Laura E. Wallace

Why do people avoid having important but difficult conversations? The dominant explanation is that people are overly pessimistic about the outcomes of conversations— overestimating costs and underestimating benefits. However, anecdotal evidence suggests people still fail to initiate conversations they expect to be more beneficial than costly. We address this puzzle by testing a self-control account of difficult conversations. Like other classic self-control conflicts (e.g., going to the gym, eating healthily), we argue that engaging in difficult conversations requires people to overcome proximal, concrete costs (e.g., feeling uncomfortable, hurting someone’s feelings in the moment) in pursuit of distal, abstract benefits (e.g., helping someone grow). Across four pilot studies and six experiments (N = 2,442), we provide three key pieces of support for our account. First, people perceive difficult conversations as having intertemporal trade-offs, such that the costs precede the benefits. Second, people’s decisions to initiate difficult conversations are sensitive to time, such that people are more willing to have difficult conversations in the future than the present (i.e., they delay). Importantly, this effect is specific to conversations that are expected to have both costs and benefits, suggesting that people do not generally delay all conversations. This delay is mediated by differential weighing of the costs and benefits in addition to lower anticipated costs in the future (vs. the present). Third, people are more willing to take up costly commitment devices to motivate themselves to initiate difficult conversations than to take up equivalently costly gambles. This suggests that people are aware of these dynamics. Overall, we provide a new theoretical lens for understanding difficult conversations and point to new interventions to prompt them.

Decades of research indicate that growth versus fixed mindsets can influence important outcomes. Some, however, have recently questioned this conclusion, documenting small to nonexistent effects. Inspired by attitudes research, we propose that some growth mindsets may be stronger-more impactful-than others. Specifically, this work examines whether mindsets held with higher certainty are more likely to influence responses. A field study, a high-powered preregistered experiment, and an integrative data analysis test whether mindset certainty influences interest and engagement in organizations that endorse fixed versus growth mindsets. These studies found that when students held their mindsets with high levels of certainty, their personal mindset beliefs were highly predictive of their relative interest in growth versus fixed classrooms, but when they held their mindsets with less certainty, their personal mindsets did not predict relative interest in growth versus fixed classrooms in this same manner. Broadly, these studies support that mindsets vary in strength, which should encourage researchers to identify "when" rather than "whether" growth mindsets predict outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In this work, we introduce the Experience-Outcome Model of honest conversation. Our model advances three key ideas. First, a communicator’s decision to initiate a conversation is influenced by their expected experience during a conversation, in addition to the expected outcomes following the conversation. Second, these same factors influence a communicator’s decision to speak truthfully within a conversation, conditional on initiation. Third, when communicators expect the experience of a conversation to be negative but the outcomes of a conversation to be positive, this leads to self-regulatory conflict. After introducing the Experience-Outcome Model, we explain its implications for difficult conversations—conversations that are aversive because they can cause interpersonal harm. The Experience-Outcome Model explains why communicators fail to initiate difficult conversations and why they communicate dishonestly within them, even when communicators expect the conversations to lead to positive outcomes: The negative experience associated with harm aversion creates self-regulatory conflict. Drawing from the literature on self-regulation, we develop six key propositions that explain how psychological distance influences the experience of harm aversion within difficult conversations and, therefore, a communicator’s likelihood of overcoming this conflict. Our model deepens the current understanding of the psychological dynamics underlying honesty and social engagement. By applying the Experience-Outcome Model to difficult conversations, we provide insight into the psychology of self-regulation and everyday harm as well as provide practical guidance on managing, mentoring, and promoting others’ growth.

Construal level theory (CLT) proposes that psychological distance—the removal of events from direct experience—prompts people to construe events in higher-level terms (i.e., highlighting the abstract vs. concrete features of events). There is growing interest in the replicability of this core tenet of CLT (e.g., Calderon et al., 2020). The present research develops a novel CLT paradigm that leverages two critical design features—a within-subjects manipulation and a refinement of construal level assessment—to optimize statistical power for detecting construal level effects. Consistent with predictions, this new paradigm revealed a significant effect of temporal distance on construal level. This replicates previous CLT research, and demonstrates that, in addition to existing best practices for reproducible science (e.g., large-N), design changes can dramatically increase power. Beyond implications for CLT, the present research serves as a case study for how design optimization may contribute to the science of replicability.

Many mainstream organizations celebrate their historical successes. In their history, however, they often marginalized racial minorities, women, and other underrepresented groups. We suggest that when organizations celebrate their histories, even without mentioning historical marginalization, they can undermine belonging and intentions to join the organization among historically marginalized groups. Four experiments demonstrate that Black participants who were exposed to an organization that celebrated their history versus the present showed reduced belonging and intentions to participate in the organization. These effects were mediated by expectations of biased treatment in the organization. Further, when organizations had a history of Black people in power, celebrating history was no longer threatening, highlighting that the negative effects of celebrating history are most likely when organizations are or are assumed to be majority-White and have treated Black Americans poorly. Taken together, these findings suggest that emphasizing organizational history can be a source of social identity threat among Black Americans.

Growth mindsets are beliefs that abilities, like intelligence, are mutable. Although most prior work has focused on people's personal mindset beliefs, a burgeoning literature has identified that organizations also vary in the extent to which they communicate and endorse growth mindsets. Organizational growth mindsets have powerful effects on belonging and interest in joining organizations, suggesting that they may be a productive way to intervene to improve individual and societal outcomes. Yet, little is known about for whom organizational mindset interventions might be more or less effective, a critical question for effective implementation and theory. We examine whether people's personal mindset beliefs might determine the effect of organizational growth mindsets, and if so, whether this moderation reflects a matching or mismatching pattern. Three experiments manipulated the espoused mindset of an organization and found that organizational growth mindsets primarily increased belonging and interest in joining among participants who personally endorsed matching growth mindset beliefs. An additional field study provided ecological validity to these findings, replicating them with students' experiences of belonging in classrooms. This study also revealed a divergent mismatching pattern on grades: rather than bolstering the grades of students with growth mindsets, growth mindset classroom contexts primarily enhanced the grades of students with more fixed mindsets. By clarifying for whom organizational growth mindsets are beneficial and in what manner, the current work provides theoretical and practical insight into the psychological dynamics of organizational growth mindsets. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigated whether political endorsements from in‐ versus out‐group political elites would influence likelihood of COVID‐19 vaccination. In March 2021, we ran an experiment with Democrats and Republicans in the United States to examine whether they would be more likely to get vaccinated following endorsements by former Presidents Obama or Trump. Participants reported greater likelihood of getting vaccinated if the vaccine was endorsed by an elite from their own rather than the opposing party. This effect was driven by Trump, who increased vaccination likelihood among Republicans but decreased it among Democrats. We also investigated the mechanisms underlying this persuasion effect and found that perceived bias and liking were plausible mediators, whereas perceived trustworthiness and expertise were not. This study highlights the potential of having endorsements from both Democrat and Republican political elites to increase support for health behaviors in a politically charged climate.

Communicators commonly present two-sided messages to avoid being perceived as biased. This approach equates bias with one-sidedness rather than divergence from the position supported by available data. Messages often concern topics with mixed qualities: a product is exceptional but expensive; a politician is inexperienced but ethical. For these topics, providing a two-sided message should reduce perceived bias according to both views of bias as one-sidedness and divergence from available data. However, if perceived bias follows divergence from available data, for topics viewed as one-sided (univalent), a two-sided message should not reduce perceived bias. Across five studies, acknowledging two sides reduced perceived bias for novel topics. In two of the studies, two-sidedness no longer reduced perceived bias for topics viewed as univalent. This work clarifies that people conceptualize bias as a divergence from available data, not simply one-sidedness. It also clarifies when and how to leverage message-sidedness to reduce perceived bias.

Understanding when people are likely to feel ambivalent is important, as ambivalence is associated with key attitude outcomes, such as attitude-behavior consistency. Interestingly, the presence of conflicting positive and negative reactions (objective ambivalence) is weakly related to feeling conflicted (subjective ambivalence). We tested a novel situation that can influence the correspondence between objective and subjective ambivalence: whether a message and a recipient’s topic match in affective versus cognitive orientation. When a person encounters a message with an affective or cognitive match to the topic, conflicting reactions may be more accessible, increasing feelings of ambivalence. Across five studies, greater objective–subjective ambivalence correspondence occurred with an affective–cognitive match between message and topic orientation. Studies 4 and 5 also demonstrated that this primarily occurred when the message was counterattitudinal. This work contributes to the literature explaining the gap between measures of objective and subjective ambivalence as well as how messages can influence attitude strength properties.

The current research examined how people infer whether novel sources are biased based on their ability to justify their position. Across nine studies, when sources provided weak versus strong arguments, message recipients perceived the source as more biased. This effect held controlling for other possible inferences, such as lack of expertise or untrustworthiness. This research also examined whether perceived source bias on one message can carry over to ambiguously related future persuasive messages. Studies 6 to 8 demonstrated that perceivers use both the perceived bias from an initial message and the argument quality of the second message to determine a source’s bias on the new topic. Finally, perceived bias carried over from an initial message can influence persuasion on a second topic (Study 9). Ultimately, the present work provides insight into factors that affect perceived bias and the dynamic consequences of those perceptions.