While putting people into groups amplifies their cognitive capacity, it can either intensify or impair people’s motivational level. Resting on the premise of groups as motivated-information-processors, the current paper proposes that factors that vary a group’s motivation level might hold...

The social identity literature has traditionally examined affirmational identities, that is, groups defined by what they are (e.g., "we are management scholars"), but has largely overlooked negational identities, that is, groups defined by what they are not (e.g., "we are not Republicans") as a...

The impact of newcomer's social similarity and opinion agreement with old timers is examined. Much of the research about newcomers has ignored the role of social similarity, generally conflating newcomer status with out-group status. The current investigation addresses this confound by...

We examine the impact of social categorization and disagreement on individuals' affective and cognitive reactions in decision-making settings. A 2 (social similarity: in-group vs. out-group) x 2 (task opinion similarity: agree vs. disagree) between-subjects experiment showed that participants...

Many tendencies in social perceivers' judgments about individuals and groups can be integrated in terms of the premise that perceivers rely on implicit theories of agency acquired from cultural traditions. Whereas, American culture primarily conceptualizes agency as a property of individual...

"Stop Wasting Precious Time and Money You have a complex problem at work, and you know the standard solutions: hire a consultant, enlist a superstar employee, have more meetings about it. In short, spend money and hours to dig your way out. But you've been down this road before-the so-called...

Markets and communities are often compared as alternative forms of knowledge sharing, but the process by which people dynamically transition between them is less understood. As a preliminary study of these transitions, we design a technology that allows geographically distributed participants to...

Cultures might differ when they lose control and seek to regain it. Two experiments explored whether threats to control affected participants’ willingness to believe personality feedback from a horoscope. We found that lack of control increased the degree to which people in Western, but not...

We develop a dynamic cognitive model of network activation and show that people at different status levels spontaneously activate, or call to mind, different subsections of their networks when faced with job threat. Using a multi-method approach (General Social Survey data and a laboratory...

This paper compares how managers value knowledge from internal and external sources. Although many theories account for favoritism toward insiders, we find that preferences for knowledge obtained from outsiders are also prevalent. Two complementary case studies and survey data from managers...