Entrepreneurship & Innovation

A longitudinal study found that the psychological approach individuals take when immersed in a general multicultural environment can predict subsequent career success. Using a culturally diverse sample, we found that "multicultural engagement" — the extent to which students adapted to and learned about new cultures — during a highly international 10-month master of business administration (MBA) program predicted the number of job offers students received after the program, even when controlling for important personality/demographic variables.

Numerous studies have found that perspective-taking reduces stereotyping and prejudice, but they have only involved negative stereotypes. Because target negativity has been empirically confounded with reduced stereotyping, the general effects of perspective-taking on stereotyping and prejudice are unclear.

The current research explores how awareness of shared attention influences attitude formation. We theorized that sharing the experience of an object with fellow group members would increase elaborative processing, which in turn would intensify the effects of participant mood on attitude formation. Four experiments found that observing the same object as similar others produced more positive ratings among those in a positive mood, but more negative ratings among those in a negative mood.

Friendly gestures (e.g., smiles, flattery, favors) typically build trust and earn good will. However, we propose that people feel unsettled when enemies initiate friendly gestures. To resolve these sensemaking difficulties, people find order through superstitious reasoning about friendly enemies. Supporting this theorizing, friendly enemies created sensemaking difficulty, which in turn mediated people's tendencies to blame them for coincidental negative outcomes (Experiment 1).

The article describes the potential negative consequences of the courses about academia, and especially the danger of weakening research and the innovation system of research universities. The MOOC courses may disrupt the structure of higher education because their business model is effective in de-linking the three components of an active University: teaching, research, and approval of credit for degree-granting courses. In the end, the article offers universities several ways to deal with the negative consequences of these MOOC courses.

The current research establishes a first-mover disadvantage in negotiation. We propose that making the first offer in a negotiation will backfire when the sender reveals private information that an astute recipient can leverage to his or her advantage. In two experiments, we manipulated whether the first offer was purely distributive or revealed that the sender's preferences were compatible with the recipient's preferences (i.e., the negotiators wanted the same outcome on an issue).

Although a great deal of research has examined specific behaviors that positively affect leaders' negotiation processes and outcomes, there has been considerably less attention devoted to stable characteristics, psychological or physical, that might also influence outcomes at the bargaining table. In the current research, we identify a measureable physical trait — the facial width-to-height ratio — that predicts negotiation performance in men.