Behavioral Science Workshops

Invited guests, faculty, and students present current research in decision-making and judgment in our workshop series. The emphasis of our workshop series is on behavioral implications of decision and judgment models.

Workshop Details

• Where: Chicago Booth Harper Center, Classroom C06. Workshops will be offered IN-PERSON ONLY.
• When: Mondays 10:10–11:30 a.m. (unless otherwise noted)
• Who can attend: Workshops are open to Roman Family Center faculty, researchers, staff, and students, plus invited guests. Additional requests to attend the workshop are handled on a case-by-case basis. Please email tricia.nicholson@chicagobooth.edu if you’d like to attend.
• Archive: For a full list of presenters 2004-present, see our workshop archive.

 

Spring Workshop Series 

 

Monday, March 18, 2024

Ike Moses Dashiell Silver 
Northwestern University 

"Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is: A Field Experiment Encouraging Donors to Share About Charity"

Sharing about charity online or in personal conversations can help raise awareness and bolster fundraising efforts for good causes. However, when deciding whether to tell others about their charitable giving, donors may focus more on possible risks to their reputation (e.g., of seeming braggy, inauthentic) than on potential word-of-mouth benefits for the charity. In a large, preregistered field experiment, we tested a post-donation intervention designed to encourage word-of-mouth by reorienting donors to the idea that sharing about charity means doing more good; 77,485 donors received either a control or treatment message asking them to share a link to the cause via social media, text, or email. Compared with the organization’s standard solicitation (“Please share your donation…”), our intervention emphasized consequences of sharing for the cause (“Your donation can start a chain reaction…”). This brief message increased click-through by 5.1% and likelihood of recruiting at least one later donation via word-of-mouth by 12.4%. Exploratory follow-up analyses suggest that these effects are most pronounced among larger-gift donors; the more donors gave, the more responsive they were to the intervention. Whereas many field experiments aim to increase giving directly, we test an intervention designed to boost word-of-mouth for worthy causes. We discuss approaches for encouraging sharing in the domain of charity and beyond.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Angelica Leigh
Duke University 

"Am I Next? The Influence of Mega-Threats on Individuals at Work"

Despite acknowledging the importance of events, organizational scholars rarely explore the influence of broader societal events on employee experiences and behaviors at work. In this talk, I will discuss a series of papers that explore the effects of societal events, which I call mega-threats, on employees in the workplace. I will first briefly discuss a theory paper (Leigh & Melwani, 2019) where we introduced the concept of mega-threats – highly publicized, negative, identity relevant societal occurrences. Next, I will discuss theory and results from an empirical paper (Leigh & Melwani, 2022) that explores the consequences of mega-threats on employees at work. In this paper, we find that mega-threats lead individuals that share identity group membership with those targeted and/or harmed in the event to experience heightened identity-based threat. We also find that this identity-based threat spills over into the workplace, leading employees, specifically employees that belong to racial minority groups, to engage in a process of emotional and cognitive threat suppression, which ultimately leads to increased work withdrawal behavior. Finally, I will discuss initial findings from new research where my co-authors and I are examining the broader effects of mega-threats on individuals that share identity with victims of a mega-threat, and those that are members of a different racially stigmatized identity group. Taken together, this work yields important theoretical and practical implications about the significant influence that societal events have on employees when they enter the workplace and on individuals in society more broadly.

 

Monday, April 1, 2024

Abdullah Almaatouq
MIT Sloan School

"Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature"

The social and behavioral sciences often struggle to integrate experimental findings. This is, at least in part, due to what Newell called "playing twenty questions with nature" paradigm, which focuses on testing individual theory predictions one-at-a-time and assumes that integration of findings happens via the scientific publishing process. However, I'll argue that this integration process is either inefficient or, in many cases, doesn't actually happen. Addressing this challenge goes beyond just improving the reliability and replicability of individual experiments or conducting larger ones; it calls for a fundamental rethink of experimental design and its ties to theory. In this talk, I will present the "integrative experiment design" framework, which promotes commensurability and continuous knowledge integration by design, which (hopefully?) would lead to more reliable, cumulative empirical and theoretical progress. 

 

Monday, April 8, 2024

Michael Muthukrishna 
London School of Economics 

 

Monday, April 15, 2024

Alin Coman 
Princeton University

"Grounding large-scale social outcomes in psychological phenomena"

What binds people together in communities – from small groups such as families to large ones such as nations – is the degree to which they share memories of their past, they endorse similar beliefs, and they synchronize their emotions following group-relevant events. In this talk, I will present a research program to study how communities dynamically form these collective phenomena. Using experiments that involve conversational interactions in social networks, I will show how large-scale social outcomes (i.e., collective memories, collective beliefs, and collective emotions) emerge out of micro-level local dynamics (i.e., memory updating, belief revision, emotion contagion). The social-interactionist approach proposed herein provides a framework for not only measuring, but also intervening on collective phenomena in communities of individuals, with implications for a variety of topics: from diminishing the spread of misinformation in networks to reducing negative emotions in intergroup conflict.

 

Monday, April 22, 2024 

Peter Belmi 
UVA Darden School of Business

"The Consequences of Revealing First-Generational Status"

Today, one in three students at American universities is a first-generation (“first-gen”) college student. How do students fare when they reveal to prospective employers they are “first-gen”? In this talk, I will share an ongoing research program that examines the consequences of revealing first-generational status. First, I will outline two competing perspectives grounded on different bodies of work. One perspective predicts the possibility of a first-gen advantage; the other predicts a first-gen disadvantage. I will present the results of a large-scale resume audit study (n = 1,783) and four preregistered experiments (n = 4,920) that test these two perspectives. I will also propose and test potential moderators that seek to reconcile these views. Finally, I will present newer research that builds on these findings and suggests a third perspective: in some cases, even positive beliefs about first-gen college students can ironically reinforce class disparities. Specifically, when students reveal their first-gen status, employers are more likely to see them as ‘heroes’. Consequently, this heroization makes first-gen students more vulnerable for exploitation. Together, this research program will highlight the nuanced effects of revealing first-gen status and how workplaces create and maintain socioeconomic disparities.

 

Monday, April 29, 2024

Julian Zlatev 
Harvard Business School

"Sending Signals: Strategic Displays of Warmth and Competence"

 Using a combination of exploratory and confirmatory approaches, this research examines how people signal important information about themselves to others. We first train machine learning models to assess the use of warmth and competence impression management strategies in text data. Then, we evaluate whether these signals actually lead to higher warmth and competence perceptions among observers. Guided by these analyses, we generate hypotheses about how individuals present themselves as warm and competent, which we subsequently test in a new dataset. This process allows us to descriptively examine the effective and ineffective strategies people use to manage impressions, providing evidence for the existence of both novel and previously-identified tactics. More broadly, this work highlights the benefits of using natural language processing as part of a "full-cycle" approach to investigating psychological phenomena.

 

Monday, May 6, 2024

Jana Gallus 
UCLA Anderson School of Management

"Incentives and the social fabric of work"

This talk explores how incentives interact with the social relational context, presenting evidence from Wikipedia, healthcare, and startup simulations. In the first field experiment, social recognition incentives had positive and long-lasting effects on volunteer retention. In the second field experiment, social recognition incentives backfired, significantly impairing people’s well-being. The talk presents an overarching framework to reconcile these findings and to guide future experiments. It concludes with recent evidence from a third experiment, which employs startup simulations to propose an experimental paradigm allowing us to exogenously vary relational structures and incentives. The ultimate aim of this research program is to dissect the reciprocal influences of incentives and social relationships and study how they jointly impact human motivation and behavior.

 

Monday, May 13, 2024

Sarah Lamer 
University of Tennessee Knoxville

"The Role of Cultural Patterns in Intergroup Cognition"

People tend to evaluate others based on social category membership and social scientists have long argued that people are socialized to hold biases about groups from what they observe around them. Yet, research on socialization has been limited by the lack of a framework for characterizing what is in the broader social environment and how the environment directly influences people’s beliefs. I use a Cultural Snapshots approach to examine socialization processes by first quantifying meaningful cultural patterns that people regularly see and then using experimental methodologies to examine how people’s social beliefs tune to those patterns. In my talk, I will discuss culturally prevalent patterns that shape important social beliefs (e.g., televised patterns of nonverbal emotion that convey gender role beliefs, patterns of emotion in racially-diverse crowds that heighten the importance of racial category distinctions, patterns of vertical location that convey gender stereotypes about power and dominance). Theoretical implications and practical applications will be discussed. Findings suggest that people tune their beliefs to the subtle patterns they regularly see in their social environments and support that people can detect even subtle patterns situated in the complex environments where they naturally occur.

 

Monday, May 20, 2024

Matt Salganik
Princeton University

"The unpredictability of life outcomes"

Researchers have long theorized about the processes through which family background and childhood experiences shape life outcomes. However, machine learning models that use data on family background and childhood experiences to predict life outcomes often have poor predictive performance. In this talk, we present results from three interrelated studies of the predictability of life outcomes: a scientific mass collaboration involving hundreds of participants, a high-throughput study using hundreds of machine learning pipelines to predict hundreds of life outcomes, and a qualitative study involving in-depth interviews with 40 families. Collectively these studies help to assess and understand the limits of predictability of life outcomes, which has implications for social science theory and for algorithmic decision-making in high-stakes settings.