Asking for less (but receiving more): Women avoid impasses and outperform men when negotiators have weak alternatives.

Both research and conventional wisdom suggest that, due to their relational orientation, women are less likely than men to engage in agentic and assertive behaviors, leading them to underperform in zero-sum, distributive negotiations where one party's gain is equivalent to the other party's loss. However, past research tends to neglect the costs of reaching impasse by excluding impasses from measures of negotiation performance. Departing from this convention, we incorporate the economic costs of impasses into measures of negotiation performance to provide a more holistic examination of negotiation outcomes. In so doing, we reveal a reversal of the oft-cited male performance advantage when obtaining an impasse is especially economically costly (as is the case when negotiators have weak negotiation alternatives). Specifically, we predicted that female negotiators would make less assertive first offers than men due to their more relational orientation and that these gender differences in offer assertiveness should result in women avoiding impasse more often than men. Since avoiding impasses should improve negotiation performance when negotiators are able to obtain a deal that is more valuable than their negotiation alternative, women's tendency to avoid impasses should improve their performance when negotiators have weak (vs. strong) alternatives. These predictions were supported in eight studies (three preregistered) across various negotiation contexts, comprising data from the television show Shark Tank (Study 1), four incentive-compatible negotiation simulations (Studies 2 and 3, Supplemental Studies), and a multistudy causal experimental chain (Supplemental Studies 4a-c). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Support for increasing low-wage workers' compensation: The role of fixed-growth mindsets about intelligence.

Approximately 44% of U.S. workers are low-wage workers. Recent years have witnessed a raging debate about whether to raise their minimum wages. Why do some decision-makers support raising wages and others do not? Ten studies (four preregistered) examined people's beliefs about the malleability of intelligence as a key antecedent. The more U.S. human resource managers (Study 1) and Indian business owners (Study 2) believed that people's intelligence can grow (i.e., had a growth mindset), the more they supported increasing low-wage workers' compensation. In key U.S. swing states (Study 3a), and a nationally representative sample (Study 3b), residents with a more growth mindset were more willing to support ballot propositions increasing the minimum wage and other compensation. Study 4 provided causal evidence. The next two studies confirmed the specificity of the predictor. People's beliefs about the malleability of intelligence, but not personality (Study 5a) or effort (Study 5b), predicted their support for increasing low-wage workers' compensation. Study 6 examined multiple potential mechanisms, including empathy, attributions for poverty, and environmental affordances. The relationship between growth mindset and support for raising low-wage workers' wages was explained by more situational rather than dispositional attributions for poverty. Finally, Studies 7a and 7b replicated the effect of growth mindset on support for increasing low-wage workers' compensation and provided confirmatory evidence for the mediator-situational, rather than dispositional, attributions of poverty. These findings suggest that growth mindsets about intelligence promote support for increasing low-wage workers' wages; we discuss the theoretical and practical implications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The mutual constitution of culture and psyche: The bidirectional relationship between individuals' perceived control and cultural tightness-looseness.

According to the theory of mutual constitution of culture and psyche, just as culture shapes people, individuals' psychological states can influence culture. We build on compensatory control theory, which suggests that low personal control can lead people to prefer societal systems that impose order, to examine the mutual constitution of personal control and cultural tightness. Specifically, we tested whether individuals' lack of personal control increases their preference for tighter cultures as a means of restoring order and predictability, and whether tighter cultures in turn reduce people's feelings of personal control. Seven studies (five preregistered) with participants from the United States, Singapore, and China examine this cycle of mutual constitution. Specifically, documenting the correlational link between person and culture, we found that Americans lower on personal control preferred to live in tighter states (Study 1). Chinese employees lower on personal control also desired more structure and preferred a tighter organizational culture (Study 2). Employing an experimental causal chain design, Studies 3-5 provided causal evidence for our claim that lack of control increases desire for tighter cultures via the need for structure. Finally, tracing the link back from culture to person, Studies 6a and 6b found that whereas tighter cultures decreased perceptions of individual personal control, they increased people's sense of collective control. Overall, the findings document the process of mutual constitution of culture and psyche: lack of personal control leads people to seek more structured, tighter cultures, and that tighter cultures, in turn, decrease people's sense of personal control but increase their sense of collective control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Reconciling female agentic advantage and disadvantage with the CADDIS measure of agency.

Contradictory findings about whether agentic women are penalized or rewarded persist in gender and leadership research. To account for these divergent effects, we distinguish between agentic traits that people believe female leaders ought to possess (i.e., agency prescriptions) and ought not possess (i.e., agency proscriptions). We draw on expectancy violation theory to suggest that an agentic advantage is elicited when women are perceived to violate agency prescriptions (e.g., competence), whereas an agentic disadvantage is elicited when they are perceived to violate agency proscriptions (e.g., dominance). We first developed and validated a new, six-factor measure of agency in Studies 1 and 2, CADDIS (i.e., Competent agency, Ambitious agency, Dominant agency, Diligent agency, Independent agency, and Self-assured agency). We theorized that these agency factors represented distinct agency prescriptions and proscriptions for men and women. In Studies 3-5, we found that this six-factor conceptualization of agency not only reconciles existing tensions within the gender and leadership literature, but also leads to a different understanding of past conclusions-an agentic advantage occurs when women are perceived to possess competent agency, diligent agency, and independent agency, and an agentic disadvantage occurs when women are perceived to possess dominant agency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Thought-control difficulty motivates structure seeking.

Struggling to control one's mind can change how the world appears. In prior studies testing the compensatory control theory, reduced control over the external environment motivated the search for perceptual patterns and other forms of structured knowledge, even in remote domains. Going further, the current studies test whether difficulty controlling thoughts similarly predicts structure seeking. As hypothesized, thought-control difficulty positively predicted perceptions of causal connections between remote events (Study 1a) and nonexistent objects in visual noise (Study 1b). This effect was mediated by aversive arousal (Study 2) and caused specifically by thought-control difficulty as distinct from general difficulty (Study 3). Study 4 replicated the effect with a sample of meditators learning to control their thoughts, showing that thought-control difficulty was a powerful predictor of structure seeking. These findings reveal a novel form of motivated perception. (PsycINFO Database Record