In three field studies, we explore the impact of providing employees and teammates with prosocial bonuses, a novel type of bonus spent on others rather than on oneself. In Experiment 1, we show that ...prosocial bonuses in the form of donations to charity lead to happier and more satisfied employees at an Australian bank. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we show that prosocial bonuses in the form of expenditures on teammates lead to better performance in both sports teams in Canada and pharmaceutical sales teams in Belgium. These results suggest that a minor adjustment to employee bonuses--shifting the focus from the self to others--can produce measurable benefits for employees and organizations.
Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-Control Tian, Allen Ding; Schroeder, Juliana; Häubl, Gerald ...
Journal of personality and social psychology,
06/2018, Letnik:
114, Številka:
6
Journal Article
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Odprti dostop
Rituals are predefined sequences of actions characterized by rigidity and repetition. We propose that enacting ritualized actions can enhance subjective feelings of self-discipline, such that rituals ...can be harnessed to improve behavioral self-control. We test this hypothesis in 6 experiments. A field experiment showed that engaging in a pre-eating ritual over a 5-day period helped participants reduce calorie intake (Experiment 1). Pairing a ritual with healthy eating behavior increased the likelihood of choosing healthy food in a subsequent decision (Experiment 2), and enacting a ritual before a food choice (i.e., without being integrated into the consumption process) promoted the choice of healthy food over unhealthy food (Experiments 3a and 3b). The positive effect of rituals on self-control held even when a set of ritualized gestures were not explicitly labeled as a ritual, and in other domains of behavioral self-control (i.e., prosocial decision-making; Experiments 4 and 5). Furthermore, Experiments 3a, 3b, 4, and 5 provided evidence for the psychological process underlying the effectiveness of rituals: heightened feelings of self-discipline. Finally, Experiment 5 showed that the absence of a self-control conflict eliminated the effect of rituals on behavior, demonstrating that rituals affect behavioral self-control specifically because they alter responses to self-control conflicts. We conclude by briefly describing the results of a number of additional experiments examining rituals in other self-control domains. Our body of evidence suggests that rituals can have beneficial consequences for self-control.
Four studies tested whether cultural values moderate the content of gender stereotypes, such that male stereotypes more closely align with core cultural values (specifically, individualism vs. ...collectivism) than do female stereotypes. In Studies 1 and 2, using different measures, Americans rated men as less collectivistic than women, whereas Koreans rated men as more collectivistic than women. In Study 3, bicultural Korean Americans who completed a survey in English about American targets rated men as less collectivistic than women, whereas those who completed the survey in Korean about Korean targets did not, demonstrating how cultural frames influence gender stereotype content. Study 4 established generalizability by reanalyzing Williams and Best's (1990) cross-national gender stereotype data across 26 nations. National individualism-collectivism scores predicted viewing collectivistic traits as more-and individualistic traits as less-stereotypically masculine. Taken together, these data offer support for the cultural moderation of gender stereotypes hypothesis, qualifying past conclusions about the universality of gender stereotype content.
Giving Time Gives You Time Mogilner, Cassie; Chance, Zoë; Norton, Michael I.
Psychological science,
10/2012, Letnik:
23, Številka:
10
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Results of four experiments reveal a counterintuitive solution to the common problem of feeling that one does not have enough time: Give some of it away. Although the objective amount of time people ...have cannot be increased (there are only 24 hours in a day), this research demonstrates that people's subjective sense of time affluence can be increased. We compared spending time on other people with wasting time, spending time on oneself, and even gaining a windfall of "free" time, and we found that spending time on others increases one's feeling of time affluence. The impact of giving time on feelings of time affluence is driven by a boosted sense of self-efficacy. Consequently, giving time makes people more willing to commit to future engagements despite their busy schedules.
Aubiquitous feature of even the fastest self-service technology transactions is the wait. Conventional wisdom and operations theory suggest that the longer people wait, the less satisfied they ...become; we demonstrate that because of what we term the
labor illusion
, when websites engage in operational transparency by signaling that they are exerting effort, people can actually prefer websites with longer waits to those that return instantaneous results-even when those results are identical. In five experiments that simulate service experiences in the domains of online travel and online dating, we demonstrate the impact of the labor illusion on service value perceptions, demonstrate that perceptions of service provider effort induce feelings of reciprocity that together mediate the link between operational transparency and increased valuation, and explore boundary conditions and alternative explanations.
This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors.
This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors.
We document a link between the relational diversity of one’s social portfolio—the richness and evenness of relationship types across one’s social interactions—and well-being. Across four distinct ...samples, respondents from the United States who completed a preregistered survey (
n
= 578), respondents to the American Time Use Survey (
n
= 19,197), respondents to the World Health Organization’s Study on Global Aging and Adult Health (
n
= 10,447), and users of a French mobile application (
n
= 21,644), specification curve analyses show that the positive relationship between social portfolio diversity and well-being is robust across different metrics of well-being, different categorizations of relationship types, and the inclusion of a wide range of covariates. Over and above people’s total amount of social interaction and the diversity of activities they engage in, the relational diversity of their social portfolio is a unique predictor of well-being, both between individuals and within individuals over time.
Conceptual consumption Ariely, Dan; Norton, Michael I
Annual review of psychology,
2009, Letnik:
60
Journal Article
Recenzirano
As technology has simplified meeting basic needs, humans have cultivated increasingly psychological avenues for occupying their consumption energies, moving from consuming food to consuming concepts; ...we propose that consideration of such "conceptual consumption" is essential for understanding human consumption. We first review how four classes of conceptual consumption-consuming expectancies, goals, fluency, and regulatory fit-impact physical consumption. Next, we benchmark the power of conceptual consumption against physical consumption, reviewing research in which people forgo positive physical consumption-and even choose negative physical consumption-in order to engage in conceptual consumption. Finally, we outline how conceptual consumption informs research examining both preference formation and virtual consumption, and how it may be used to augment efforts to enhance consumer welfare.
Researchers have documented many cases in which individuals rationalize their regrettable actions. Four experiments examine situations in which people go beyond merely explaining away their ...misconduct to actively deceiving themselves. We find that those who exploit opportunities to cheat on tests are likely to engage in self-deception, inferring that their elevated performance is a sign of intelligence. This short-term psychological benefit of self-deception, however, can come with longer-term costs: when predicting future performance, participants expect to perform equally well—a lack of awareness that persists even when these inflated expectations prove costly. We show that although people expect to cheat, they do not foresee self-deception, and that factors that reinforce the benefits of cheating enhance self-deception. More broadly, the findings of these experiments offer evidence that debates about the relative costs and benefits of self-deception are informed by adopting a temporal view that assesses the cumulative impact of self-deception over time.
Dying Is Unexpectedly Positive Goranson, Amelia; Ritter, Ryan S.; Waytz, Adam ...
Psychological science,
07/2017, Letnik:
28, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In people's imagination, dying seems dreadful; however, these perceptions may not reflect reality. In two studies, we compared the affective experience of people facing imminent death with that of ...people imagining imminent death. Study 1 revealed that blog posts of near-death patients with cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were more positive and less negative than the simulated blog posts of nonpatients—and also that the patients' blog posts became more positive as death neared. Study 2 revealed that the last words of death-row inmates were more positive and less negative than the simulated last words of noninmates—and also that these last words were less negative than poetry written by death-row inmates. Together, these results suggest that the experience of dying—even because of terminal illness or execution—may be more pleasant than one imagines.
The authors propose a new means by which nonprofits can induce donors to give today and commit to giving in the future: contingent match incentives, in which matching is made contingent on the ...percentage of others who give (e.g., "if X% of others give, we will match all donations"). A field experiment shows that a 75% contingent match (such that matches "kick in" only if 75% of others donate) is most effective in increasing commitment to recurring donations. An online experiment reveals that the 75% contingent match drives commitment to recurring donations because it simultaneously provides social proof while offering a low enough target to remain plausible that the match will occur. A final online experiment demonstrates that the effectiveness of the 75% contingent match extends to one-time donations. The authors discuss the practical and theoretical implications of contingent matches for managers and academics.
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