motivate the Poorly Compensated to Cheat
By: Leslie K. John, George Loewenstein and Scott RickIntuitively, people should cheat more when cheating is more lucrative, but we find that the effect of performance-based pay rates on dishonesty depends on how readily people can compare their pay rate to that of others. In Experiment 1, participants were paid 5 cents or 25 cents per self-reported point in a trivia task, and half were aware that...
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- 2014
- Article
Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men
By: Alison Wood Brooks, Laura Huang, Sarah Kearney and Fiona MurrayEntrepreneurship is a central path to job creation, economic growth, and prosperity. In the earliest stages of start-up business creation, the matching of entrepreneurial ventures to investors is critically important. The entrepreneur's business proposition and previous experience are regarded as the main criteria for investment decisions. Our research, however, documents other critical criteria that investors use to make these decisions: the gender and physical attractiveness of the entrepreneurs themselves. Across a field setting (three entrepreneurial pitch competitions in the United States) and two experiments, we identify a profound and consistent gender gap in entrepreneur persuasiveness. Investors prefer pitches presented by male entrepreneurs compared with pitches made by female entrepreneurs, even when the content of the pitch is the same. This effect is moderated by male physical attractiveness: attractive males were particularly persuasive, whereas physical attractiveness did not matter among female entrepreneurs.
- 2014
- Article
Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men
By: Alison Wood Brooks, Laura Huang, Sarah Kearney and Fiona MurrayEntrepreneurship is a central path to job creation, economic growth, and prosperity. In the earliest stages of start-up business creation, the matching of entrepreneurial ventures to investors is critically important. The entrepreneur's business proposition and previous experience are regarded as the main criteria for investment decisions. Our...
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- 2014
- Chapter
Appetite, Consumption, and Choice in the Human Brain
By: Brian Knutson and Uma R. KarmarkarAlthough linked, researchers have long distinguished appetitive from consummatory phases of reward processing. Recent improvements in the spatial and temporal resolution of neuroimaging techniques have allowed researchers to separately visualize different stages of reward processing in humans. These techniques have revealed that evolutionarily conserved circuits related to affect generate distinguishable appetitive and consummatory signals, and that these signals can be used to predict choice and subsequent consumption. Review of the literature surprisingly suggests that appetitive rather than consummatory activity may best predict future choice and consumption. These findings imply that distinguishing appetite from consumption may improve predictions of future choice and illuminate neural components that support the process of decision making.
- 2014
- Chapter
Appetite, Consumption, and Choice in the Human Brain
By: Brian Knutson and Uma R. KarmarkarAlthough linked, researchers have long distinguished appetitive from consummatory phases of reward processing. Recent improvements in the spatial and temporal resolution of neuroimaging techniques have allowed researchers to separately visualize different stages of reward processing in humans. These techniques have revealed that evolutionarily...
Ever since their origins about three decades ago, the Behavioral Science areas of economics, ethics and managerial psychology have been rapidly evolving. In the 1980's and 1990's, early work by Max Bazerman in judgment and negotiation, Matthew Rabin in behavioral economics, and James Sebenius in negotiations was instrumental in shaping research on Human Behavior & Decision-Making. Today, our research focuses on individual and interactive judgment and decision making and explores the role of personal bias, cognition and learning, time, perception, ethics and morality, and emotion.
Recent Publications
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
- 2021 |
- Working Paper |
- Faculty Research
How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions
- March–April 2021 |
- Article |
- Harvard Business Review
Threadless: The Renewal of an Online Community
- February 2021 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations
- February 2021 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
G.I. Joe Phenomena: Understanding the Limits of Metacognitive Awareness on Debiasing
- 2021 |
- Working Paper |
- Faculty Research
Health Care Measurements That Improve Patient Outcomes
- February 2021 |
- Article |
- NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery
The EU's Unsustainable Approach to Stakeholder Capitalism
- Article |
- Harvard Business Review Digital Articles
Measuring Employment Impact: Applications and Cases
- 2021 |
- Working Paper |
- Faculty Research
Aster DM Healthcare: Budgeting for a Crisis
- January 2021 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Snapp: Scaling Under Sanctions in Iran (A)
- January 2021 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
The case takes us through the founding story of Snapp in 2014 to how the company grew to reach two million daily rides in Iran servicing 30 million customers through its two million registered drivers in 100 cities in Iran. The case then goes into detail about how the removal of all Iran-based apps from application stores limited Snapp’s operations and its go-to-market channels. Next, the case chronicles how the co-founders focused on finding operational and technological solutions to minimize Snapp’s reliance on U.S. technology following the U.S.’ withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May 2018 and instating the secondary sanctions on Iran.
The case highlights the challenges of operating under sanctions and the different ways the co-founders try to find to keep Snapp alive in a market that had been out of reach for Western investors. In 2019, Snapp had become the largest Internet company in the Middle East yet it was increasingly difficult to navigate the operational hurdles. The co-founders could not help but think whether it was now time to reach out to major media outlets and launch a public relations campaign to create awareness around the unexpected decision that had put the very existence of many companies at risk, including Snapp’s. Alkassar and Fouz needed to weigh it against Snapp’s realities. The case then asks: Should they go public with their story, or would it be better to stay under the radar and focus on efficiency and sustainability of operations?"