Publications from the Behavioral Lab

Researchers have long used end-of-year discipline rates to identify punitive schools, explore sources of inequitable treatment, and evaluate interventions designed to stem both discipline and racial disparities in discipline. Yet, this approach…

Like most literatures as they mature, the creativity literature has become — ironically — less creative. We spearheaded this special issue to encourage the bold new ideas we need to revitalize research on creativity in organizations and expand…

Negotiation is a consequential activity that can exacerbate power differentials, especially for women. While traditional contexts can prime stereotypical gender roles and promote conditions that lead to performance differences, these can be…

The present research compares the influence of diversity ideologies on race and gender relations. In contrast to research suggesting that an identity-aware ideology (i.e.,…

The debate about the best way to lead has been raging for years: Should you empower your people and get out of their way, or take charge and push them to do great work? The answer, say the authors, is to do both. Their research shows…

This research explores the concept of gender relativism, whereby “gender”-or what is seen as “male” and “female”-changes as a function of context. Seven studies find that people attach gender to seemingly “gender-neutral” stimuli-bifurcating…

In this curation, we review many articles published in the Journal of Consumer Research(JCR) that focus on a spectrum of health and medical decisions, while highlighting five (Bolton et al. 2008Botti, Orfali, and…

Past research on growth mindsets has focused on the benefits of viewing the self as flexible rather than fixed. We propose that employees can make more substantial agentic changes to their work experiences if they also hold growth mindsets about…

How well do voters hold politicians accountable? Although a long-standing research tradition claims that elections are effective tools for the sanctioning and selection of leaders, a more recent literature argues that voters often reward and…

Where there is behavior there are social norms. Social norms are a key feature of societies, and their adherence is crucial to sustaining social order. This special issue brings together research at the interdisciplinary research frontier…

Though organizational scholars have studied punishment for decades, recent examples of punishment in organizations cannot be fully explained by the scholarly literature. This may be because much of our prior understanding of punishment has been…

Research suggests that White women often experience more gender backlash than women of color in response to expressions of agency. We consider whether this differential in backlash is driven by the match or mismatch of the race of both perceivers…

Status-based theories of labor market inequality contend that, even when workers have identical qualifications and performance, employers evaluate them differently based on stereotypes about their status group. Gender and parenthood are status…

We propose that self-essentialist reasoning is a foundational mechanism of the similarity-attraction effect. Our argument is that similarity breeds attraction in two steps: (a) people categorize someone with a shared attribute as a person like me…

We explore the effect of recommendation modality on recommendation adherence. Results from five experiments run on various online platforms (N = 6,103 adults from TurkPrime and Prolific) show that people are more likely to adhere to…

How does cognitive diversity in a group affect its performance? Prior research suggests that group cognitive diversity poses a performance tradeoff: diverse groups excel at creativity and innovation but struggle to take coordinated action.…

This paper studies strategic consumer shopping behavior in response to a macroeconomic policy and quantifies its unintended consequences for retailers vis-à-vis the policy goal. Using transaction-level data from a large retail chain in India, we…

Conspiracies are consequential and social, yet online conspiracy groups that consist of individuals (and bots) seeking to explain events or a system have been neglected in sociology. We extract conspiracy talk about the COVID-19 pandemic on…

In honor cultures, relatively minor disputes can escalate, making numerous forms of aggression widespread. We find evidence that honor cultures’ focus on virility impedes a key conflict de-escalation strategy — apology — that can be successfully…

Organizations benefit when they are perceived as authentic. Yet, explanations for this effect typically rely on context-specific attributions that can carry different meanings for different people. Here we develop some elements of a broader…

We evaluate how features of the digital environment free or constrain the self. Based on the current empirical literature, we argue that modern technological features, such as predictive algorithms and tracking tools, pose four potential…

Early theories of status dynamics in small groups portrayed intragroup status as a limited resource — as the status of one group member rises, the status of another must fall. Recent theorizing presents an alternative view: that the amount of…

Millions of employees are victims of violent crimes at work every year, particularly those in the retail industry, who are frequent targets of robbery. Why are some employees injured while others escape from these incidents physically unharmed?…

In polarized political environments, partisans tend to deploy empathy parochially, furthering division. We propose that belief in the usefulness of cross-partisan empathy — striving to understand other people with whom one disagrees politically…