Francesca Gino

Escalation of commitment costs businesses and taxpayers billions of dollars. Management research has consistently found that even in cases where future prospects look dire, decision makers routinel...

Integrating the differentiated knowledge, skills, and experiences of its members is critical to the effective functioning of an organization. Hence, interactions spanning across formal organization...

Many practitioner-oriented negotiation texts advise negotiators who are under time pressure to keep their final deadlines secret, especially if they are in a weak position. While this advice is consistent with intuition, recent research on the effects of revealing deadlines in negotiation has proven it to be incorrect. This is a useful lesson for students of negotiation, who often find themselves under time pressure at the bargaining table. The article discusses ways in which this lesson can be successfully taught in the classroom. In doing so, the present work reviews prior studies that investigated the effects of revealing final deadlines on negotiation outcomes and explains why negotiators mistakenly believe they ought to keep their deadlines secret.

From Catholics performing the sign of the cross since the 4th century to Americans reciting the Pledge of Allegiance since the 1890s, group rituals (i.e., predefined sequences of symbolic actions) have strikingly consistent features over time. Seven studies (N = 4,213) document the sacrosanct nature of rituals: Because group rituals symbolize sacred group values, even minor alterations to them provoke moral outrage and punishment. In Pilot Studies A and B, fraternity members who failed to complete initiation activities that were more ritualistic elicited relatively greater moral outrage and hazing from their fraternity brothers. Study 1 uses secular holiday rituals to explore the dimensions of ritual alteration-both physical and psychological-that elicit moral outrage. Study 2 suggests that altering a ritual elicits outrage even beyond the extent to which the ritual alteration is seen as violating descriptive and injunctive norms. In Study 3, group members who viewed male circumcision as more ritualistic (i.e., Jewish vs. Muslim participants) expressed greater moral outrage in response to a proposal to alter circumcision to make it safer. Study 4 uses the Pledge of Allegiance ritual to explore how the intentions of the person altering the ritual influence observers' moral outrage and punishment. Finally, in Study 5, even minor alterations elicited comparable levels of moral outrage to major alterations of the Jewish Passover ritual. Across both religious and secular rituals, the more ingroup members believed that rituals symbolize sacred group values, the more they protected their rituals-by punishing those who violated them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

People routinely assume correspondence between acts and dispositions. This “correspondence bias” leads people to neglect the power of the situation to influence behavior. However, most of the research documenting the correspondence bias uses paradigms in which the situation operates in the background. The three studies presented here employ novel paradigms in which people have full information about the situation and its effect on behavior. We find that the bias persists in the face of debiasing treatments and even in situations where avoiding it amounts to a simple subtraction problem. We also find that the correspondence bias generalizes to inanimate objects. In light of this new evidence, we reconsider the psychological origins of the correspondence bias.

The quest for authenticity is a potent existential striving. Authenticity is commonly defined as the extent to which a person knows, and lives in accordance with their "true self." We propose that people can also infer whether they are being authentic from ambient feelings of fluency, or the subjective feeling of ease that corresponds to one's immediate experience, mental processing, or physical action. We report findings from four studies and a meta-analysis that support this view. Study 1 shows that experienced fluency during one’s most recent activity predicts authentic feelings independently of other relevant variables. In Study 2, participants’ recalled experiences of authenticity were also those that felt fluent. Study 3 was a pre-registered compliment to Study 2, and shows that participants' recalled experiences of fluency were also those that felt authentic. In a pre-registered Study 4, participants who generated self-defining attributes under cognitive load reported greater difficulty doing so and subsequently lower authenticity. Other attempts to manipulate fluency, reported in the Supplement, were successful in doing so, but did not produce reliable main effects on authenticity. Nevertheless, a robust correlation between self-reported fluency and authenticity was found in these studies. In Study 5, we meta-analyze this fluency-authenticity link using all relevant data collected during this project. We discuss how our phenomenological approach to authenticity can integrate, but also update, recent theorizing about the nature of authenticity and how this model can be used to further speculate about who and what can be authentic.

From Catholics performing the sign of the cross since the fourth century to Americans reciting the Pledge of Allegiance since the 1890s, group rituals (i.e., predefined sequences of symbolic actions) have strikingly consistent features over time. Seven studies (N = 4,213) document the sacrosanct nature of rituals: Because group rituals symbolize sacred group values, even minor alterations to them provoke moral outrage and punishment. In Pilot Studies A and B, fraternity members who failed to complete initiation activities that were more ritualistic elicited relatively greater moral outrage and hazing from their fraternity brothers. Study 1 uses secular holiday rituals to explore the dimensions of ritual alteration—both physical and psychological—that elicit moral outrage. Study 2 demonstrates that altering a ritual elicits outrage even beyond the extent to which the ritual alteration is seen as violating descriptive and injunctive norms. In Study 3, group members who viewed male circumcision as more ritualistic (i.e., Jewish versus Muslim participants) expressed greater moral outrage in response to a proposal to alter circumcision to make it safer. Study 4 uses the Pledge of Allegiance ritual to explore how the intentions of the person altering the ritual influence observers’ moral outrage and punishment. Finally, in Study 5, even minor alterations elicited comparable levels of moral outrage to major alterations of the Jewish Passover ritual. Across both religious and secular rituals, the more ingroup members believed that rituals symbolize sacred group values, the more they protected their rituals—by punishing those who violate them.

How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can decrease their service time, up to a point, to complete work more quickly. As the number of tasks increases, however, workers may also manage their workload by a different process—task selection. Drawing on research on workload, individual discretion, and behavioral decision making, we theorize and then test that under conditions of increased workload, individuals may choose to complete easier tasks to manage their load. We label this behavior task completion preference (TCP). Using six years of data from a hospital emergency department, we find that physicians engage in TCP, with implications for their performance. Specifically, TCP helps physicians manage variance in service times; however, although it initially appears to improve shift-level throughput volume, after adjusting for the complexity of the work completed, TCP is related to worse throughput. Moreover, we find that engaging in easier tasks compared with hard ones is related to lower learning in service times. We then turn to the laboratory to replicate conceptually the short-term task selection effect under increased workload and show that it occurs because of both fatigue and the sense of progress individuals get from task completion. These findings provide another mechanism for the workload-speedup effect from the literature. We also discuss implications for both the research and the practice of operations in building systems to help people succeed. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.

Honest reporting is essential for society to function well. However, people frequently lie when asked to provide information, such as misrepresenting their income to save money on taxes. A landmark finding published in PNAS [L. L. Shu, N. Mazar, F. Gino, D. Ariely, M. H. Bazerman, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 15197–15200 (2012)] provided evidence for a simple way of encouraging honest reporting: asking people to sign a veracity statement at the beginning instead of at the end of a self-report form. Since this finding was published, various government agencies have adopted this practice. However, in this project, we failed to replicate this result. Across five conceptual replications ( n = 4,559) and one highly powered, preregistered, direct replication ( n = 1,235) conducted with the authors of the original paper, we observed no effect of signing first on honest reporting. Given the policy applications of this result, it is important to update the scientific record regarding the veracity of these results.