What's New?

March 2024 When Women Ask: Does Curiosity Help? My research examining the effects of curiosity as a transformative negotiation tool has been published in Social Sciences. Together with my colleagues Ece Tuncel and former American University student Lucie Prewitt we conducted three experimental studies involving 600 participants finding curiosity in negotiations—where one shows genuine interest in understanding the counterpart's perspective—can lead to successful economic outcomes without incurring the social backlash often faced by women.

December 2023 I am honored to be awarded a three year a Kogod Research Professorship to support my research. I appreciate the recognition from Dean Marchick and the Kogod School of Business, and the confidence in my continued scholarship.

August 2023 The Academy of Management named my 2016 paper with Rachel Campagna, Dejun Kong, and William Bottom, titled “Strategic Consequences of Emotion Misrepresentation in Negotiations: The Blowback Effect,” as the recipient of the Conflict Management Division's Most Influential Article award published between 2015-2018. I am thrilled and honored that a committee of conflict management experts judged this work to be the most influential conflict management-related paper published between 2015-2018.

July 2023 I presented my research with Ece Tuncel and Lucie Prewitt examining the value of displaying curiosity for women when they negotiate at the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM) in Thessaloniki, Greece.

June 2023 The Transdisciplinary Research Union for the Study of Trust (T-R-U-S-T) brought together 15 world-leading experts across disciplines for the inaugural meeting in Vienna, Austria. I was delighted to join this ambitious and inspiring effort to shape the future of transdisciplinary trust research with such engaging scholars from a wide range of disciplines.

April 2023 I had an engaging conversation with Christopher and Heather, the wonderful hosts of VBB, about best negotiation practices for professional women. Listen to the podcast of our conversation here.

March 2023 In recognition of Equal Pay Day – a day dedicated to recognizing the gender pay gap in the United States – I wrote an article distilling current negotiation research into five best practices to help women (and all people regardless of where they identify on the gender spectrum) negotiate more effectively in the workplace. You can read it here: 5 tips for women to negotiate a higher salary.

February 2023 My research examining Retrospective blind spots in reputation management, together with my wonderful colleagues Peter Kim, Alyssa Han and Ece Tuncel was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Across a series of experiments, we find that workplace transgressions, even relatively minor ones, have a more negative impact on people’s reputations than they anticipate. Past good deeds at work (e.g. volunteering to help an analyst on another team get ahead) are discounted when they are followed by bad deeds (e.g. covering up a mistake by blaming someone else) because observers retrospectively impute nefarious intentions for the past good deeds (e.g. they must have helped the analyst for self-interested reasons). This leads to divergent beliefs about moral character and trust in the workplace because people fail to anticipate effects on their reputation.

July, 2022 I presented my new research with Ece Tuncel and Robin Pinkley examining the effects of curiosity on successful negotiation outcomes (claiming value while still protecting the relationship) at the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM). Despite a last-minute flight cancellation I was fortunate to be able to participate by presenting virtually and received some very helpful feedback.

August, 2021 My colleagues and I are delighted to receive a National Science Foundation (NSF) award from the Decision, Risk and Management Sciences program for our research examining the Value of Statistical Life (VSL) estimates. VSL captures the trade-offs people are willing to make to reduce the probability of death. While VSL estimates are widely used in safety regulation, they vary considerably by measurement approach, they ignore differences in subjective experiences of risk, and VSL estimates from labor contexts are often leveraged for non-labor relations. In this project Elissa Cohen (in her doctoral dissertation work), Mary Hansen, Robert Feinberg and I conduct a series of studies examining these sources of variability in VSL with the aim of identifying more effective approaches to cost-benefit analyses of safety regulations.

March, 2021 My research examining whether first impressions of trust last and have an ongoing impact over time in subsequent interactions has been accepted for publication at Human Relations. Existing research on trust doesn’t provide a clear answer to this question. My colleagues Rachel Campagna, Kurt Dirks, Hilary Anger Elfenbein and I reconcile competing theoretical predictions by conducting a longitudinal field study and two experiments to identify how time can change the impact of initial trust beliefs and belief-disconfirming events on cooperation. While we find that first impressions of trust are mostly robust, even after a trust violation, we also find that people who are initially thought to be less trustworthy can overcome this perception by engaging in behavior that counters these beliefs over time. Our research is titled The (Mostly) Robust Influence of Initial Trustworthiness Beliefs on Subsequent Behaviors and Perceptions.

September, 2020 I am honored to be awarded a three-year appointment as Kogod Faculty Fellow in Management. I very much appreciate the recognition and support from the Kogod School of Business, and the confidence in my continued scholarship.

July, 2020 I participated in my first virtual conference, vIACM, and had the opportunity to present new research examining the effects of denial as strategy for repairing trust over time. This is research together with my colleague Rachel Campagna and we appreciated the chance to hear from our many talented colleagues who also participated from their homes.

March, 2020 My research, The Impact of Financial Literacy on Negotiation Behavior, with Susan Krische was accepted for publication at the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. In a series of studies engaging students from undergraduate business courses and adults recruited from an online crowdsourcing service, we examine the relationship between these measures of financial literacy and (a) the likelihood of initiating a negotiation and (b) the likely outcome from a negotiation, if initiated. Results suggest that financial confidence impacts participants’ willingness to engage in negotiation, while financial knowledge impacts the level of participants’ first offer. These findings suggest financial literacy has important implications for career advancement and compensation, as well as the successful management of interpersonal communications, even in fields not traditionally thought of as focusing on numerical reasoning skills.

August, 2019 Alyssa Han presented our new research with Peter Kim and Ece Tuncel examining how time and new events can change the perceived implications of past ethical and unethical behaviors at the Academy of Management (AOM) Meetings in Boston, MA. An extended abstract of our work was published in the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings 2019.

July, 2019 I am honored, together with my collaborators Ece Tuncel and Robin PInkley, to be the recipient of the NTR-Peterson Research Grant 2019. This grant was awarded to us for a new project that we are starting that examines potential tradeoffs between building relational and economic value in negotiations and focuses on identifying specific tactics that can mitigate this tradeoff.

July, 2019 I presented my research investigating alternatives to denying a transgression (an approach that has been shown to be most effective) when attempting to rebuild trust in a negotiation at the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM) in Dublin, Ireland. This work is with my collaborator Rachel Campagna.

May, 2019 I was delighted to present my new research with Rachel Campagna on leaders using hardball bargaining tactics at the 4th Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Leadership Symposium was held in Corfu, Greece.

March, 2019 My research examining how guilt after using anger tactics to achieve short‐term gains during a negotiation can influence the relationship between parties and behaviors the crucial implementation phase of a negotiated agreement, has been published in Behavioral Decision Making. This research was conducted with my collaborators Rachel Campagna and William Bottom and is titled, Motivated by guilt and low felt trust: The impact of negotiators' anger expressions on the implementation of negotiated agreements.

August, 2018 I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to present my research at a two-day workshop on Game Theory and Nuclear Stability in Northeast Asia, hosted by the John’s Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, funded by the United States Department of Defense, and coordinated with the Department of State. I learned about a range of multipolar nuclear stability issues in Northeast Asia from leading game theorists, nuclear strategists and regional experts during this fascinating workshop.

July, 2018 I was invited to present my research on initial trust in negotiations at the Cologne Social Cognition Meeting on Trust.  This intimate two-day meeting at a remote location offered an opportunity to interact with a fantastic group of interdisciplinary trust scholars and to learn more about the great research being conducted by scholars at the Social Cognition Center Cologne.

May, 2018  I am excited to be visiting the Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München through June thanks to the generous invitation of Prof. Dr. Brooke A. Gazdag and Prof. Dr. Martin Högl. I am looking forward to a productive time here with these inspiring colleagues.

July, 2017  My research project investigating how the power of a transgressor shapes the perceived authenticity of emotional displays following a transgression and resulting levels of trust was presented at the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM) in Berlin, Germany.  My collaborators Peter Kim, Ece Tuncel, Ryan Fehr, Arik Cheshin and Gerben van Kleef and I conducted six empirical studies and a meta-analysis that revealed: a) a transgressor’s display of emotion is perceived to be less authentic when that party’s power is high rather than low, b) this perception of emotional authenticity, in turn, directly influences (and mediates) the level of trust in that party, and c) perceivers ultimately exert less effort when asked to make a case for leniency toward high rather than low power transgressors.  Our research is forthcoming in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

November, 2016  Jane Seago wrote a great article Taking A New Look At Impasse, featuring my research with Ece Tuncel, Selin Kesebir, Robin Pinkley in YPO’s “Ignite” magazine on negotiator tendency toward accepting agreements.

August 9, 2016  My research project together with Rachel Campagna and Mara Olekalns examining the formation and implications of felt trust during job negotiations was presented at the76th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Anaheim, CA.

July 9, 2016  I presented my research Strategic implications of guilt and trust perceptions on post-negotiation behaviors with Rachel Campagna and William Bottom at the 32nd annual European Group for Organizational Studies Colloquium in Naples, Italy.

June 1, 2016  I was delighted to present "Negotiation for Medical Professionals" at Children's National Hospital Grand Rounds today. I met many interesting people and I also enjoyed the opportunity to run a Workshop for Women Faculty at Children's Hospital after my talk.

April 26, 2016  I am honored to be the recipient of the 2016 Jack Child Teaching with Technology Award for my use of technology in the classroom.

April 15, 2016  Susan Krische and I are excited to be the winners of the 2016 Kogod Interdisciplinary Research Funding Competition. Our interdisciplinary research will examine the impact of financial literacy on negotiation behavior.

March 31, 2016  My collaboration with 25 different research groups across the world conducting replications of moral judgment effects studied by Eric Luis Uhlmann and his colleagues was featured in The Atlantic in a piece by prominent science journalist Ed Yong, "How to Make Psychology Studies More Reliable: A new way for the field to address it's replication crisis." The project was also featured on Retraction Watch.

February 3, 2016   My new publication examining the value of agreement beyond the terms of a settlement was featured in the Minds for Business: Psychological Science at Work research blog.  The authors offer a nice summary of our work and raise interesting questions for future research.

January 13, 2016   Time.com mentioned my research on small talk and offered some great advice on negotiating a salary increase in the Money section of Career Guide 2016 today.

November 3, 2015   Why do negotiators sometimes agree to a deal that doesn't meet their objective interests? In my newest publication "Agreement attraction and impasse aversion" in press at Psychological Science, my colleagues Ece Tuncel, Selin Kesebir, Robin Pinkley and I conducted a series of experiments that repeatedly demonstrate that that for many people ‘agreement’ carries value that extends beyond the terms of a settlement. Individuals are given the choice to give up real value and sacrifice economic efficiency in order to attain a nominal agreement outcome and avoid an impasse. We find that labeling an allocation option as ‘agreement’ shifts choices in favor of that option, even when it is strictly dominated by the alternative choice. Similarly labeling an allocation outcome as ‘impasse’ shifts choices away from that option even when it strictly dominates the alternative choice. Our findings suggest that the appeal of agreement and the aversion to impasse are both important, and that these lead negotiators to strike deals that do not meet their objective interests. 

September 25, 2015   My research examining "Strategic consequences of emotional misrepresentation in negotiation" together with Rachel Campagna, Dejun Kong, and William Bottom was provisionally accepted for publication at the Journal of Applied Psychology. While prior research has affirmed a longstanding notion that feigning anger is a useful bargaining tactic, we examine whether this tactic jeopardizes post-negotiation deal implementation and subsequent cooperation.  We conduct four studies directly testing the tactical and strategic consequences of emotion representation.   False representations of anger generated little tactical benefit, but produced considerable and persistent strategic disadvantage. This disadvantage is due to an effect we call “blowback” – when a negotiator’s misrepresented anger creates an action-reaction cycle that results in genuine anger and diminishes trust in both the negotiator and counterpart. 

September 15, 2015    A project that I coauthored with Martin Schweinsberg, Nikhil Madan and numerous other colleagues titled, "The Pipeline Project: Pre-Publication Independent Replications of a Single Laboratory’s Research Pipeline" was conditionally accepted for publication at the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This is a unique project that introduces a collaborative approach to improving the reproducibility of scientific research through crowdsourcing.  My colleagues and I from 25 different research groups across the world conducted replications of ten moral judgment effects that Eric Luis Uhlmann and his collaborators had in their pipeline as of August 2014.  We found that 40% of the original findings failed at least one major replication criterion and we discuss potential ways to implement and incentivize pre-publication independent replications on a large scale. 

August 26, 2015    My paper “Accounting for Reciprocity in Negotiation and Social Exchange” written together with Peter Boumgarden, Daisung Jang and William Bottom was accepted for publication at Judgment and Decision Making.  In this paper we conduct two experiments that examine how the relational accounts people maintain to regulate exchange influence negotiations.

August 10, 2015    I presented my research on Temporal Influences on Trust Repair and Apology with Rachel Campagna at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Vancouver, Canada.

August 08, 2015    My colleague Mary Kern and I were honored to co-host a superb panel of experts on the topic of Scholarly Engagement with the Media at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Vancouver. Bruce Barry, Alfred Hermida, Ben Haimowitz, Adam Galinsky and Jo-Ellen Pozner each gave engaging presentations followed by a panel discussion with the audience. The session was a great success thanks to our participants.

June 24, 2015    Fast Company's Lydia Dishman wrote a great article, "Is there a Small-Talk Gender Gap?" featuring my a recent publication in Basic and Applied Social Psychology with Brooke Shaughnessy and Tanja Hentschel examining gender differences in small talk.

June 23, 2015    My research with Lisa Williams and Brooke Shaughnessy, "Motivating Trust: Can Mood and Incentives Increase Interpersonal Trust," was published today in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. We examine whether higher potential financial gains from trusting cause people to trust strangers more.  Our study shows that the motivating power of incentives depends on the mood of the trustor.