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  • Posted by Jason Hensel at
    12:00AM 02/14/2013 • 0 Comments

    How to Avoid Being BlindSided by Unexpected Challenges

    Not every company has an Iron Man, but many have a Tony Stark—a highly powerful, intensely-focused individual who often ignores risk in order to achieve his or her goals.

    That’s usually a good thing—as long as companies make sure to also hire a Pepper Potts to keep their powerful leaders grounded, according to new research co-authored by a Brigham Young University (BYU) business professor.

    Katie Liljenquist

    Katie Liljenquist

    “Organizations need to anticipate the tendency of their most powerful members to leap without looking,” said study co-author Katie Liljenquist, a professor of organizational leadership at BYU's Marriott School of Management. “The remedy is to surround them with people who can see other angles, or can play a devil’s advocate role to point out risk. Interestingly, it is the low-power members of the organization who are best equipped to do this.”

    The study, appearing online ahead of print in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that powerful people are less likely to see constraints in pursuing their goals. Meanwhile, their low-power counterparts are more aware of the risks around them.

    Liljenquist says the phenomenon mirrors the animal kingdom: Predators have evolved to have an extremely narrow eye focus for tracking prey, but this compromises their peripheral vision. Meanwhile, prey animals sacrifice such visual focus for more sensitive peripheral vision that tracks movement and potential threats in the surrounding environment.

    “In business settings you need both,” Liljenquist said. “You need the people with that unfettered confidence and optimism and the willingness to take big risks, but you need those low-power individuals who say, ‘Hey wait a second. Let’s identify the pitfalls.’”

    Donald Trump is a perfect example of a leader whose confidence guides business decisions. During the first season of his reality show, The Apprentice, Trump offered the winner a chance to manage the construction of the Trump Tower in Chicago—even though the tower hadn’t been fully approved yet.

    “Trump didn’t even have clearance to build that tower yet,” said study lead author Jennifer Whitson. “It was that incredible confidence. He didn’t have all his ducks in a row yet, but he acted—and it worked out for him.”

    Liljenquist says that failure to consider constraints can carry weighty repercussions, such as the housing market crises and bank failures of 2008 that caused the worst economic recession since the 1920s.

    “Although blindness to constraints may make the powerful more willing to pursue their goals, their willingness to leap before they look may also sow the seeds of their own fall and the fall of those who depend on them,” she said. “Power often perpetuates itself and can lead to great things, but when powerful people are blind-sided by unexpected challenges, they may crash and burn.” 

    The 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster is a classic example of how power can be blinding. On that fateful day, powerful individuals doggedly pursued launch while ignoring the low-power employees who tried to be a voice of warning about the possibility of mechanical failures.

    The study was led by Whitson, an assistant professor of business at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. Other contributing researchers are from Columbia University, New York University, Stanford University and the University of Colorado-Boulder.

    (Story materials and images from BYU.)



  • Posted by Jason Hensel at
    12:00AM 06/08/2012 • 3 Comments

    Positive Fantasies Lead People to Acquire Biased Info

    A new study has found that when we fantasize about dream vacations before they are possible, we tend to overlook the negatives—thus influencing our decision-making down the line.

    "We were interested in the effects of positive fantasies—what happens when people imagine an idealized, best-case-scenario version of the future, compared to when they imagine a less idealized version,” said Heather Barry Kappes of New York University, co-author of the study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. "This is one of the first papers to examine selective information acquisition at this early stage, before people are seriously considering a possibility.”

    For example, imagine that you would like to take a trip to Australia this year but think you are very unlikely to do so—you have no more vacation time left, cannot afford it or would rather save up for a new car. But you still daydream about how nice it would be to see the Australian Outback and relax on the beaches, perhaps without thinking about the long plane ride there or the poisonous animals. Those daydreams, Kappes says, have powerful effects.

    To test those effects, Kappes and co-author Gabriele Oettingen asked people to imagine a particular future about one of three topics: wearing glamorous high-heeled shoes, making money in the stock market or taking a vacation. To induce positive fantasies for each topic, the study participants were prompted to think about how great it would be to do each activity. In the control condition, participants also imagined experiencing the future, but were prompted to think about the negatives as well, with questions like "Would it really be so great?” In both conditions, participants wrote down what they were thinking for the researchers to ensure they were engaged in the imagery.

    After that exercise, the researchers offered the participants a choice of different types of information. For example, participants could browse a website describing the positive and negative health consequences of wearing high heels, and researchers noted how much more time they spent reading about positive versus negative consequences. Or, they could choose which of five (fictitious) Tripadvisor.com reviews they wanted to read, and researchers recorded whether they chose one that was more pro-trip (i.e., five stars) or con-trip (i.e., one star).

    Kappes' team found that for each topic, imagining the idealized version made people prefer to learn about the pros rather than the cons of the future event. 

    "These effects are pronounced when people are not seriously considering pursuing a given future,” Kappes said.

    The work has important implications for even the most deliberate of decision-makers. 

    "When people are seriously considering implementing a decision like taking a trip, they often engage in careful deliberations about the pros versus cons,” Kappes said. "Our work suggests that before getting to this point, positive fantasies might lead people to acquire biased information—to learn more about the pros rather than the cons. Thus, even if people deliberate very carefully on the information they've acquired, they could still make poor decisions.”

    People need to be aware of these effects to ensure that they acquire balanced information before it is time to make a decision, she says. The study also contributes to a larger body of research about the powerful consequences of mental imagery—and shows that positive thinking may not always be best. 

    "Although there are benefits to imagining a positive future, there are also drawbacks, and it's important to recognize them in order to most effectively pursue our goals,” she said.

    (Story materials provided by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology)



  • Posted by Jason Hensel at
    12:00AM 09/16/2011 • 0 Comments

    Overconfidence is Good for You

    We recently shared with you news that ambition drives happiness. Now a new study shows that an inflated belief that we can easily meet challenges or win conflicts is actually good for us.

    Researchers have shown for the first time that overconfidence actually beats accurate assessments in a wide variety of situations, be it sport, business or even war.

    However, this bold approach also risks wreaking ever-greater havoc. The authors cite the 2008 financial crash and the 2003 Iraq war as just two examples of when extreme overconfidence backfired.

    A team from the University of Edinburgh and the University of California, San Diego used a mathematical model to simulate the effects of overconfidence over generations. It pitted overconfident, accurate and underconfident strategies against each other.

    A paper published in Nature shows that overconfidence frequently brings rewards, as long as spoils of conflict are sufficiently large compared with the costs of competing for them. In contrast, people with unbiased, accurate perceptions usually fare worse.

    The implications are that over a long period of time the evolutionary principal of natural selection is likely to have favoured a bias toward overconfidence.

    Therefore people with the mentality of someone such as boxer Muhammad Ali would have left more descendants than those with the mindset of film maker Woody Allen.

    The evolutionary model also showed that overconfidence becomes greatest in the face of high levels of uncertainty and risk. When we face unfamiliar enemies or new technologies, overconfidence becomes an even better strategy.

    Would you say you're an overconfident person? Has it helped or harmed you?

    (Story materials provided by the University of Edinburgh.)



  • Posted by Jason Hensel at
    12:00AM 09/13/2011 • 1 Comments

    Females Remember Deep Male Voices

    According to a new study, women remember deeper male voices more than higher toned voices. Oh, wow, that sounds like a study straight out of the 1950s, but really, there's some truth to it. Also, it doesn't have to be just females remembering male voices. I still remember 15 years later my friend Ron Heck's voice, whose tone was deep and warm like a late-night radio DJ's voice. 

    In a series of two experiments, David Smith and colleagues from the University of Aberdeen in the U.K. showed that memory in women is sensitive to male voice pitch, a cue important for mate choice because it can indicate genetic quality as well as signal behavioral traits undesirable in a long-term partner. These could include antisocial traits and lack of emotional warmth for example. In order to evaluate potential partners, women appear to rely on their memories to rapidly provide information about the attributes and past behavior of potential partners.

    In the first experiment, 45 women were initially shown an image of a single object while listening to the name of the object spoken either by a high or low pitch male or female manipulated voice. They were then shown two similar but not identical versions of the object and asked to identify the one they had seen earlier. The women were also asked which voice they preferred.

    In the second experiment, as well as manipulated voices, the researchers used real male and female voices to test how 46 new women rated the voices and how they scored on object memory.

    In both cases, the authors found that women had a strong preference for the low pitch male voice and remembered objects more accurately when they have been introduced by the deep male voice.

    "Our findings demonstrate that women's memory is enhanced with lower pitch male voices, compared with the less attractive raised pitch male voices," Smith said. "Our two experiments indicate for the first time that signals from the opposite-sex that are important for mate choice also affect the accuracy of women's memory."

    The research is published online in Springer's journal, Memory & Cognition.

    Think about it: Do you remember deeper voices more often then higher voices? 



  • Posted by Jason Hensel at
    12:00AM 09/12/2011 • 0 Comments

    Seeing Yourself in Others

    It seems like we're all drawn to ourselves, because if we're not sitting next to people that look like us, then we're convinced that a member of a group looks like, well, ourselves. 

    A recent study illustrated this by asking, "What does a typical European face look like according to Europeans?" It all depends on which European you ask. Germans think the typical European looks more German; Portuguese people think the typical European looks more Portuguese. That’s the conclusion of the study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science. The results show how people think about groups they belong to.

    Other studies have found that when people choose typical characteristics for a group they’re in, they’ll pick characteristics more like themselves. But that research was done using words. Roland Imhoff and Rainer Banse of the University of Bonn, Ron Dotsch and Daniël H.J. Wigboldus of Radboud University Nijmegen and Mauro Bianchi of the University Institute of Lisbon chose to take a different approach: pictures.

    The researchers recruited two sets of participants in Germany and Portugal. Each person sat in front of a computer for about 20 minutes looking at pairs of pictures—770 pairs in all. Every picture was based on the same composite photograph of a man, but each had been computer-manipulated in a different way to introduce noise, distorting the picture and the man’s features. Each time, the participant was supposed to pick the picture they thought looked more European. The researchers averaged the pictures that were chosen in each group to come up with one average picture for the Portuguese group and one for the German group.

    The average picture created from the Portuguese participants’ opinions looks darker, with wider-set eyes. The face created by the Germans has lighter hair and looks more German. The researchers had other people rate the two pictures and found that these observations held up—Germans had come up with a “typical European” face that looked more German, while Portuguese people thought of the “typical European” as more Portuguese-looking.

    It may also be that this is just a sort of a mental shortcut people use to think of an abstract concept, such as “European” or “America,” Imhoff says. It may also be that people are expressing a kind of subtle belief that they think their group is better than others. 

    “It has been claimed that I can elevate my own group by claiming it’s particularly typical,” Imhoff said. 

    This could have implications for racial profiling. For example, if a white police officer thinks of “British” as someone who is white like him, he may be more suspicious of someone who doesn’t look like that. Much more research is needed to find out if that’s true, Imhoff says.

    (Story materials provided by the Association for Psychological Science.)



  • Posted by Christa Schelter at
    12:00AM 09/09/2011 • 0 Comments

    More Ambition, Greater Satisfaction

    Recent research out of the University of California-Riverside suggests that ambition drives happiness.

    Assistant marketing professor Cecile K. Cho concluded that consumers who set ambitious goals have a greater level of satisfaction compared to those who set conservative goals.

    Two experiments were conducted to compare people who set ambitious goals to those who set conservative goals. They focused on situations in which goals were achieved, and measured the level of satisfaction with the achieved goals.

    In the first experiment, 134 participants were asked to set a target rate of return that they would be satisfied with and asked to pick from a percentage range of 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 or 20. Low goal setters were defined as those who set the rate at 14 percent or lower.  High goal setters were those who set the rate at greater than 14 percent.

    Participants were then asked to allocate their US$5,400 budget by picking three of 20 fictitious stocks presented to them. After a 10-minute filler task, participants received the return of their stock portfolio, handwritten by the experimenter so it matched their goal. Participants were led to believe their stock allocation had been entered into a database to get actual returns.

    The experimenters then concocted three feedback scenarios.

    In the first one, only the stock performance information was provided. This is called the “default” condition of interest. In the second one, the participants were first told the typical return of stocks was 6 percent to 20 percent and then told how their stocks performed. In the last scenario, participants were first reminded what their goal was and then told how their stocks performed. Participants were then asked to rate their satisfaction on 9-point scales.

    Of interest is whether all participants, who achieve their goals, are similarly happy. Existing research would predict that those who achieve their goals should be satisfied. Results suggested otherwise.

    In the first “default” scenario, high goal setters average satisfaction was 7.85 while low goal setters were at 6.53.

    In the third scenario, where the range of possible outcomes was reiterated, a similarly large gap occurred between high-goal setters (8.57) and low goal setters (6.98).

    In the second scenario, where participants were reminded of their goal, the gap in happiness level between the two groups disappeared, with high goal setters at 7.72 and low goal setters at 7.46.

    This suggested that when people set goals, they don’t necessarily recall this goal to evaluate their performance, but recruit a higher comparison point to do so. This upward comparison process likely negatively impacts their satisfaction with the performance of their portfolio.

    A second experiment involving puzzles found similar results.

    “The moral of the story is don’t sell yourself short,” Cho said. “Aim high.”

    (Story materials provided by the University of California-Riverside.)



  • Posted by Jason Hensel at
    12:00AM 08/15/2011 • 5 Comments

    Playing Nice Earns You Less Money

    Hey jerkface! What? You don't like my tone? I'm just trying to increase my income, so don't hate.

    Research presented during the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in San Antonio, Aug. 14-16, finds that agreeable workers have considerably lower incomes than less agreeable ones, and that the gap is especially wide among men. Nice women may not earn quite as much as less-nice women, but, when it comes to men, disagreeable men simply leave agreeable ones in the dust.

    "Nice guys do not necessarily finish last, but they do finish a distant second in terms of earnings," said the study's authors, Beth A. Livingston of Cornell University, Timothy A. Judge of the University of Notre Dame and Charlice Hurst of the University of Western Ontario. They find that "men who are one standard deviation [roughly 20 percentage points] below the mean on agreeableness earn an average of 18.31 percent (US$9,772) more than men one standard deviation above the mean on agreeableness. Meanwhile, the 'disagreeableness premium' for women was only 5.47 percent ($1,828). Thus, the income premium for disagreeableness is more than three times stronger for men than for women."

    The professors concede the finding to be a bit puzzling. 

    "Given the increasing reliance of organizations on teams, it would seem that people high in agreeableness would have at least a slight economic advantage over those low in agreeableness," the wrote. 

    Why, then, have scholars not "offered more than a minimal explanation" for its absence? To a significant extent, the study suggests, because they have not fully appreciated the powerful effect of masculine stereotypes on men's earnings.

    "Disagreeable men reap a double benefit," the professors write. "Their disagreeableness helps them better translate their human capital into earnings advantage, and the same behavior conforms to expectations of 'masculine' behavior." 

    By the same token "agreeable men are disproportionately disadvantaged" because their agreeableness "conflicts with social norms of masculinity."

    Not that this anomaly provides an opportunity for women to greatly close the earnings gap between the sexes. 

    "Seen from the perspective of gender equity, even the nice guys seem to be making out quite well relative to either agreeable or disagreeable women," the professors wrote. "Thus, exhortations for women not to be nice might be overblown. Nice girls might not get rich, but 'mean' girls do not do much better. Even controlling for human capital, marital status and occupation, highly disagreeable women do not earn as much as highly agreeable men."

    Since men are most affected by the business world's continuing prejudice against agreeableness, how should they respond to the study? 

    "Certainly nice guys should forswear any wholesale personality makeover, even if such a thing is possible," Livingston said. "What would obviously make sense is to maintain their good nature without compromising their self-interest. For example, suppose they contribute significantly to the success of a project. Agreeable people sometimes have a tendency to hide their light under a bushel. But there are ways to make sure that one's contribution is recognized without being disagreeable about it.

    "In the end, agreeable folks may make less money than they deserve, but even disagreeable people know that money isn't everything," she continued. "Leo Durocher could certainly be disagreeable, but even he insisted he didn't really mean that nice guys always finish last."

    Okay, then. Sorry about saying jerkface. You're actually a really nice person!

    (Story materials provided by the Academy of Management.)



  • Posted by Jason Hensel at
    12:00AM 08/11/2011 • 0 Comments

    Narcissists Aren't Good Leaders

    Narcissistic qualities—confidence, dominance, authority and self-esteem—can make someone a good leader, as many people believe. Is this a valid belief?

    “Our research shows that the opposite seems to be true,” said Barbora Nevicka, a Ph.D. candidate in organizational psychology, describing a new study she undertook with University of Amsterdam colleagues Femke Ten Velden, Annebel De Hoogh and Annelies Van Vianen. 

    The study found that the narcissists’ preoccupation with their own brilliance inhibits a crucial element of successful group decision-making and performance: the free and creative exchange of information and ideas. The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

    The study recruited 150 participants and divided them into groups of three. One person was randomly assigned to be the group’s leader. All were told they could contribute advice, but that the leader was responsible for making the decision. Then they undertook a group task: choosing a job candidate. Of 45 items of information about the candidate, some were given to all three and some to only one of the participants.

    The experiment was designed so that using only the information all three were privy to, the group would opt for a lesser candidate. Sharing all the information, including what each possessed exclusively, would lead to the best choice. Afterwards, the participants completed questionnaires. The leaders’ questions measured narcissism; the others assessed the leaders’ authority and effectiveness. All checked off the items among the 45 that they knew—indicating how much the group had shared—and rated how well they’d exchanged information.

    Experimenters tallied the number of shared items, noted the objective quality of the decision and analyzed these data in relation to the leader’s narcissism.

    As expected, the group members rated the most narcissistic leaders as most effective. But they were wrong. In fact, the groups led by the greatest egotists chose the worse candidate for the job.   

    “The narcissistic leaders had a very negative effect on their performance," Nevicka said. "They inhibited the communication because of self-centeredness and authoritarianism.”

    Narcissism can sometimes be useful in a leader, Nevicka says. In a crisis, for instance, people feel that a strong, dominant person will take control and do the right thing, “and that may reduce uncertainty and diminish stress.”

    But in the everyday life of an organization, “communication—sharing of information, perspectives and knowledge—is essential to making good decisions. In brainstorming groups, project teams, government committees, each person brings something new. That’s the benefit of teams. That’s what creates a good outcome.” Good leaders facilitate communication by asking questions and summarizing the conversation—something narcissists are too self-involved to do.

    Nevicka says the research has implications beyond the workplace—for instance, in politics. 

    “Narcissists are very convincing," she said. "They do tend to be picked as leaders. There’s the danger that people can be so wrong based on how others project themselves. You have to ask: Are the competencies they project valid, or are they merely in the eyes of the beholder?”

    (Story materials provided by the Association for Psychological Science.)



  • Posted by Jason Hensel at
    12:00AM 08/11/2011 • 0 Comments

    Service Interactions as Theater

    There are many people in the world who argue that life is a game, a constant exchange of status. For validation of this belief, look no further than the hospitality industry.

    “When we think about a service context in a high-end hospitality industry such as a spa, a luxury hotel or a cruise, the image that comes to our mind is a serene, peaceful setting with numerous friendly, empathetic service providers working hard to take care of the customers,” wrote authors Tuba Üstüner (Colorado State University) and Craig J. Thompson (University of Wisconsin–Madison) in a new study about status exchange in the Journal of Consumer Research.

    In this imagined world, satisfied, happy customers treat service providers with respect and reward them with generous tips. However, the reality behind that idyllic vision is quite different, the authors explain.

    The authors interviewed consumers and employees in the hairdressing industry in metropolitan regions of Turkey, which caters to affluent and secular clients. Hairdressers are often young men, who come from rural, religiously conservative areas. 

    “Hairdressing is regarded as a working-class trade, and hence, its labor pool is largely constituted by rural migrants, squatters, and other members of the urban underclass,” the authors said. 

    What happens when these men (most of whom did not advance beyond primary school) are called upon to serve middle- or upper-middle-class women? Turkish salons can include valet parking, music and food and beverages. The salon’s employees spend up to three hours pampering each client. But class roles are strictly enforced, and consumers set the boundaries for conversation and interaction.

    “These service interactions are a performance, much like a theatrical one where each party has its roles to play,” the authors wrote. “But the scripts are not neutral; rather, they reflect the customers’ desire to reenact their class-based dominance over their hairdressers.” 

    However, service workers are not powerless in these situations. 

    “On the contrary, the game that is being played is what we call an interdependent status game, where customers are as much dependent on the service providers as service providers are on customers,” the authors conclude.

    How often do you play the status game?

    (Story materials provided by the University of Chicago Press Journals.)



  • Posted by Jason Hensel at
    12:00AM 07/30/2011 • 0 Comments

    Mimicry May Not Always Be Positive

    In human relationships, mimicry can act as a kind of social glue and foster rapport in subtle ways. If, for example, Amy and Ted are engaged in a conversation, Amy might mirror some of Ted’s mannerisms, leading Ted to like Amy more, trust her, and think of Amy as more similar, even though both are unaware that any mimicry took place. All this has been confirmed by much of psychological research, leading to a popular perception (and advice) that imitating is good for you. New research, though, suggests that mimicry may not always lead to positive social outcomes. In fact, sometimes not mimicking is the smarter thing to do.

    In a study to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Piotr Winkielman and Liam Kavanagh, along with philosophers Chris Suhler and Patricia Churchland at the University of California, San Diego, noted that there are often observers to the mimicry that takes place in dyadic relationships. This led them to wonder whether there might be certain situations in which mimicry comes at a reputational cost. That is, are there some cases in which an observer might think less of a person for mimicking the behavior of another, even when the mimicry is not consciously noticed by the observer? After all, Winkielman argues, mimicry is a crucial part of social intelligence and “social intelligence is not only knowing how to mimic, but also when not to mimic.”

    Participants in the study were asked to watch several videotaped interviews staged by the experimenters. Some participants saw videos in which the interviewer was cordial and other participants saw videos in which the same interviewer was condescending. Importantly, in some videos the interviewee mimicked the interviewer’s simple, innocuous mannerisms, such as chin-touching or leg-crossing, and in other videos the interviewee showed no mimicry. After watching each video, participants evaluated the interviewee on general competence, trustworthiness and likability.

    Despite the fact that the participants reported no awareness of mimicry, it still influenced their evaluations of the interviewee. Critically, participants judged the interviewee who mimicked the condescending interviewer to be less competent than the non-mimicking interviewee. In other words, in the eyes of the outside observers, the imitator of the undesirable model incurred reputational costs—their mirroring was seen as an error.

    Interestingly, an additional experiment showed that visually obscuring the interviewer in the same videos eliminates the negative effects of mimicry, showing that observers use alignment in body language to make their judgments. Furthermore, the reputational cost of mimicking a condescending interviewer disappeared when participants first read positive information about his character, suggesting that the observers care about the deeper aspects of the person.

    Winkielman says that this research indicates that mimicry is more nuanced than previously thought. Our social lives are incredibly complex and in order to build or maintain relationships we have to keep in mind “who is competent, high status, trustworthy, who is friends with whom.” We can make these determinations partly by observing who imitates whom. As such, the benefits of mimicry depend very much on the social context. 

    “It’s good to have the capacity to mimic, but an important part of social intelligence is knowing how to deploy this capacity in a selective, intelligent, context-dependent manner," Winkielman said. "Sometimes, the socially intelligent thing to do is not to imitate.”

    (Story materials provided by the Association for Psychological Science.)



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