Judgments →

Face Value: Do Certain Physical Features Help People Get Ahead?

Society seems to reward people with particular facial features. Research by Shunyuan Zhang and colleagues uses machine learning to analyze traits that people associate with charisma. The findings highlight opportunities to enhance one's image—and challenge bias.

Inclusive Leadership Advice: Get Comfortable With the Uncomfortable

People tend to seek sameness, but they can teach themselves to relish in the differences of the human experience. Francesca Gino offers these three principles from improv to anyone who's trying to lead more inclusively.

Can These Business Students Motivate Londoners to Do the Right Thing?

In the Harvard Business School course Behavioral Insights, students work in the UK with psychology experts to understand what motivates consumers and workers. What they learn can help businesses of all types, says Michael Luca. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Stereotypes and Belief Updating

Increasing evidence demonstrates that stereotyped beliefs drive key economic decisions. This paper shows the significant role of self-stereotyping in predicting beliefs about one’s own ability. Stereotypes do not just affect beliefs about ability when information is scarce. In fact, stereotypes color the way information is incorporated into beliefs, perpetuating initial biases.

Why Ethical People Become Unethical Negotiators

You may think you are an ethical person, but self-interest can cloud your judgment when you sit down at the bargaining table, says Max Bazerman. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

How Can Decision Making Be Improved?

While scholars can describe how people make decisions, and can envision how much better decision-making could be, they still have little understanding of how to help people overcome blind spots and behave optimally. Chugh, Milkman, and Bazerman organize the scattered knowledge that judgment and decision-making scholars have amassed over several decades about how to reduce biased decision-making. Their analysis of the existing literature on improvement strategies is designed to highlight the most promising avenues for future research. Key concepts include: People put great trust in their intuition. The past 50 years of decision-making research challenges that trust. A key task for psychologists is to identify how and in what decision-making situations people should try to move from intuitive, emotional thinking to more deliberative, logical thinking. The more that researchers understand the potentially harmful effects of some biased decision-making, the more important it is to have empirically tested strategies for reaching better decisions. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.