Lack of trust is a key barrier to collaboration in organizations and is exacerbated in contexts when employees subscribe to different ideological beliefs. Across five preregistered experiments, we find that people judge ideological opponents as more trustworthy when opposing opinions are expressed through a self-revealing personal narrative than through either data or stories about third parties-even when the content of the messages is carefully controlled to be consistent. Trust does not suffer when explanations grounded in self-revealing personal narratives are augmented with data, suggesting that our results are not driven by quantitative aversion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcross all domains of human social life, positive perceptions of conversational listening (i.e., feeling heard) predict well-being, professional success, and interpersonal flourishing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Gen
December 2023
Individuals often preferentially avoid information that contradicts and seek information that aligns with their prior beliefs-a tendency referred to as "selective exposure." Traditionally, prior research has focused on drivers of selective exposure, including avoidance of cognitive dissonance. We take a complementary approach by investigating the conditions under which concerns drive selective exposure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
February 2023
In the United States, liberals and conservatives disagree about facts. To what extent does expertise attenuate these disagreements? To study this question, we compare the polarization of beliefs about COVID-19 treatments among laypeople and critical care physicians. We find that political ideology predicts both groups' beliefs about a range of COVID-19 treatments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Opin Psychol
October 2022
To form truthful beliefs, individuals must expose themselves to varied viewpoints. And yet, people routinely avoid information that contradicts their prior beliefs-a tendency termed "selective exposure." Why? Prior research theorizes that exposure to opposing views triggers negative emotions; in turn, people avoid doing so.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGiven the many contexts in which people have difficulty engaging with views that disagree with their own-from political discussions to workplace conflicts-it is critical to understand how conflictual conversations can be improved. Whereas previous work has focused on strategies to change individual-level mindsets (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Rev
May 2022
The present article reviews a growing body of research on receptiveness to opposing views-the willingness to access, consider, and evaluate contradictory opinions in a relatively impartial manner. First, we describe the construct of receptiveness and consider how it can be measured and studied at the individual level. Next, we extend our theorizing to the interpersonal level, arguing that receptiveness in the course of any given interaction is mutually constituted by the dispositional tendencies observable behaviors of the parties involved.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe review research on "attitude conflict" -- competitive disagreement with regard to beliefs, values, and preferences, characterized by parties' intolerance of each other's positions. We propose a simple causal model of attitude conflict, including three antecedents that drive it and two consequences that frequently emerge. Whereas prior research has focused on the consequences - negative inferences about holders of opposing views and negative affect at the prospect of interacting with them - we focus on the antecedents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcross seven studies (combined = 5,484), we demonstrated that confidence in one's judgments decreases over a series of quantitative estimates. This finding was robust to various methods of confidence elicitation, the presence of incentives, and different estimation topics (Studies 1, 2, and 4). Our results also stand in contrast to participant expectations (Study 3).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNegotiation scholarship espouses the importance of opening a bargaining situation with an aggressive offer, given the power of first offers to shape concessionary behavior and outcomes. In our research, we identified a surprising consequence to this common prescription. Through four studies in the field and laboratory (total = 3,742), we explored how first-offer values affect the recipient's perceptions of the offer-maker's trustworthiness and, subsequently, the recipient's behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Pers Soc Psychol
December 2019
In a recent article published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP; Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson, & Gino, 2017), we reported the results of 2 experiments involving "getting acquainted" conversations among strangers and an observational field study of heterosexual speed daters. In all 3 studies, we found that asking more questions in conversation, especially follow-up questions (that indicate responsiveness to a partner), increases interpersonal liking of the question asker. Kluger and Malloy (2019) offer a critique of the analyses in Study 3 of our article.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople preferentially consume information that aligns with their prior beliefs, contributing to polarization and undermining democracy. Five studies (collective N = 2455) demonstrate that such "selective exposure" partly stems from faulty affective forecasts. Specifically, political partisans systematically overestimate the strength of negative affect that results from exposure to opposing views.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConversation is a fundamental human experience that is necessary to pursue intrapersonal and interpersonal goals across myriad contexts, relationships, and modes of communication. In the current research, we isolate the role of an understudied conversational behavior: question-asking. Across 3 studies of live dyadic conversations, we identify a robust and consistent relationship between question-asking and liking: people who ask more questions, particularly follow-up questions, are better liked by their conversation partners.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe introduce and evaluate the effectiveness of temptation bundling-a method for simultaneously tackling two types of self-control problems by harnessing consumption complementarities. We describe a field experiment measuring the impact of bundling instantly gratifying but guilt-inducing "want" experiences (enjoying page-turner audiobooks) with valuable "should" behaviors providing delayed rewards (exercising). We explore whether such bundles increase should behaviors and whether people would pay to create these restrictive bundles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPopular belief holds that eye contact increases the success of persuasive communication, and prior research suggests that speakers who direct their gaze more toward their listeners are perceived as more persuasive. In contrast, we demonstrate that more eye contact between the listener and speaker during persuasive communication predicts less attitude change in the direction advocated. In Study 1, participants freely watched videos of speakers expressing various views on controversial sociopolitical issues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrior investigators have asserted that certain group characteristics cause group members to disregard outside information and that this behavior leads to diminished performance. We demonstrate that the very process of making a judgment collaboratively rather than individually also contributes to such myopic underweighting of external viewpoints. Dyad members exposed to numerical judgments made by peers gave significantly less weight to those judgments than did individuals working alone.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
October 2011
Four studies examined dyadic collaboration on quantitative estimation tasks. In accord with the tenets of "naïve realism," dyad members failed to give due weight to a partner's estimates, especially those greatly divergent from their own. The requirement to reach joint estimates through discussion increased accuracy more than reaching agreement through a mere exchange of numerical "bids.
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