The surprising underperformance of East Asians in US law and business schools: The liability of low assertiveness and the ameliorative potential of online classrooms.

SignificanceTo date, researchers and practitioners have focused on the academic challenges of underrepresented ethnic groups in the United States. In comparison, Asians have received limited attention, as they are commonly assumed to excel across all educational stages. Six large studies challenge this assumption by revealing that East Asians (but not South Asians) underperform in US law schools and business schools. This is not because East Asians are less academically motivated or less proficient in English but because their low verbal assertiveness is culturally incongruent with the assertiveness prized by US law and business schools. Online classes (via Zoom) mitigated East Asians' underperformance in courses emphasizing assertiveness and class participation. Educators should reexamine pedagogical practices to create a culturally inclusive classroom.

Why East Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States.

Well-educated and prosperous, Asians are called the "model minority" in the United States. However, they appear disproportionately underrepresented in leadership positions, a problem known as the "bamboo ceiling." It remains unclear why this problem exists and whether it applies to all Asians or only particular Asian subgroups. To investigate the mechanisms and scope of the problem, we compared the leadership attainment of the two largest Asian subgroups in the United States: East Asians (e.g., Chinese) and South Asians (e.g., Indians). Across nine studies (n = 11,030) using mixed methods (archival analyses of chief executive officers, field surveys in large US companies, student leader nominations and elections, and experiments), East Asians were less likely than South Asians and whites to attain leadership positions, whereas South Asians were more likely than whites to do so. To understand why the bamboo ceiling exists for East Asians but not South Asians, we examined three categories of mechanisms-prejudice (intergroup), motivation (intrapersonal), and assertiveness (interpersonal)-while controlling for demographics (e.g., birth country, English fluency, education, socioeconomic status). Analyses revealed that East Asians faced less prejudice than South Asians and were equally motivated by work and leadership as South Asians. However, East Asians were lower in assertiveness, which consistently mediated the leadership attainment gap between East Asians and South Asians. These results suggest that East Asians hit the bamboo ceiling because their low assertiveness is incongruent with American norms concerning how leaders should communicate. The bamboo ceiling is not an Asian issue, but an issue of cultural fit.

Mistaken identity: activating conservative political identities induces "conservative" financial decisions.

Four studies investigated whether activating a social identity can lead group members to choose options that are labeled in words associated with that identity. When political identities were made salient, Republicans (but not Democrats) became more likely to choose the gamble or investment option labeled "conservative." This shift did not occur in a condition in which the same options were unlabeled. Thus, the mechanism underlying the effect appears to be not activated identity-related values prioritizing low risk, but rather activated identity-related language (the group label "conservative"). Indeed, when political identities were salient, Republicans favored options labeled "conservative" regardless of whether the options were low or high risk. Finally, requiring participants to explain the label "conservative" before making their choice did not diminish the effect, which suggests that it does not merely reflect inattention to content or construct accessibility. We discuss the implications of these results for the literatures on identity, priming, choice, politics, and marketing.

Negotiators who give too much: unmitigated communion, relational anxieties, and economic costs in distributive and integrative bargaining.

A series of studies found that the personality dimension of unmitigated communion (H. L. Fritz & V. S. Helgeson, 1998) leads negotiators to make concessions to avoid straining relationships. Results indicate that even within the population of successful business executives, this dimension of relational anxiety can be identified distinctly from more general relational orientations, such as agreeableness, and that it distinctly predicts accommodating tendencies in everyday conflicts. In economic games, unmitigated communion predicts giving in contexts in which the relational norm of reciprocity applies, but not in contexts tapping instrumental or altruistic motives for cooperation. In distributive negotiations, the effect of unmitigated communion in lowering a negotiator's outcome is mediated by prenegotiation anxieties about relational strain and plans to make large concessions if needed to avoid impasse (lower reservation points). In integrative negotiations, high unmitigated communion on both sides of the negotiation dyad results in relational accommodation, evidenced by decreased success in maximizing economic joint gain but increased subjective satisfaction with the relationship.