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Selfishly benevolent or benevolently selfish? When self-interest undermines versus promotes prosocial behavior
Published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2016
Existing research shows that appeals to self-interest sometimes increase and sometimes decrease prosocial behavior. We propose that this inconsistency is in part due to the framings of these appeals. Different framings generate different salient reference points, leading to different assessments of the appeal. Study 1 demonstrates that buying an item with the proceeds going to charity evokes a different set of alternative behaviors than donating and receiving an item in return. Studies 2 and 3a-g establish that people are more willing to act, and give more when they do, when reading the former framing than the latter. Study 4 establishes ecological validity by replicating the effect in a field experiment assessing participants’ actual charitable contributions. Finally, Study 5 provides additional process evidence via moderation for the proposed mechanism. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings and suggest avenues for future research.
Recommended citation: Zlatev, J. J., & Miller, D. T. (2016). "Selfishly benevolent or benevolently selfish: When self-interest undermines versus promotes prosocial behavior." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 137, 112-122.
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Moral traps: When self-serving attributions backfire in prosocial behavior
Published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2016
Two assumptions guide the current research. First, people's desire to see themselves as moral disposes them to make attributions that enhance or protect their moral self-image: When approached with a prosocial request, people are inclined to attribute their own noncompliance to external factors, while attributing their own compliance to internal factors. Second, these attributions can backfire when put to a material test. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that people who attribute their refusal of a prosocial request to an external factor (e.g., having an appointment), but then have that excuse removed, are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior than those who were never given an excuse to begin with. Study 3 shows that people view it as more morally reprehensible to no longer honor the acceptance of a prosocial request if an accompanying external incentive is removed than to refuse a request unaccompanied by an external incentive. Study 4 extends this finding and suggests that people who attribute the decision to behave prosocially to an internal factor despite the presence of an external incentive are more likely to continue to behave prosocially once the external incentive is removed than are those for whom no external incentive was ever offered. This research contributes to an understanding of the dynamics underlying the perpetuation of moral self-regard and suggests interventions to increase prosocial behavior.
Recommended citation: Lin, S. C., Zlatev, J. J., & Miller, D. T. (2017). "Moral traps: When self-serving attributions backfire in prosocial behavior." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 198-203.
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Behavioral processes in long-lag intervention studies
Published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2017
We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and the outcome measure. Neglect of such processes, we contend, stems from psychology’s long tradition of short-lag lab experiments where there is little scope for intervening behavioral processes. Studying process in the lab invariably involves studying psychological processes, but in long-lag field experiments it is important to study causally relevant behavioral processes as well as psychological ones. To illustrate the roles that behavioral processes can play in long-lag experiments we examine field experiments motivated by three policy-relevant goals: prejudice reduction, health promotion, and educational achievement. In each of the experiments discussed we identify various behavioral pathways through which the manipulated psychological state could have produced the observed outcome. We argue that if psychologists conducting long-lag interventions posited a theory of change that linked manipulated psychological states to outcomes via behavioral pathways, the result would be richer theory and more practically useful research. Movement in this direction would also permit more opportunities for productive collaborations between psychologists and other social scientists interested in similar social problems.
Recommended citation: Miller, D. T., J. E. Dannals, Zlatev, J. J. (2017). "Behavioral processes in long-lag intervention studies." Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(3), 454-467.
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Default neglect in attempts at social influence
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017
Current theories suggest that people understand how to exploit common biases to influence others. However, these predictions have received little empirical attention. We consider a widely studied bias with special policy relevance: the default effect, which is the tendency to choose whichever option is the status quo. We asked participants (including managers, law/business/medical students, and US adults) to nudge others toward selecting a target option by choosing whether to present that target option as the default. In contrast to theoretical predictions, we find that people often fail to understand and/or use defaults to influence others, i.e., they show “default neglect.” First, in one-shot default-setting games, we find that only 50.8% of participants set the target option as the default across 11 samples (n = 2,844), consistent with people not systematically using defaults at all. Second, when participants have multiple opportunities for experience and feedback, they still do not systematically use defaults. Third, we investigate beliefs related to the default effect. People seem to anticipate some mechanisms that drive default effects, yet most people do not believe in the default effect on average, even in cases where they do use defaults. We discuss implications of default neglect for decision making, social influence, and evidence-based policy.
Recommended citation: Zlatev, J. J., Daniels, D. P., Kim, H., & Neale, M. A. (2017). "Default neglect in attempts at social influence." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(52), 13643-13648.
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Brokerage and brokering: An integrative review and organizing framework for third party influence
Published in Academy of Management Annals, 2019
Brokerage and brokering are pervasive and consequential organizational phenomena. Prevailing models underscore social structure and focus on the consequences that come from brokerage—occupying a bridging position between disconnected others in a network. By contrast, emerging models underscore social interactions and focus on brokering—the behavioral processes through which organizational actors shape others’ relationships. Our review led us to develop a novel framework as a means to integrate and organize a wide range of theoretical insights and empirical findings on brokerage and brokering. The Changing Others’ Relationships (COR) framework captures the following ideas that emerged from our review: (a) Different triadic configurations enable different forms of brokering, which in turn produce distinct effects on others’ relationships, (b) brokering is a multifaceted social influence process that can take the form of intermediation (connecting disconnected others) or modification (changing others’ preexisting relationships), (c) comparing social relations prebrokering versus postbrokering reveals a broker’s impact, (d) brokering can influence others’ relationships positively or negatively, and (e) information and incentives are two principal means through which individuals change others’ relationships. Overall, the current review integrates multiple streams of research relevant to brokerage and brokering—including those on structural holes, organizational innovation, boundary spanning, social and political skill, workplace gossip, third-party conflict managers, and labor relations—and links each of the emergent themes identified in the current review to promising directions for future research on brokerage and brokering.
Recommended citation: Halevy, N., Halali, E., & Zlatev, J. J. (2019). "Brokerage and brokering: An integrative review and organizing framework for third party influence." Academy of Management Annals, 13(1), 215-239.
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Choice architects reveal a bias toward positivity and certainty
Published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2019
Biases influence important decisions, but little is known about whether and how individuals try to exploit others’ biases in strategic interactions. Choice architects—that is, people who present choices to others—must often decide between presenting choice sets with positive or certain options (influencing others toward safer options) versus presenting choice sets with negative or risky options (influencing others toward riskier options). We show that choice architects’ influence strategies are distorted toward presenting choice sets with positive or certain options, across thirteen studies involving diverse samples (executives, law/business/medical students, adults) and contexts (public policy, business, medicine). These distortions appear to primarily reflect decision biases rather than social preferences, and they can cause choice architects to use influence strategies that backfire.
Recommended citation: Daniels, D. P. & Zlatev, J. J. (2019). "Choice architects reveal a bias toward positivity and certainty." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 151, 132-149.
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I may not agree with you, but I trust you: Caring about social issues signals integrity
Published in Psychological Science, 2019
What characteristics of an individual signal trustworthiness to other people? I propose that individuals who care about contentious social issues signal to observers that they have integrity and thus can be trusted. Critically, this signal conveys trustworthiness whether or not the target and the observer hold the same view on the issue. Five studies (N = 3,817) demonstrated the predicted effect of caring on integrity-based trust (Studies 1, 2, 3a, 3b, and 4)—even in cases of strong disagreement—across a variety of issues (Study 1) and when behavioral outcomes with real stakes were used (Studies 3a and 3b). This effect largely results from a perception of low-caring targets as particularly untrustworthy (Study 2). Additionally, participants trusted targets with staunchly opposing views about an issue even though they simultaneously disliked them (Study 4). These findings have important implications for how people form impressions of others and speak to potential interventions to help mitigate the growing ideological divide.
Recommended citation: Zlatev, J. J. (2019). "I may not agree with you, but I trust you: Caring about social issues signals integrity." Psychological Science, 30(6), 880-892.
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Being ‘good’ or ‘good enough’: Prosocial risk and the structure of moral self-regard
Published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2019
The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We propose that people’s efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their prosocial behavior legitimates the claim that they have acted morally, a claim that often diverges from whether their behavior is in the best interests of the recipient. Specifically, it predicts that for people to feel moral following a prosocial decision, that decision need not have promised the greatest benefit for the recipient but only one larger than at least one other available outcome. Moreover, this model predicts that once people produce a benefit that exceeds this threshold, their moral self-regard is relatively insensitive to the magnitude of benefit that they produce. In 6 studies, we test this moral threshold model by examining people’s prosocial risk decisions. We find that, compared with risky egoistic decisions, people systematically avoid making risky prosocial decisions that carry the possibility of producing the worst possible outcome in a choice set—even when this means avoiding a decision that is objectively superior. We further find that this aversion to producing the worst possible prosocial outcome leads people’s prosocial (vs. egoistic) risk decisions to be less sensitive to those decisions’ maximum possible benefit. We highlight theoretical and practical implications of these findings, including the detrimental consequence that people’s desire to protect their moral self-regard can have on the amount of good that they produce.
Recommended citation: Zlatev, J. J., Kupor, D. M., Laurin, K., & Miller, D. T. (2020). "Being ‘good’ or ‘good enough’: Prosocial risk and the structure of moral self-regard." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(2), 242-253.
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Returnable reciprocity: Returnable gifts are more effective than unreturnable gifts at promoting virtuous behaviors
Published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2020
Current theories suggest that people understand how to exploit common biases to influence others. However, these predictions have received little empirical attention. We consider a widely studied bias with special policy relevance: the default effect, which is the tendency to choose whichever option is the status quo. We asked participants (including managers, law/business/medical students, and US adults) to nudge others toward selecting a target option by choosing whether to present that target option as the default. In contrast to theoretical predictions, we find that people often fail to understand and/or use defaults to influence others, i.e., they show “default neglect.” First, in one-shot default-setting games, we find that only 50.8% of participants set the target option as the default across 11 samples (n = 2,844), consistent with people not systematically using defaults at all. Second, when participants have multiple opportunities for experience and feedback, they still do not systematically use defaults. Third, we investigate beliefs related to the default effect. People seem to anticipate some mechanisms that drive default effects, yet most people do not believe in the default effect on average, even in cases where they do use defaults. We discuss implications of default neglect for decision making, social influence, and evidence-based policy.
Recommended citation: Zlatev, J. J., Rogers, T. (2020). "Returnable reciprocity: Returnable gifts are more effective than unreturnable gifts at promoting virtuous behaviors." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 161, 74-84.
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Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust
Published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2021
People often respond to others’ emotions using verbal acknowledgment (e.g., “You seem upset”). Yet, little is known about the relational benefits and risks of acknowledging others’ emotions in the workplace. We draw upon Costly Signaling Theory to posit how emotional acknowledgment influences interpersonal trust. We hypothesize that emotional acknowledgment acts as a costly signal of the perceiver’s willingness to expend personal resources to meet the needs of the expresser. Across six studies, we found convergent evidence that emotional acknowledgment led to greater perceptions of costliness, and in turn, to higher evaluations of trust. These effects were stronger for negative than positive emotions because acknowledging negative emotions involved a greater perceived cost. Moreover, inaccurate acknowledgment fostered greater trust than not acknowledging when positive emotions were mislabeled as negative, but not when negative emotions were mislabeled as positive. These findings advance theory on key dynamics between emotion and language in work-related relationships.
Recommended citation: Yu, A., Berg, J. M., & Zlatev, J. J. (2021). "Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 164, 116-135.
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Choice architecture in physician–patient communication: a mixed-methods assessments of physicians’ competency
Published in BMJ Quality & Safety, 2021
Recommended citation: Zlatev, J. J., Rogers, T. (2020). "Choice architecture in physician–patient communication: a mixed-methods assessments of physicians’ competency." BMJ Quality & Safety, 30(5), 362-371.
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The dynamics of gender and alternatives in negotiation
Published in Journal of Applied Psychology, 2021
A substantial body of prior research documents a gender gap in negotiation performance. Competing accounts suggest that the gap is due either to women’s stereotype-congruent behavior in negotiations or to backlash enacted toward women for stereotype-incongruent behavior. In this article, we use a novel data set of over 2,500 individual negotiators to examine how negotiation performance varies as a function of gender and the strength of one’s alternative to a negotiated agreement. We find that the gender gap in negotiation outcomes exists only when female negotiators have a strong outside option. Furthermore, our large data set allows us to examine an understudied performance outcome, rate of impasse. We find that negotiations in which at least one negotiator is a woman with a strong alternative disproportionately end in impasse, a performance outcome that leaves considerable potential value unallocated. In addition, we find that these gender differences in negotiation performance are not due to gender differences in aspirations, reservation values, or first offers. Overall, these findings are consistent with a backlash account, whereby counterparts are less likely to come to an agreement and therefore reach a potentially worse outcome when one party is a female negotiator empowered by a strong alternative.
Recommended citation: Dannals, J. E., Zlatev, J. J., Halevy, N., & Neale, M. A. (2021). "The dynamics of gender and alternatives in negotiation." Journal of Applied Psychology, 106(11), 1655–1672.
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A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022
Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge flu vaccination or to a business-as-usual control condition that received no messages. We found that the reminder texts that we tested increased pharmacy vaccination rates by an average of 2.0 percentage points, or 6.8%, over a 3-mo follow-up period. The most-effective messages reminded patients that a flu shot was waiting for them and delivered reminders on multiple days. The top-performing intervention included two texts delivered 3 d apart and communicated to patients that a vaccine was “waiting for you.” Neither experts nor lay people anticipated that this would be the best-performing treatment, underscoring the value of simultaneously testing many different nudges in a highly powered megastudy.
Recommended citation: Milkman, K. L., Gandhi, L., Patel, M. S., Graci, H. N., Gromet, D. M., Ho, H., ... & Duckworth, A. L. (2022). "A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(6), e2115126119.
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Are you listening to me? The negative link between extraversion and perceived listening
Published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2022
Extraverts are often characterized as highly social individuals who are highly invested in their interpersonal interactions. We propose that extraverts’ interaction partners hold a different view—that extraverts are highly social, but not highly invested. Across six studies (five preregistered; N = 2,456), we find that interaction partners consistently judge more extraverted individuals to be worse listeners than less extraverted individuals. Furthermore, interaction partners assume that extraversion is positively associated with a greater ability to modify one’s self-presentation. This behavioral malleability (i.e., the “acting” component of self-monitoring) may account for the unfavorable lay belief that extraverts are not listening.
Recommended citation: Flynn, F. J., Collins, H., & Zlatev, J. J. (2023). "Are you listening to me? The negative link between extraversion and perceived listening." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(6), 837-851.
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Clinicians’ use of choice framing in intensive care unit family meetings
Published in Critical Care Medicine, 2024
Recommended citation: Hart, J., Malik, L., Li, C., Summer, A., Sangani, J., Zlatev, J., & White, D. B. (2024). "Clinicians’ use of choice framing in intensive care unit family meetings." Critical Care Medicine, 52(10), 1533-1542.
Going beyond the ‘self’ in self-control: Interpersonal consequences of commitment strategies
Published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2024
Commitment strategies are effective mechanisms individuals can use to overcome self-control problems. Across seven studies (and two supplemental studies), we explore the negative interpersonal consequences of commitment strategy choice and use. In Study 1, using an incentivized trust game, we demonstrate that individuals trust people who choose to use a commitment strategy less than those who choose to use willpower to achieve their goals. Study 2 shows this relationship holds across four domains and for integrity-based trust in particular. Study 3 provides evidence that it is the choice to use the strategy rather than strategy use itself that incurs this integrity penalty. In Studies 4–5b, we demonstrate that this effect is driven, at least in part, by the fact that people infer past performance from strategy choice. Finally, Study 6 provides evidence that people select commitment strategies more in private than in public, which is consistent with the notion that people anticipate the negative consequences of commitment strategy choice. Thus, we establish the role of willpower as a positive signal in impression formation as well as the negative interpersonal consequences of choosing to rely on external aides when faced with temptation.
Recommended citation: Kristal, A. S., & Zlatev, J. J. (2024). "Going beyond the ‘self’ in self-control: Interpersonal consequences of commitment strategies." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 126(5), 804–817.