Lack of trust is a key barrier to collaboration in organizations and is exacerbated in contexts when employees subscribe to different ideological beliefs. Across five preregistered experiments, we find that people judge ideological opponents as more trustworthy when opposing opinions are expressed through a self-revealing personal narrative than through ... Read More

Statistical discrimination relies on people inferring unobservable characteristics of group members based on their beliefs about the group. Across four pre-registered experiments (𝑁 = 9,002), we show that accurate information about the composition of top performers can induce incorrect beliefs about performance differences across groups when the groups are ... Read More

A carbon tax is widely accepted as the most effective policy for curbing carbon emissions but is controversial because it imposes costs on consumers. An alternative, 'nudge,' approach promises smaller benefits but with much lower costs. However, nudges aimed at reducing carbon emissions could have a pernicious indirect effect if they offer the promise of a ... Read More

When people try to infer how well someone will do on a task, they often rely on group characteristics. For example, people who graduated from university may be perceived as more conscientious, leading employers to prefer those with degrees even for jobs that do not require specific knowledge related to the degree. In many cases, these inferences are likely ... Read More

Building trust is key to successful workplace relationships. However, in an age of great political divide, people are often hesitant to trust others with differing ideologies. This creates a problem for organizations whose employees need to collaborate to make decisions and complete tasks. Given this issue, researchers in this study (Hagmann et al., 2024) ... Read More

Organizations often face the strategic dilemma of choosing between exploration—such as diversifying into new products or markets—and exploiting their existing opportunities. Our research suggests that the subjective experience of losses can influence the willingness to explore. Participants in our experiments chose from options that yielded different payoffs ... Read More

In the modern world, information is readily available to inform decisions both great—on health, finance, or politics, for example—and small. However, decision-makers are not always eager to take advantage of the information at their fingertips, especially if they fear that it will be painful. Such willful ignorance can have dire consequences for individuals ... Read More

Organizations and governments alike have increasingly embraced nudges: small changes to the decision environment that can influence the choices people make. A utility company promoting energy conservation can redesign its bill to include comparisons to more efficient households, nudging households to reduce their energy consumption. Firms that want to help ... Read More

Modern technology has brought us unprecedented access to information. We can exchange ideas with people all over the world, monitor the performance of our investment portfolios in real-time, and learn about our risks of developing a variety of medical conditions long before experiencing any symptoms. And yet, many do not avail themselves of this information ... Read More