Special Issue: Behavioral Economics
Plus: The Good of Rules, Motivated Cognition, & Information Gaps
If you want to encourage someone to do something, make it easy. - Richard Thaler
What I-O Folks Are Reading
Selections from published articles, articles in press, and other academic resources.
Curiosity and Frustration? Who Could Ask for Anything More?
You know how, if someone calls your mobile phone, but they don’t leave a message, it makes you insanely curious and irritated? Yeah, that same thing happens at work, apparently.
Although information gaps frequently occur in the workplace, surprisingly little organizational research considered their psychological consequences for employees … [We argue] that work-related information gaps constitute a double-edged sword for work engagement because they elicit both specific curiosity and frustration.
(Don’t) Mind the Gap? Information Gaps Compound Curiosity Yet Also Feed Frustration at Work. Organization Behavior & Human Decision Processes.
Just Keep At It
This research examines a perplexing but all too common phenomenon in which people actively forego nearly costless opportunities to switch from less-preferred tasks to preferred alternatives. The authors investigate such failures to change and identify a novel underlying cause—entrenchment, a state of heightened tedious task-set accessibility.
The Entrenchment Effect: Why People Persist with Less-Preferred Behaviors. Organization Behavior & Human Decision Processes.
Altruism Beats Egoism (For a Change)
Past research has documented mixed findings about whether employees help abused co-workers: some studies found that employees are less likely to help abused co-workers, whereas others found the opposite. To explain these inconsistent findings, we consider the role of employee’s own experiences with abusive supervision as a boundary condition. We propose competing hypotheses based on two frameworks. According to the altruistically motivated view of helping, employees help others because they empathize with others’ negative situation … By contrast, according to the egoistically motivated view of helping, employees help others because they want to reduce experienced negative emotions … Two experiments and a multi-wave, multi-source field study support the altruistically motivated view of helping.
When do Employees Help Abused Coworkers? It Depends on Their Own Experience with Abusive Supervision. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.
What Behavioral Economists Are Reading
Articles, books, and resources from the world of behavioral economics.
The Cooperation Game
This paper presents a pilot experiment named Good of Rules, an educational program for 11-year-old children from South Italy. The program introduces participants to institutions, legality, and social cohesion. Among other didactic activities, it includes two field trips to symbolic places and a role-playing game. The results suggest that the program attendance positively affects cooperation in a one-shot N-player Prisoner's Dilemma and altruism in a Dictator Game.
The Good of Rules: A Pilot Study on Prosocial Behavior. Journal of Behavioral & Experimental Economics.
Religious Beliefs & Motivated Cognition
We experimentally test how psychological motivations can impact the processing of purely objective information. We first document that, when the high-stakes College Entrance Exam is held in the month of Ramadan, Chinese Muslim students perform significantly worse. When asked about the impact of fasting, they severely underestimate the cost of taking the exam during Ramadan, even when presented with direct empirical evidence. In the experiment, we randomly offer students reading materials in which well-respected Muslim clerics explain that it is permissible to postpone the fast until after the exam. Consistent with an interpretation of motivated cognition, students who receive the material distort the statistics about the fasting cost significantly less and become more accepting of delaying the fast for the exam.
When Information Conflicts with Obligations: the Role of Motivated Cognition. The Economic Journal.
When Civil Servants Disagree with the Administration
Exploiting presidential transitions as a source of “within-bureaucrat” variation in political alignment, we find that procurement contracts overseen by misaligned officers exhibit greater cost overruns and delays. We provide evidence consistent with a general “morale effect,” whereby misaligned bureaucrats are less motivated to pursue the organizational mission.
Ideology and Performance in Public Organizations. Econometrica.
Amazon Best Sellers: Behavioral Economics
Links lead to short summaries.
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, Richard Thaler
What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You: Unlocking Consumer Decisions with the Science of Behavioral Economics, Melina Palmer
Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics, Stephen Wendel
A Course in Behavioral Economics, Erik Angner
Construct of the Week
A psychological construct relevant to work psychology.
Endowment Effect: The tendency for individuals to place a higher value on an object they already own than the value they would place on that same object if they did not own it.
The Research Quiz
Test your intuition against this research finding.
French local elections can be re-contested if the results are very close, but the election loser must agree to the process.
Is there a difference in men’s and women’s willingness to re-contest close elections when they’re the loser? Choose your response below, then follow the link to the journal article.
Who is more likely to challenge the results of a close election?