"I read Playboy for the articles": Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences
| Authors: | Zoë Chance and Michael I. Norton |
|---|---|
| Published: | September 24, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | September 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
We want others to find us good, fair, responsible and logical; and we place even more importance on thinking of ourselves this way. Therefore, when people behave in ways that might appear selfish, prejudiced, or perverted, they tend to engage a host of strategies designed to justify questionable behavior with rational excuses: "I hired my son because he's more qualified." "I promoted Ashley because she does a better job than Aisha." Or, "I read Playboy for the articles." In this chapter from a forthcoming book, HBS doctoral student Zoë Chance and professor Michael I. Norton describe various means of coping with one's own questionable behavior: through preemptive actions and concurrent strategies for re-framing uncomfortable situations, forgoing decisions, and forgetting those decisions altogether.
Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior
| Authors: | Lalin Anik, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton, and Elizabeth W. Dunn |
|---|---|
| Published: | September 10, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | August 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Helping others takes countless forms and springs from countless motivations, from deep-rooted empathy to a more calculated desire for public recognition. Social scientists have identified a host of ways in which charitable behavior can lead to benefits for the giver, whether economically via tax breaks, socially via signaling one's wealth or status, or psychologically via experiencing well-being from helping. Charitable organizations have traditionally capitalized on all of these motivations for giving, with a recently emerging focus on highlighting the mood benefits of giving—the feelings of empowerment, joy, and inspiration that giving engenders. Indeed, if giving feels good, why not advertise the benefits of "self-interested giving," allowing people to experience that good feeling while increasing contributions to charity at the same time? HBS doctoral candidate Lalin Anik, Professor Michael I. Norton, and coauthors explore whether organizations that seek to increase charitable giving by advertising the benefits of giving are making claims supported by empirical research and, most importantly, whether such claims actually increase donations.
The Height Tax, and Other New Ways to Think about Taxation
| Q&A with: | Matthew Weinzierl |
|---|---|
| Published: | September 8, 2009 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
The notion of levying higher taxes on tall people—an idea offered largely tongue in cheek—presents an ideal way to highlight the shortcomings of current tax policy and how to make it better. Harvard Business School professor Matthew C. Weinzierl looks at modern trends in taxation.
A Decision-Making Perspective to Negotiation: A Review of the Past and a Look into the Future
| Authors: | Chia-Jung Tsay and Max H. Bazerman |
|---|---|
| Published: | August 20, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | July 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
The art and science of negotiation has evolved greatly over the past three decades, thanks to advances in the social sciences in collaboration with other disciplines and in tandem with the practical application of new ideas. In this paper, HBS doctoral student Chia-Jung Tsay and professor Max H. Bazerman review the recent past and highlight promising trends for the future of negotiation research. In the early 1980s, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a hot spot on the negotiations front, as scholars from different disciplines began interacting in the exploration of exciting new concepts. The field took a big leap forward with the creation of the Program on Negotiation, an interdisciplinary, multicollege research center based at Harvard University. At the same time, Roger Fisher and William Ury's popular book Getting to Yes (1981) had a pronounced impact on how practitioners think about negotiations. On a more scholarly front, a related, yet profoundly different change began with the publication of HBS professor emeritus Howard Raiffa's book The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982), which for years to come transformed how researchers would think about and conduct empirical research.
Optimal Taxation in Theory and Practice
| Authors: | N. Gregory Mankiw, Matthew Weinzierl, and Danny Yagan |
|---|---|
| Published: | August 19, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | June 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Are developments in the theory of taxation improving tax policies around the world? The optimal design of a tax system is a topic that has long fascinated economic theorists and flummoxed economic policymakers. This paper explores the interplay between tax theory and tax policy. It identifies key lessons policymakers might take from the academic literature on how taxes ought to be designed, and it discusses the extent to which these lessons are reflected in actual tax policy. The authors find that there has been considerable change in the theory and practice of taxation over the past several decades—although the two paths have been far from parallel. Overall, tax policy has moved in the directions suggested by theory along a few dimensions, even though the recommendations of theory along these dimensions are not always definitive.
The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution
| Authors: | N. Gregory Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl |
|---|---|
| Published: | August 19, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | June 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
A tax on height follows inexorably from a well-established empirical regularity and the standard approach to the optimal design of tax policy. Many readers of this paper, however, will not so quickly embrace the idea of levying higher taxes on tall taxpayers. Indeed, when first hearing the proposal, most people either recoil from it or are amused by it. That reaction is precisely what makes tax policy so intriguing, according to N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University and Matthew Weinzierl of HBS. This paper addresses a classic problem: the optimal redistribution of income. A Utilitarian social planner would like to transfer resources from high-ability individuals to low-ability individuals, but is constrained by the fact that he cannot directly observe ability. Taxing height helps the planner achieve redistribution efficiently because height, the data show, is an indicator of income-earning ability. Although readers might take this paper in one of two ways—some seeing it as a small, quirky contribution aimed to clarify the literature on optimal income taxation, others as a broader effort to challenge the entire literature—the authors' results raise a fundamental question about the framework for optimal taxation for which William Vickrey and James Mirrlees won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Economics and which remains a centerpiece of modern public finance.
In Favor of Clear Thinking: Incorporating Moral Rules into a Wise Cost-Benefit Analysis
| Authors: | Max H. Bazerman and Joshua D. Greene |
|---|---|
| Published: | August 13, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | July 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Policy decisions may be the most important set of decisions we make as a society. In this realm, moral rules often play an active and dysfunctional role. The typical way in which we make decisions—by weighing them individually—leads us to overuse moral rules in a manner that is inconsistent with the more reflective set of preferences we would identify through joint consideration of options. In their response to a companion article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Max Bazerman, of HBS, and Joshua D. Greene, of Harvard University, argue that cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is unfairly stereotyped. The critique of CBA in the companion article could be better framed as a set of considerations that can contribute to more careful CBAs.
Policy Bundling to Overcome Loss Aversion: A Method for Improving Legislative Outcomes
| Authors: | Katherine L. Milkman, Mary Carol Mazza, Lisa L. Shu, Chia-Jung Tsay and Max H. Bazerman |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 15, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | June 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Citizens hope their elected representatives will pass legislation that creates net gains that outweigh net harms—in other words, legislation that has positive expected value for society. However, economist Joseph Stiglitz has noted that legislators often fail to pass such legislation, even when its net positive expected value is highly significant. The psychology and economics literature suggests that legislators face an uphill battle when proposing legislation that has both costs and benefits due to the power of loss aversion, a cognitive bias that has been found to cause individuals to dramatically overweight losses relative to gains. Here the authors propose and test a new type of policy bundling technique in which related bills that have both costs and benefits are combined in a way that reduces the harmful effects of loss aversion.
Truth in Giving: Experimental Evidence on the Welfare Effects of Informed Giving to the Poor
| Authors: | Christina Fong and Felix Oberholzer-Gee |
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| Published: | July 8, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | May 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
It is often difficult for donors to predict the value of charitable giving because they know little about the persons who receive their help. While there is substantial evidence that individuals use information about recipients to decide how generous a donation to make, we know surprisingly little about how much donors care to help their preferred types. To start closing this gap, HBS professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Carnegie Mellon University coauthor Christina Fong study transfers of income to real-world poor people in the context of experimental games. Their findings have implications for governments and nongovernmental organizations that seek to increase the financial and political support for wealth transfer programs.
Are You Ready to Manage in an Irrational World?
| Published: | July 6, 2009 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | What Do YOU Think? |
| Forum: | closed | 97 Comments posted |
It is becoming clear that human behavior is much less rational than we assumed, says HBS professor Jim Heskett. Judging from replies to this month's question, there are many nuances to managing in an irrational world. (Online forum now closed. Next forum begins August 7.)
Social Influence Given (Partially) Deliberate Matching: Career Imprints in the Creation of Academic Entrepreneurs
| Authors: | Pierre Azoulay, Christopher C. Liu, and Toby E. Stuart |
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| Published: | June 11, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | May 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
How do people select partners for relationships? Most relationships arise from a matching process in which individuals pair on a limited number of high-priority dimensions. Although people often match on just a few attributes, it may be that some set of additional characteristics, which was not considered when a choice was made to develop the relationship, results in the social transmission of attitudes and behaviors. For this reason, social matching is only "partially" deliberate. HBS professor Toby Stuart and coauthors observe this phenomenon in an analysis of the origins and consequences of the matching of postdoctoral biomedical scientists to their faculty advisers. This work shows the imprints of postdoctoral advisers on the subsequent choices of the scientists-in-training who travel through their laboratories. The researchers' findings contribute to a burgeoning literature on the interface between academic and commercial science.
On Good Scholarship, Goal Setting, and Scholars Gone Wild
| Authors: | Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. Bazerman |
|---|---|
| Published: | May 20, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | April 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
When confronted by anecdotal evidence and some causal evidence, how should scholars—and indeed businesses and society—react? In this response to a critique in the journal Academy of Management Perspectives, the authors articulate the aims of their article "Goals Gone Wild: How Goals Systematically Harm Individuals and Organizations," describe points of disagreement with the critics, offer a definition of good scholarship, and suggest a program of research for future studies of goal setting.
Phenomenological Assumptions and Knowledge Dissemination within Organizational Studies
| Authors: | Corinne Bendersky and Kathleen L. McGinn |
|---|---|
| Published: | April 16, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | September 2008, revised March 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Field-wide integration of knowledge generated by subfield specialists is critical for new discoveries and for a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of complex phenomena. In spite of the value of broadly disseminating knowledge within the social and physical sciences, scholarly discourse tends to be contained within subfields of research. Further constraining innovation and understanding, knowledge dissemination between academics and practitioners or clinicians is often limited and inaccurate. In this article, UCLA professor Corinne Bendersky and HBS professor Kathleen L. McGinn introduce "phenomenological assumptions"—revealed beliefs about the fundamental qualities of the phenomenon under investigation and its relationship to the environment in which it occurs—as barriers limiting the integration of knowledge generated within a subfield into the broader intellectual discourse of its field.
Why Sweatshops Flourish
| Published: | March 23, 2009 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Everyone agrees it is wrong to buy things made with sweatshop labor. Yet many of us are willing to justify our decision when a product—a pair of jeans, for example—is something we really want. HBS doctoral student Neeru Paharia and Professor Rohit Deshpandé study the dark side of buying behavior. Their good news: We can influence change for the better.
Beyond Gender and Negotiation to Gendered Negotiations
| Authors: | Deborah Kolb and Kathleen L. McGinn |
|---|---|
| Published: | March 19, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | October 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
How does gender affect negotiations within organizations or rather how do organizations affect gender relations? Deborah Kolb, a professor at Simmons College School of Management, and HBS professor Kathleen McGinn explore how definitions of work, specified roles in organizations, status hierarchies, and the politics and practices of organizational realities affect how gender plays out in organizations. Considering gender in organizations from a "negotiated order perspective"—that is, from the perspective that cultural patterns and work practices are the result of past interaction and negotiation—not only expands the range of issues that are potentially negotiable, it also turns attention to rethinking certain dimensions of the negotiation process itself.
Dishonest Deed, Clear Conscience: Self-Preservation through Moral Disengagement and Motivated Forgetting
| Authors: | Lisa L. Shu, Francesca Gino, and Max H. Bazerman |
|---|---|
| Published: | February 19, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2009, revised April 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Why do people engage in unethical behavior repeatedly over time? In Everybody Does It! (1994), Thomas Gabor documents the pervasive immorality of ordinary people. Challenging the stereotype that only criminals violate the law, Gabor describes the numerous transgressions of everyday life and suggests that the excuses people make for their dishonest behavior parallel the justifications criminals make for their crimes. This common tendency of people to justify and distance themselves from their unethical behavior has captured the attention of several psychologists, and a long stream of research has documented differences in the way people think about their own ethical behavior and that of others. Harvard Business School's Lisa Shu and Max Bazerman, with colleague Francesca Gino, show that seemingly innocuous aspects of the environment can promote the decision to act ethically or unethically.
What's Good about Quiet Rule-Breaking
| Q&A with: | Michel J. Anteby |
|---|---|
| Published: | February 17, 2009 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
If your company quietly allows employees to break some rules with the tacit approval of management, that's a moral gray zone. And your company is not alone. When rules are broken but privileges are not abused, such unspoken pacts between workers and management can allow both to achieve their respective goals of expressing professional identity and sustaining efforts in positive ways, says HBS professor Michel Anteby. Q&A
Sweatshop Labor is Wrong Unless the Jeans are Cute: Motivated Moral Disengagement
| Authors: | Neeru Paharia and Rohit Deshpandé |
|---|---|
| Published: | January 27, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Most consumers in America have purchased products made with sweatshop labor at one point or another. However, very little attention has been focused on the psychological mechanisms that enable consumers to propagate a system that implicates harm. Although many people say they care about ethical issues such as humane labor conditions, demand for products that guarantee it remains low. According to some estimates, there are hundreds of thousands of sweatshops still operating today. HBS doctoral student Neeru Paharia and professor Rohit Deshpandé examine whether people may be motivated to morally disengage in the presence of harmful attributes such as sweatshop labor when desire for a product is high. They found that research participants were significantly more likely to agree with statements such as: "The use of sweatshop labor is okay because companies must remain competitive," and "Sweatshops are the only realistic source of income for workers in poorer countries," when confronted with a hypothetical pair of shoes with a higher appeal, versus shoes with a lower appeal. The researchers also found that moral disengagement can drive people to like products they believe to be made with sweatshop labor even more. The authors suggest that since we are confronted with conflicts between our desires and our moral standards on nearly a daily basis, this research calls into question the foundation from which our moral judgments rest on. If our moral judgments are likely to vary based on our affective desires, any moral standards we may hold ourselves to are dubious at best.
Published in 2008
Can Housing and Credit be "Nudged" Back to Health?
| Published: | December 3, 2008 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | What Do YOU Think? |
| Forum: | closed | 38 Comments posted |
Did human frailty cause this crisis? Several thinkers have come forward with a suggestion for improvements to fiscal policy that are based on fostering better decisions while preserving consumer choice, says HBS professor Jim Heskett. What should be done? What do you think? (Online forum now closed. Next forum begins January 7.)
Decoding the Artful Sidestep
| Q&A with: | Todd Rogers |
|---|---|
| Published: | November 17, 2008 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Do you notice when someone changes the subject after you ask them a question? If you don't always notice or even mind such conversational transformations, you're not alone. New research by Todd Rogers and Harvard Business School professor Michael I. Norton explores the common occurrence of "conversational blindness." Q&A with Rogers.
