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The Right Music Can Make People More Cooperative

paff_092016_musiccooperation_newsfeatureMusic is a common feature in many workplaces – from surgery suites to the mechanic’s shop. But when businesses play music, it’s typically to influence the mood of customers. Studies have shown that background music, even when we don’t notice it, can have an effect on our buying preferences. However, relatively little research has studied the impact of music on employee behavior.In a new study, a team of Cornell University researchers found evidence that what we’re listening to at work might influence how willing we are to cooperate with coworkers.
“Based on results from two extended 20-round public goods experiments, we find that happy music significantly and positively influences cooperative behavior,” writes Kevin Kniffin and colleagues. “We also find a significant positive association between mood and cooperative behavior.”
Several previous studies have shown that when prompted with enjoyable music, people end up in a good mood. In a 2010 study published in Psychological Science, University of Western Ontario graduate student Ruby Nadler and colleagues found that participants who listened to snippets of upbeat music (such as Vivaldi’s “Spring”) outperformed those who listened neutral or sad music during a pattern recognition task.
To invoke a good mood in their experiment, Kniffin and colleagues selected peppy songs such as “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles; “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves; “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison; and the theme song from “Happy Days.” The unhappy music playlist included a mix of songs from grindcore metal bands Attack Attack! and Iwrestledabearonce (some on Wikipedia argue that Iwrestledabearonce’s oeuvre should really be classified as punk mathcore).
For the first experiment, 78 college students were randomly assigned to listen to either “happy” music or “unhappy” music over an audio system while completing an economic cooperation task. Each student was seated at an individual computer station with a privacy hood while music was played over the room’s speakers.
During each round of the game, they had the option of allocating a portion of their own store of tokens, which represented small amounts of actual cash, to a shared pool with two other unknown players. Tokens added to the group pool were multiplied in value by 1.5, providing a strong incentive for cooperation.
Across 20 rounds of this game, the participants listening to happy music were found to be more cooperative, contributing more tokens to the shared pot compared to those listening to unhappy music.
In a second experiment, 188 participants were again randomly assigned to listen to either happy music or unhappy music, but this time the researchers also included a control group who did not listen to any music. Participants also completed a short mood assessment survey before, during, and after the experiment.
Again, the researchers “found significantly and persistently higher levels of cooperative behavior by participants who were played Happy music when compared with the other two conditions.”
The mood assessments showed that although mood was relatively consistent across the conditions at the very beginning of the experiment, mood declined for those listening to unhappy music compared to the control group. Essentially, pleasant music seemed to inspire a good mood which led to greater cooperation between teammates.
The researchers note that they did not account for potentially important variables, such as personality traits, that might moderate links among music, mood, and cooperation. Future research could also benefit from more naturalistic experiments, such as allowing participants to select their own music.
Music is an easy way to help boost employees’ mood on the job, which may ultimately help organization create a more positive and cooperative workplace. Choosing music everyone can enjoy may be the bigger challenge; while one person may prefer Mozart, someone else’s good mood inspiration may be Celine Dion or Nodes of Ranvier.
 

References

Kniffin, K. M., Yan, J., Wansink, B., & Schulze, W. D. (2016). The sound of cooperation: Musical influences on cooperative behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior. doi: 10.1002/job.2128
Nadler, R. T., Rabi, R., & Minda, J. P. (2010). Better mood and better performance learning rule-described categories is enhanced by positive mood. Psychological Science, 21(12), 1770-1776. doi: 10.1177/0956797610387441
from Minds for Business – Association for Psychological Science http://bit.ly/2cOlJce

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You’re Joking: Detecting Sarcasm in Emails Isn’t Easy

paff_092716_sarcasmcommunication_newsfeature“Well, that meeting was a really fantastic use of my time.”You may want to think twice before hitting send on that email with a sarcastic joke – regardless of whether your boss or your work buddies are on the receiving end.
New research investigating how we determine the emotional content of text is showing that people have a very hard time catching on to sarcasm in emails and texts. This means that written communications aren’t the best medium for making a well-meaning joke; people often interpret a friendly riff as being overtly negative, or they don’t catch the sarcastic tone at all and assume a caustic jibe is actually praise.
Across three studies, Chatham University psychological scientists Monica Riordan and Lauren Trichtinger measured people’s accuracy at gauging the emotional tone of emails sent by both friends and complete strangers. Their results: We’re terrible at it – even when we’re corresponding with our friends.
In one study, participants were assigned to write an email that would evoke one particular emotion, such as disappointment after trying a new restaurant or happiness about getting asked out on a date. Participants then sent these emails to both friends and strangers also enrolled in the study. Both friends and strangers rated the emails for the presence of eight basic emotions, and then sent their own response emails. Additionally, everyone rated how confident they felt in their ability to accurately identify the intended emotional tone of the email.
Although participants were highly confident in their interpretations, especially when communicating with a friend, this confidence had no relationship with accuracy.
“It is clear from this study that readers can determine that we are angry, but cannot determine HOW angry,” said Riordan. “The loss of this subtlety could lead to consequences in many forms– especially in our relationships, where the difference between annoyance and rage can be vast, and a simple misinterpretation of an intended emotion can lead to a drastic alteration in that emotion.”
Research from a team led by Adam D. Galinsky (Northwestern University) finds that when people are in a position of power they’re even worse at accurately predicting how others will interpret a sarcastic comment.
In one experiment, 42 college students read a scenario in which they went to a fancy restaurant recommended by a colleague’s friend, but had a particularly bad dining experience. The next day, an email was sent to the friend who made the recommendation stating only, “About the restaurant, it was marvelous, just marvelous.” Participants then used a 6-point scale to indicate how they thought the friend would interpret the comment, ranging from very sarcastic to very sincere.
Before reading the restaurant scenario, participants were randomly assigned to a high-power or a low-power condition. High-power participants were instructed to recall and write about a personal incident in which they had power over individuals. Participants assigned to the low-power condition were instructed to write about a personal incident in which someone else had power over them.
The results showed that those assigned to the high-power group were much more likely to assume, perhaps mistakenly, that the friend would think the email was clearly sarcastic.
“These findings support our prediction that power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to other individuals’ perspectives,” Galinsky and colleagues write in Psychological Science.
If it’s so easy to misinterpret a written message, what can people do to help make their intentions clear? University of Nottingham psychological scientists Dominic Thompson and Ruth Filik found that the use of an expressive smiley face emoticon (such as : ) or ^.^) can provide a helpful cue for when messages are meant sarcastically.
Participants were shown a list of short text message conversations and asked how they would make it clear that a response text was to be taken either literally or sarcastically.
You: So how was the interview?
Friend:  I really can’t tell…
You: Well, you didn’t look confident
In this example, participants would be prompted to modify the wording of the final response in the exchange in such a way as to clearly communicate either sarcasm or a straightforward response. There was no specific mention of emoticons or images.
The results showed that people were “significantly more likely to use emoticons to aid understanding in sarcastic comments than literal ones.” Emoticons were also more likely to occur in texts articulating praise rather than criticism.
Specifically, Thompson and Filik found that the tongue out (:p) and wink (; )) emoticons were the most closely linked with marking sarcasm, and almost never appeared in any condition except for marking sarcasm.
“Importantly, this suggests emoticons may actually be more efficient than ‘standard’ language for marking sarcastic intent,” Thompson and Filik conclude. “That is, the intention can be communicated more quickly via an emoticon than via additional words or phrases, in a way somewhat similar to nonverbal cues in speech.”
 

References

Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Inesi, M. E., & Gruenfeld, D. H. (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1068-1074. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01824.x
Riordan, M. A., & Trichtinger, L. A. (2016). Overconfidence at the Keyboard: Confidence and accuracy in interpreting affect in e‐mail exchanges. Human Communication Research. doi: 10.1111/hcre.12093
Thompson, D., & Filik, R. (2016). Sarcasm in written communication: Emoticons are efficient markers of intention. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 21(2), 105-120. doi: 10.1111/jcc4.12156
from Minds for Business – Association for Psychological Science http://bit.ly/2dpqz1U

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A Good Mood is a Good Motivator

paff_091316_motivatingmood_newsfeatureYou need to alphabetize those files, transcribe last week’s meeting, and then look up some tax codes, but actually motivating yourself to take care of these tedious tasks can be a real challenge. According to new research from APS Fellow James J. Gross (Stanford University) and colleagues, people are much more likely to take on boring, unpleasant tasks when they’re in a good mood.
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Why It’s So Hard to Shake a Bad First Impression

PAFF_072816_BadImpressions_newsfeatureA new study demonstrates that shaking a negative first impression is often diabolically difficult, providing just one more reason to make sure that you show up on time for your next job interview.
“Moral and immoral behaviors often come in small doses. A person might donate just a few dollars to charity or cheat on just one exam question,” explain University of Chicago psychological scientists Nadav Klein and Ed O’Brien. But how many positive or negative acts must a person undertake before we change our minds about someone?
Across five experiments, Klein and O’Brien found that this moral tipping point is asymmetric — a moral improvement takes a lot more work for us to notice compared to a moral decline, even if the evidence is we observe is the same in each case. In other words, “it is apparently easier to become a sinner than a saint, despite exhibiting equivalent evidence for change.”
In one experiment, Klein and O’Brien attempted to measure the moral tipping point – the number of behaviors that will change our assessment of someone. A group of 201 participants took part in an online study in which they read a scenario about an average office worker named Barbara. All of the participants were told that Barbara’s personality was pretty neutral; most of the time her behavior towards her colleagues was inoffensive, but occasionally she was especially nice (e.g., holding the door, giving compliments) while other times she was kind of a jerk (e.g., cutting in line, spreading gossip).
Participants were then told that there had been a change in Barbara’s behavior over a period of several weeks. One group of participants was told that Barbara was now doing many more nice things and another group was told she was now doing many more mean things. Participants were then asked how many weeks of this behavior change (1 – 16 weeks) would convince them she had made a substantial moral change as a person.
When Barbara’s behavior turned mean, it only took a few weeks for participants to conclude that she had taken a turn for the worse. However, it took many more weeks of positive behavior to convince people that Barbara was changing for the better.
“Put another way, these results suggest an asymmetry in the moral tipping point that truly depends on valence: it takes relatively few bad actions to be seen as changed for the worse, but relatively many good actions to be seen as changed for the better,” the researchers explain.
In another online experiment, 200 female participants read a very similar scenario, but this time the information about their coworker’s behavior changes was presented in increments. After reading that the coworker had shown a change in behavior for a whole week, participants were asked whether they were convinced this person’s moral character had “officially” improved or declined. If they responded “yes,” the session ended. If they responded “no,” they were told the behavior had continued for another week and were asked if the personality change had tipped.
Again, the results showed that people were much quicker at concluding the change in behavior showed a moral decline and much slower at acknowledging moral improvement.
“People apparently need to commit just a few bad actions to appear substantively changed for the worse, but need to commit many good actions to appear substantively changed for the better,” Klein and O’Brien report.
A recent article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science demonstrates just how influential small acts can be in our assessment of another person’s morality. In one experiment, participants were told about a company hiring a new CEO. One of the candidates requested an expensive marble table as a perk. Participants found this request so morally appalling that they “reported a preference for paying an additional $1 million in salary to a different job candidate just to avoid hiring a candidate whose salary request included a $40,000 marble table.”
Participants viewed a candidate who asked for such perks as more likely to act on his own selfish interests rather than the good of the company.
In their article, Klein and O’Brien argue that it’s important to be aware of this strong bias against negative information. Because the threshold for forming negative impressions is much lower than positive ones, we may want to be more open to giving people opportunities to redeem themselves after a bad first impression.
 
References
Klein, N., & O’Brien, E. (2016). The Tipping Point of Moral Change: When Do Good and Bad Acts Make Good and Bad Actors?. Social Cognition, 34(2), 149. doi: 10.1521/soco.2016.34.2.149
Uhlmann, E. L., Pizarro, D. A., & Diermeier, D. (2015). A person-centered approach to moral judgment. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(1), 72-81. doi: 10.1177/1745691614556679
from Minds for Business – Association for Psychological Science http://bit.ly/2aiwGz6

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Entitled at the Top: Are Leaders More Selfish Than the Rest of Us?

PAFF_072616_SelfishLeaders_newsfeatureLeaders’ propensity for generosity seems to depend on whether they feel like they’ve earned their high-status position, according to new research conducted by psychological scientists Nicholas Hays (Michigan State University) and Steven Blader (New York University).
The findings indicate that a boss or colleague who feels that their high-status position is unearned is likely to be much more generous compared to someone who feels like they’re entitled to a spot at the top.
“For instance, high-status CEOs—who have a greater sense of hubris and thus are likely to have an exaggerated sense of their value to their organizations— extract more compensation and yet devote less time and effort to advancing organizational goals compared to lower-status CEO,” write Hays and Blader. “Because generosity is often strategically demonstrated to attain status, generosity may decrease once status-attainment goals are achieved.”
Previous research published in Psychological Science has shown that attaining a position of power really can change people for the worse: Across five experiments, Joris Lammers (Tilburg University) and colleagues found that “irrespective of how power was manipulated or hypocrisy was measured, we found strong evidence that the powerful are more likely to engage in moral hypocrisy than are people who lack power.”
However, power only seemed to compromise people’s moral judgement under circumstances in which people felt like they had earned their position: “Our final study demonstrated the crucial role of entitlement: Only when power is experienced as legitimate is moral hypocrisy a likely result. If power is not experienced as legitimate, then the moral-hypocrisy effect disappears.”
For their first experiment, Hays and Blader surveyed a group of 255 MBA students. The students were working together in 51 teams over the course of a six-month field project with real clients. The students completed two surveys asking them to assess how helpful they were (i.e., “I will be willing to help when needed”) and how important they were to their group’s success. The first survey was completed at the very beginning of the field project; in a second survey, completed three months into the project, participants also rated each member of their group on a 7-point scale for how much respect, esteem, and prominence they had within their team.
“As predicted, there is a significant positive relationship between status and generosity at low legitimacy and a significant negative relationship at high legitimacy,” the researchers report.
A second experiment looked at whether status influenced people’s actual behavior. A group of 339 college students were assigned roles in a business scenario, ostensibly based on their scores from a business aptitude assessment. In reality, the participants were randomly assigned to either high- or low-status roles and either legitimacy or illegitimacy conditions.
Those in the legitimate conditions were assigned to a status role that matched their “score” on the assessment, while those in the illegitimate condition were told they’d received a lower score than their team members but would be given a higher-ranking role.
After learning their scores and role assignments, participants played a game in which group members could allocate 100 points among themselves and their two teammates. These points could be exchanged for lottery tickets at the end of the study, and generosity was gauged based on how many points participants allocated to their teammates.
As expected, those who felt they were entitled to a high-status position were significantly less generous towards their teammates than participants who thought their high ranking was not earned. Across all six experiments, those who felt entitled to their high-status position showed significantly less generosity than people who felt they’d ended up at the top through a fluke.
“Complementing previous work indicating that generosity leads to status increases, we find that once an individual has obtained high status, the legitimacy of that status determines whether he or she tends to behave more or less generously than low-status group members,” Hays and Blader conclude.
 

References

Hays, N. A., & Blader, S. L. (2016). To Give or Not to Give? Interactive Effects of Status and Legitimacy on Generosity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. doi: 10.1037/pspi0000067
Lammers, J., Stapel, D. A., & Galinsky, A. D. (2010). Power increases hypocrisy moralizing in reasoning, immorality in behavior. Psychological Science, 21(5), 737-744. doi: 10.1177/0956797610368810
from Minds for Business – Association for Psychological Science http://bit.ly/2aapvcT

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The Kryptonite of Smart Decisions? Overconfidence

PAFF_030816_OverconfidenceKryptonite_newsfeatureResearch shows that people in general are overconfident, but entrepreneurs appear to be particularly prone to cockiness.
About half of new companies fail within five years, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Despite the imposing failure rate for new businesses, entrepreneurs are often quite confident that their ventures are going to succeed. One survey of 3,000 entrepreneurs found that 81% believed that their chance of success was 70% or higher; and a whopping 33% estimated their chance of success to be 100%.
New research from psychological scientists Daylian Cain (Yale University), Don A. Moore (University of California, Berkeley), and Uriel Haran (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) suggests that entrepreneurs may be the victims of their own better-than-average beliefs.
Across three experiments, the researchers showed that the better a person believes they are relative to others on a task, the higher the likelihood that they will decide to compete on that task. This overconfidence leads to larger numbers of competitors in “easy” markets, which could provide one reason why so many entrepreneurs make the mistake of confidently entering markets that are already overflowing with competition.
“Naturally, if people believe their chance of success is higher than that of the competition, it will increase their willingness to enter contests or start new businesses, even when their objective chances of succeeding are not particularly good,” the researchers explain.
In one of their overconfidence studies, 160 participants completed two math and logic puzzles – one easy and one difficult. After completing the quizzes, they could choose to enter one of their quiz scores into a competition market against other anonymous players.
The higher their score relative to other competitors, the more “tickets” they would be able to enter into a drawing for a cash prize, and the higher their chance of winning. Half of the participants were told that the difficult quiz was associated with a large prize ($90) and the easy quiz was associated with a smaller prize ($45), whereas the prize values were reversed for the other group of participants.
Regardless of prize size, people overwhelmingly preferred to compete in the easy-quiz market: Only 53 individuals chose to compete in the difficult-quiz market. This meant that the easy market was flooded with competition, driving the odds of winning the cash prize down.
“Our experiments revealed that this tendency of people to flock to competitions characterized by easy tasks is driven by their beliefs that they are better than others on these easy tasks but worse than others (or at least, not so much better than others) on difficult tasks,” Cain and colleagues write.
This finding supports previous research on overconfidence conducted by Moore and Albert Mannes of the University of Pennsylvania. In a study published in Psychological Science, Moore and Mannes found that people tended to overconfident in their estimates, even after receiving accurate feedback.
When it comes to opening a new business, Cain and colleagues make the argument that it is not whether one can make a hamburger that leads to success at opening a burger joint, but whether one can do so better than the competition.
“When it comes to relative standing, the performance of one’s competition can be just as important as one’s own performance,” they conclude. “As the old joke goes, when two campers are being chased by a hungry bear, it is not necessary to outrun the bear—only to outrun the other camper.”
 
References
Cain, D. M., Moore, D. A., & Haran, U. (2015). Making sense of overconfidence in market entry. Strategic Management Journal, 36(1), 1-18. doi: 10.1002/smj.2196
Mannes, A. E., & Moore, D. A. (2013). A behavioral demonstration of overconfidence in judgment. Psychological Science, 24(7), 1190-1197. doi: 10.1177/0956797612470700
from Association for Psychological Science » Minds for Business http://bit.ly/1XcRIR0

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How Caffeine Can Keep You Honest

PAFF_031116_CaffeineHonest_newsfeatureCaffeine is the most commonly used psychoactive drug in the world. And anyone who has ever worked in an office probably has a good reason for this socially accepted drug use: Caffeine enhances many cognitive processes, particularly when people are tired. This could explain why around 90% of Americans consume caffeine every day.
In addition to wreaking havoc on productivity and safety, researchers have found evidence that sleepiness may also play a role in unethical behavior. Sleep deprivation increases the presence of adenosine, an inhibitory neuromodulator that decreases cellular activity in the brain. One known mechanism by which caffeine counteracts the negative effects of sleep deprivation is by blocking adenosine receptors and increasing availability of the nerve cell messenger glutamate.
In one study, psychological scientists Michael Christian (University of North Carolina) and Aleksander P.J. Ellis (University of Arizona) found that sleep-deprived employees, those who received less than 6 hours of sleep in a night, were more likely to be engage in negative and unethical behavior at work the next day. However, in another study, Christian, Ellis, and colleagues David Welsh (University of Washington) and Ke Michael Mai (University of Arizona) found that providing tired people with a jolt of caffeine may help ward of negative behavior.
For the study, about 100 college students were kept awake all night in a lab where they could watch TV and play board games. The next morning, they were joined by a group of 100 well-rested students. At the start of the experiment, all of the students were given two pieces of mint-flavored gum. Half of the participants were given normal gum, but the other half received gum with 200 mg of caffeine — approximately the same amount of caffeine contained in a 12-ounce coffee.
Participants then took part in a money-sharing game. They were led to believe they were splitting $7 with another person in the study, but in reality they were playing against a computer opponent. In the game, the participant was given information about two options for splitting the money; in option A the participant received $5, while in option B they would receive $2. They could send their partner either an honest message (choose option A and you get $5) or a deceptive one (choose option B and you get $5).
Half the participants were assigned to a social influence condition, in which one of the experimenters encouraged them to send the deceptive message. In the control condition, participants received no encouragement either way.
Overall, sleep-deprived students were far more likely than their well-rested counterparts to send the deceptive message. But caffeine appeared to help tired students stick to their ethical principles. Among sleep-deprived students, those who had consumed caffeine were significantly less likely to send a deceptive message compared to their un-caffeinated counterparts, even under social pressure from the experimenter.
“The effects we found might be even stronger in an organizational context where employees not only have to stay awake all night but must also fulfill challenging job responsibilities during this period,” the researchers write.
Organizations need to be aware that the negative costs of sleep deprivation not only hurt employees, but can also hurt the bottom line. In a recent special section of Perspectives on Psychological Science, researchers argue that policymakers need to start taking steps to prioritize sleep health in the workplace with stronger regulation of work hours and schedules.
While Welsh and colleagues suggest that providing caffeine in the workplace is one way to help avoid ethical lapses, they also warn that caffeine is no substitute for getting a good night’s sleep.
 
Reference
Welsh, D. T., Ellis, A. P., Christian, M. S., & Mai, K. M. (2014). Building a self-regulatory model of sleep deprivation and deception: The role of caffeine and social influence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(6), 1268. doi: 10.1037/a0036202
from Association for Psychological Science » Minds for Business http://bit.ly/1MbEiih

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To Spot a Liar, Listen Closely

PAFF_030116_CatchaLiar_newsfeatureThe car company Volkswagen recently came under fire for purposely designing diesel engines to “cheat” emissions tests. Volkswagen is now facing billions of dollars in fines from countries around the world. Volkswagen’s CEO claims that he was unaware of the scheme, but German prosecutors are now probing the CEO for fraud charges.
It’s difficult and expensive for regulators to catch corporate fraud, but new insights from psychological science may eventually provide new techniques for spotting deception.
In general, research has shown that people are not very good at spotting lies. People tend to use nonverbal behaviors when they’re trying to spot a lie, but research suggests that vocal cues are much more reliable.
In a comprehensive review of the literature on lying, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Aldert Vrij (University of Portsmouth) and colleagues give an example of this. Participants in one study were supposed to detect lies in a statement from a convicted murder. The more visual cues the participants reported, the worse their ability to distinguish between truths and lies. Those who mentioned nonverbal behaviors, like gaze aversion or fidgeting, as “tells” for lying had the lowest accuracy at spotting lies.
Instead, the study showed that listening carefully to what was being said was the best way to accurately discern the truth from a lie.
To find out more about verbal “tells” for lying, a team of researchers led by Judee Burgoon of the University of Arizona analyzed the speech of corporate fraudsters. Burgoon and colleagues analyzed over 1,000 statements made by the CEO and CFO of one company during six quarterly earnings conference calls. These two company executives were eventually convicted of fraud in multiple securities class action lawsuits.
The corporate earnings conference calls allowed the researchers to accurately compare lying during both scripted, as well as unscripted, speech. These calls are publicly broadcast, and follow a typical pattern; executives give an hour-long presentation on the company’s earnings, followed by an unscripted Q&A with financial analysts.
The research team hypothesized that lying would be more cognitive taxing than telling the truth. Compared to making a truthful statement, it might be easier to use simpler language during a lie.
“Because of the increased cognitive load and the human mind’s finite processing capacity, liars will have difficulty simultaneously maintaining a false story and producing linguistically complex utterances,” Burgoon and colleagues write. “In other words, the more difficult it is for deceivers to concoct a believable response, the more they must resort to simpler language.”
Previous experiments indicate that liars enlist specific strategies to try to distance themselves from their lies. They try to keep statements short and use vague or hedging language (e.g., “I guess” and “maybe” or “could,” “might”). Liars also tend to avoid first-person singular pronouns (e.g., “I,” “me,” “myself”), which are usually a clear signal that the speaker is taking ownership of a statement.
Using special software, the researchers analyzed sound recordings from these calls at a granular level. In order to differentiate between lies and true statements in the recordings, a financial expert was recruited to code the overstatements and lies related to financial fraud.
The analysis confirmed that there were certain speech patterns the executives fell into while lying. Fraud-related speech tended to be more “fuzzy” than non-fraudulent statements; the executives used more hedge words, more distancing language, and more uncertain statements. Contrary to their expectations, the researchers also found that fraudulent statements tended to be longer and more detailed than honest ones.
Executives also used more positive and fewer negative emotional words during fraudulent statements, “suggesting a desire to put a positive spin on what was being reported.”
The researchers caution that the results of this study are limited because this study was based on only two people from one company. However, as different types of data become increasingly available – including call transcripts, online chat logs, social media – researchers will have a bigger pool of materials to draw from.
“For better or worse, new frauds are exposed on a regular basis leading to an expansion of available data. As additional candidate scenarios and features become available, richer analysis is possible,” the researchers conclude.
 
References
Burgoon, J., Mayew, W. J., Giboney, J. S., Elkins, A. C., Moffitt, K., Dorn, B., … & Spitzley, L. (2015). Which spoken language markers identify deception in high-stakes settings? Evidence from earnings conference calls. Journal of Language and Social Psychology. doi: 10.1177/0261927X15586792
Vrij, A., Granhag, P. A., & Porter, S. (2010). Pitfalls and opportunities in nonverbal and verbal lie detection. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 11(3), 89-121. doi: 10.1177/1529100610390861
from Association for Psychological Science » Minds for Business http://bit.ly/1QS4rdA

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Want to get promoted, ladies? Save up for platform shoes and voice coaching

PAFF_021116_BackdoorBacklash_newsfeatureAsking for a promotion, negotiating for a raise, or speaking up about concerns may help a male employee get ahead, but a female employee could easily end up labeled as “bossy” or worse for the exact same behavior. Research suggests that many women rightly worry that being “too aggressive” may result in backlash from their colleagues and supervisors.
This double-standard may help explain why women across the globe still struggle to gain leadership positions and pay parity with their male peers.
“Management and supervisory positions are overwhelmingly held by men. Within each sector men are more often promoted than women, and paid better as a consequence. This trend culminates at the very top, where amongst CEOs less than 4% are women,” according to the European Union’s Commission on Justice.
A large body of research suggests that people tend to penalize others for violating behavioral norms. Beliefs about appropriate roles for men and women often encourage men to be strong and assertive, and women to be warm and nurturing. Both men and women risk being socially penalized for violating these prescribed gender roles.
For example, Yale University researcher Victoria Brescoll has found that women are frequently penalized for engaging in the assertive behaviors necessary for professional success. In a 2008 study published in Psychological Science, Brescoll and colleagues found that men received a boost in their perceived status after expressing anger. On the other hand, “women who expressed anger were consistently accorded lower status and lower wages, and were seen as less competent.”
However, a new meta-analysis suggests that there are ways for women to avoid some of this workplace backlash. Study authors Melissa Williams (Emory University) and Larissa Tiedens (Stanford University) designed a meta-analysis of 71 studies examining gender, dominance, and backlash.
Consistent with previous research, they found that, compared to men, women were much more likely to be punished for showing dominance behaviors. That is, assertive behaviors like asking for a raise or talking during a meeting can carry substantial professional risk for women.
They also found that although dominant men tend to get a professional boost, women often pay a price in “likability.” Being dominant did not hurt perceptions of women’s competence, but it did make people like them less. Importantly, Williams and Tiedens found that likability can be an even more important factor than competence for getting hired.
“Male leaders are able to express dominance—without incurring liking penalties—in ways that female leaders are not. Past research has established, for instance, that employees must be seen as likable as well as skilled to be hired or promoted— competence alone is insufficient,” Williams and Tiedens explain in the journal Psychological Bulletin.
But the researchers found that not all forms of dominance led to backlash. Interestingly, the results suggested that implicit forms of dominance, such as body language or facial expressions, did not harm women’s status.
“There appears to be no need, for instance, for leaders to shy away from taking a commanding presence in a meeting, such as by standing tall and using a loud voice,” Williams and Tiedens write.
The researchers admit that this is not a solution to the systemic problem of gender bias. However, Williams and Tiedens hope that these results will provide women with tactics – such as using dominant body language – that can help them achieve professional goals without incurring social costs.
 
References
Brescoll, V. L., & Uhlmann, E. L. (2008). Can an angry woman get ahead? Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace. Psychological Science, 19(3), 268-275. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02079.x
Williams, M. J., & Tiedens, L. Z. (2016). The subtle suspension of backlash: A meta-analysis of penalties for women’s implicit and explicit dominance behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 165. doi: 10.1037/bul0000039
from Association for Psychological Science » Minds for Business http://bit.ly/1o7TyYo

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For Job Interviews, Earlier in the Day May Be Better

PAFF_063015_InterviewTiming_newsfeatureDuring a job interview, many applicants worry that their professional fate rests in the first few moments of the interview. After a few minutes—or even seconds—the interviewer has sized them up and arrived at a decision.

But new research suggests that there may be a different factor for job candidates to worry about: timing. Data gathered by psychological scientists Rachel Frieder (Old Dominion University), Chad Van Iddekinge (Florida State University), and Patrick Raymark (Clemson University) challenge the common belief that interviewers rely on near-instantaneous snap judgements. Instead, their research suggests that a successful interview may depend on your place in the interview schedule.

For the first one or two applicants, interviewers don’t have much information to process, allowing them to make a decision about a candidate’s suitability fairly easily. But, as more candidates are interviewed, interviewers have to remember, process, and compare increasing amounts of information. Therefore, interviewers may resort to using rule-of-thumb strategies, also known as heuristics, to help them make decisions.

“We expected that interviewers would take longer to make decisions about the first few applicants they interviewed and take less time to make decisions as they interviewed additional applicants,” Frieder and colleagues write.

To test this theory, the researchers analyzed data from hundreds of real job interviews conducted at a university career fair. A group of 166 experienced interviewers representing a variety of organizations interviewed a total of 691 students.

Each interviewer conducted an average of six interviews, each scheduled for a 30-minute time slot. Immediately after each interview session, interviewers rated the performance of the job candidate and noted at what point in the interview they had come to their decision.

According to the interviewers’ self-reports, snap judgements were actually very rare: Interviewers reported making a decision within the first minute of the interview only about 5% of the time. This generally happened when an applicant’s performance was either exceptionally good or bad.

Most of the time, interviewers reported making their decision between 5 and 15 minutes into the interview. However, over 20% still hadn’t made up their minds even after the interview was over.

The data showed that interviewers tended to take progressively longer to come to a decision after the first few applicants. However, after talking to about four applicants, the deliberation time began to decrease after each additional applicant.

In other words, as the number of applicants increased, interviewers took longer to deliberate because they had more information to process. The findings suggest that once the cognitive load of all the information got to be too much, around the fourth candidate, they began to rely more on heuristics to come to a quicker, more automatic decision.

“One implication is that interview order may place some applicants at a disadvantage,” the researchers conclude. “For example, applicants interviewing later in the schedule might not get as much opportunity to perform as those earlier in the schedule.”

Other factors also influenced how quickly an interviewer came to a decision. Interviewers who engaged in small talk with applicants tended to make quicker decisions, as did interviewers with more experience.

The researchers caution that they were not able to determine whether interviewers who took longer to make a decision were actually better at choosing high-performing applicants. It’s entirely possible that quick judgements were just as accurate at gauging talent as more deliberate interviews.

However, organizations may benefit from making sure that interviewers give each candidate an equal shot to show their stuff during the interview. The researchers suggest limiting the number of interviews that an interviewer conducts in immediate succession and ensuring there are breaks between interviews.

 

Reference

Frieder, R. E., Van Iddekinge, C. H., & Raymark, P. H. (2015). How quickly do interviewers reach decisions? An examination of interviewers’ decision‐making time across applicants. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. doi: 10.1111/joop.12118

from Association for Psychological Science » Minds for Business http://bit.ly/1U5sjcj

 

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