The Humor Advantage: Humorous Bragging Benefits Job Candidates and Entrepreneurs.

From job candidates to entrepreneurs, people often face an inherent tension between the need to share personal accomplishments and the need to avoid appearing arrogant. We propose that humorbragging-incorporating self-enhancing humor into self-promoting communications-can signal warmth and competence simultaneously, leading to instrumental benefits. Four studies explored humorbragging as a potential solution to the self-promotion paradox. Study 1 demonstrated that a humorbragging (vs. self-promoting) resume attracted more hiring interest from recruiters. Study 2 showed that perceived warmth and competence mediate the positive effect of humorbragging on hiring intentions. Study 3 found that humorbragging entrepreneurs achieved greater success securing funding compared to entrepreneurs who used other kinds of humor. Finally, Studies 4a to 4c established that the positive effect of humorbragging on hiring intentions is unique to self-enhancing humor. Overall, the current research establishes the instrumental benefits of humorbragging and explains why and when it functions as an effective impression management strategy.

Once bitten, twice shy: The negative spillover effect of seeing betrayal of trust.

From financial improprieties to fraudulent claims, scandals and trust transgressions can incite feelings of betrayal. Can these negative reactions spillover and taint other entities that were not involved in the original transgression? We conducted six studies to investigate this question directly. Results consistently demonstrated that people who had perceived a recent betrayal by a transgressing trustee were significantly less likely to trust a new entity that shared nominal group membership with the previous trust transgressor. This betrayal spillover effect occurs both in economic game environments and can be applied to real-world charitable contexts in which people made actual donation decisions or assessed the likelihood that a charity would be embroiled in a scandal in the future. Importantly, the betrayal spillover effect only spilled over to those that shared a nominal group identity with the original trust transgressor, and this behavior was driven by a sense of distrust stemming from people's expectations having been violated. By systematically investigating whether and to what extent betrayals can contaminate subsequent trust development, this research provides a deeper and broadened understanding on how one may be vicariously affected by other entities' trust indiscretions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

From slacktivism to activism: Improving the commitment power of e-pledges for prosocial causes.

Prosocial organizations increasingly rely on e-pledges to promote their causes and secure commitment. Yet their effectiveness is controversial. Epitomized by UNICEF's "Likes Don't Save Lives" campaign, the threat of slacktivism has led some organizations to forsake social media as a potential platform for garnering commitment. We proposed and investigated a novel e-pledging method that may enable organizations to capitalize on the benefits of e-pledging without compromising on its mass outreach potential. In two pilot studies, we first explored whether and why conventional e-pledges may not be as effective as intended. Building on those insights, we conducted one field and two lab experiments to test our proposed e-pledge intervention. Importantly, the field study demonstrated the effectiveness of the intervention for commitment behavior across a 3-month period. The laboratory experiments provided a deeper and more refined mechanism understanding of the effect and ruled out effort, novelty, and social interaction mindset as alternative explanations for why the intervention may be effective. As technological innovations continue to redefine how people interact with the world, this research sheds light on a promising method for transforming a simple virtual acknowledgment into deeper commitment-and, ideally, to action.

Naysaying and negativity promote initial power establishment and leadership endorsement.

Conventional wisdom holds that leaders should behave in a supportive and positive manner. Yet the past decade has also seen a rise in naysayers' ascent to power. This research investigates the intriguing possibility that although we may want our leaders to be cheerleaders, we instead empower naysayers. Integrating theoretical perspectives from psychology, leadership, and organizational theory, I present the Naysaying-Agency-Power-Leadership Efficacy (NAPLE) model, which captures the causal link between naysaying and power, and examine leadership efficacy as a downstream implication. Eleven studies provide empirical support for the model. Ten experimental studies demonstrate that naysaying and power are causally linked through the perception of agency. An additional study analyzed 518 eligible voters' assessments of actual statements from U.S. presidential debates between 1980 and 2008. Results reveal that voters perceived negative and critical presidential candidates as more powerful and, in turn, were more willing to vote for them; this finding was robust to controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, political orientation, and voting history. By systematically establishing that naysaying induces power at the onset, and why, these findings illuminate an unanticipated, yet formidable, determinant of power. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Goldilocks contract: The synergistic benefits of combining structure and autonomy for persistence, creativity, and cooperation.

Contracts are commonly used to regulate a wide range of interactions and relationships. Yet relying on contracts as a mechanism of control often comes at a cost to motivation. Integrating theoretical perspectives from psychology, economics, and organizational theory, we explore this control-motivation dilemma inherent in contracts and present the Contract-Autonomy-Motivation-Performance-Structure (CAMPS) model, which highlights the synergistic benefits of combining structure and autonomy. The model proposes that subtle reductions in the specificity of a contract's language can boost autonomy, which increases intrinsic motivation and improves a range of desirable behaviors. Nine field and laboratory experiments found that less specific contracts increased task persistence, creativity, and cooperation, both immediately and longitudinally, because they boosted autonomy and intrinsic motivation. These positive effects, however, only occurred when contracts provided sufficient structure. Furthermore, the effects were limited to control-oriented clauses (i.e., legal clauses), and did not extend to coordination-oriented clauses (i.e., technical clauses). That is, there were synergistic benefits when a contract served as a scaffold that combined structure with general clauses. Overall, the current model and experiments identify a low-cost solution to the common problem of regulating social relationships: finding the right amount of contract specificity promotes desirable outcomes, including behaviors that are notoriously difficult to contract. The CAMPS model and the current set of empirical findings explain why, when, and how contracts can be used as an effective motivational tool. (PsycINFO Database Record

Economic Insecurity Increases Physical Pain.

The past decade has seen a rise in both economic insecurity and frequency of physical pain. The current research reveals a causal connection between these two growing and consequential social trends. In five studies, we found that economic insecurity produced physical pain and reduced pain tolerance. In a sixth study, with data from 33,720 geographically diverse households across the United States, economic insecurity predicted consumption of over-the-counter painkillers. The link between economic insecurity and physical pain emerged when people experienced the insecurity personally (unemployment), when they were in an insecure context (they were informed that their state had a relatively high level of unemployment), and when they contemplated past and future economic insecurity. Using both experimental-causal-chain and measurement-of-mediation approaches, we also established that the psychological experience of lacking control helped generate the causal link from economic insecurity to physical pain. Meta-analyses including all of our studies testing the link from economic insecurity to physical pain revealed that this link is reliable. Overall, the findings show that it physically hurts to be economically insecure.

How decisions happen: focal points and blind spots in interdependent decision making.

Decision makers often simplify decision problems by ignoring readily available information. The current multimethod research investigated which types of information about interdependence situations are psychologically prominent to decision makers and which tend to go unnoticed. Study 1 used eye-tracking measures to investigate how decision makers allocate their attention in interdependence situations and revealed that individuals fixated on mutual cooperation earlier and longer as compared with alternative combinations of strategies and outcomes. In addition, participants' behavioral cooperation was consistent with their attention allocation. Study 2 introduced a novel information-search paradigm: Participants exchanged yes/no questions and answers to discover which of 25 different games their counterpart chose. Analyzing the contents of participants' questions showed that, consistent with Study 1, participants focused primarily on desirable outcomes and symmetric behavioral choices. Study 3 revealed that outcome desirability is a robust basis of psychological prominence across different types of social relations; in contrast, the psychological prominence of symmetry was moderated by the nature of social relations. Study 4 revealed that whether different bases of psychological prominence directed individuals' attention to the same aspects of the decision-making task moderated the effect of information availability on decision latency and cooperation rates. Taken together, these findings contribute to the mapping of bounded rationality, demonstrate how people think about their interdependence, and enhance our understanding of how decisions happen.

Mental models at work: cognitive causes and consequences of conflict in organizations.

This research investigated the reciprocal relationship between mental models of conflict and various forms of dysfunctional social relations in organizations, including experiences of task and relationship conflicts, interpersonal hostility, workplace ostracism, and abusive supervision. We conceptualize individual differences in conflict construals as reflecting variation in people's belief structures about conflict and explore how different elements in people's associative networks-in particular, their beliefs about their best and worst strategy in conflict-relate to their personality, shape their experiences of workplace conflict, and influence others' behavioral intentions toward them. Five studies using a variety of methods (including cross-sectional surveys, a 12-week longitudinal diary study, and an experiment) show that the best strategy beliefs relate in theoretically meaningful ways to individuals' personality, shape social interactions and relationships significantly more than the worst strategy beliefs, and are updated over time as a result of individuals' ongoing experiences of conflict.

Life or death decisions: framing the call for help.

BACKGROUND: Chronic blood shortages in the U.S. would be alleviated by small increases, in percentage terms, of people donating blood. The current research investigated the effects of subtle changes in charity-seeking messages on the likelihood of people responses to a call for help. We predicted that "avoid losses" messages would lead to more helping behavior than "promote gains" messages would. METHOD: Two studies investigated the effects of message framing on helping intentions and behaviors. With the help and collaboration of the Red Cross, Study 1, a field experiment, directly assessed the effectiveness of a call for blood donations that was presented as either death-preventing (losses) or life-saving (gains), and as being of either more or less urgent need. With the help and collaboration of a local charity, Study 2, a lab experiment, assessed the effects of the gain-versus-loss framing of a donation-soliciting flyer on individuals' expectations of others' monetary donations as well their own volunteering behavior. Study 2 also assessed the effects of three emotional motivators - feelings of empathy, positive affect, and relational closeness. RESULT: Study 1 indicated that, on a college campus, describing blood donations as a way to "prevent a death" rather than "save a life" boosted the donation rate. Study 2 showed that framing a charity's appeals as helping people to avoid a loss led to larger expected donations, increased intentions to volunteer, and more helping behavior, independent of other emotional motivators. CONCLUSION: This research identifies and demonstrates a reliable and effective method for increasing important helping behaviors by providing charities with concrete ideas that can effectively increase helping behavior generally and potentially death-preventing behavior in particular.

Mind games: the mental representation of conflict.

Perception and misperception play a pivotal role in conflict and negotiation. We introduce a framework that explains how people think about their outcome interdependence in conflict and negotiation and how their views shape their behavior. Seven studies show that people's mental representations of conflict are predictably constrained to a small set of possibilities with important behavioral and social consequences. Studies 1 and 2 found that, when prompted to represent a conflict in matrix form, more than 70% of the people created 1 of 4 archetypal mixed-motive games (out of 576 possibilities): Maximizing Difference, Assurance, Chicken, and Prisoner's Dilemma. Study 3 demonstrated that these mental representations relate in predictable ways to negotiators' fixed-pie perceptions. Studies 4-6 showed that these mental representations shape individuals' behavior and interactions with others, including cooperation, perspective taking, and use of deception in negotiation, and through them, conflict's outcomes. Study 7 found that the games that people think they are playing influence how their counterparts see them, as well as their counterparts' negotiation expectations. Overall, the findings document noteworthy regularities in people's mental representations of outcome interdependence in conflict and illustrate that 4 archetypal games can encapsulate fundamental psychological processes that emerge repeatedly in conflict and negotiation.

Status conferral in intergroup social dilemmas: behavioral antecedents and consequences of prestige and dominance.

Bridging the literatures on social dilemmas, intergroup conflict, and social hierarchy, the authors systematically varied the intergroup context in which social dilemmas were embedded to investigate how costly contributions to public goods influence status conferral. They predicted that contribution behavior would have opposite effects on 2 forms of status-prestige and dominance-depending on its consequences for the self, in-group and out-group members. When the only way to benefit in-group members was by harming out-group members (Study 1), contributions increased prestige and decreased dominance, compared with free-riding. Adding the option of benefitting in-group members without harming out-group members (Study 2) decreased the prestige and increased the dominance of those who chose to benefit in-group members via intergroup competition. Finally, sharing resources with both in-group and out-group members decreased perceptions of both prestige and dominance, compared with sharing them with in-group members only (Study 3). Prestige and dominance differentially mediated the effects of contribution behavior on leader election, exclusion from the group, and choices of a group representative for an intergroup competition. Taken together, these findings show that the well-established relationship between contribution and status is moderated by both the intergroup context and the conceptualization of status.

The push and pull of temptation: the bidirectional influence of temptation on self-control.

This article examines how people respond to the emergence of temptation in their environment. Three studies demonstrated that how people respond to temptation depends critically on their visceral state--whether or not they are actively experiencing visceral drives such as hunger, drug craving, or sexual arousal. We found that when people were in a "cold," nonvisceral state, the presence of temptation prompted cognition to support self-control. However, when people were in a "hot," visceral state, temptation prompted the same cognitive processes to support impulsive behavior. Study 1 examined how heterosexual men's level of sexual arousal influences their attention to attractive women. Study 2 examined whether satiated and craving smokers would engage in motivated reasoning in order to dampen (or enhance) the appeal of smoking when confronted with the temptation to smoke. Study 3 tested the boundaries of the interaction between visceral state and temptation.