• 2014
• Book

This 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
• Article

Money, 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.

• Article

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.

• March 2014
• Article

Intuitively, 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.

• 2014
• Article

Entrepreneurship 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
• Chapter

Although 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.