Entrepreneurship & Innovation

In this article, we review empirical research investigating the efficacy of perspective-taking — the active consideration of others' mental states and subjective experiences — as a strategy for navigating intergroup environments. We begin by describing some of the benefits accrued from perspective-taking: more favorable implicit and explicit intergroup evaluations, stronger approach-oriented action tendencies and positive non-verbal behaviors, increased intergroup helping, reduced reliance on stereotype-maintaining mental processes, and heightened recognition of intergroup disparities.

The idea that group contexts can intensify emotions is centuries old. Yet, evidence that speaks to how, or if, emotions become more intense in groups remains elusive. Here we examine the novel possibility that group attention — the experience of simultaneous coattention with one's group members — increases emotional intensity relative to attending alone, coattending with strangers, or attending nonsimultaneously with one's group members. In Study 1, scary advertisements felt scarier under group attention.

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.

We propose that the psychological states individuals bring into newly formed groups can produce meaningful differences in status attainment. Three experiments explored whether experimentally created approach-oriented mindsets affected status attainment in groups, both immediately and over time. We predicted that approach-oriented states would lead to greater status attainment by increasing proactive behavior.

Previous research suggests that there is a fundamental link between expansive body postures and feelings of power. The current research demonstrates that this link is not universal, but depends on people's cultural background (Western versus East Asian) and on the particular type of expansive posture enacted. Three types of expansive postures were examined in the present studies: the expansive-hands-spread-on-desk pose (Carney et al., 2010), the expansive-upright-sitting pose, and the expansive-feet-on-desk pose (Carney et al., 2010).

We present a theoretical model of reappropriation — taking possession of a slur previously used exclusively by dominant groups to reinforce another group's lesser status. Ten experiments tested this model and established a reciprocal relationship between power and self-labeling with a derogatory group term. We first investigated precursors to self-labeling: Group, but not individual, power increased participants' willingness to label themselves with a derogatory term for their group. We then examined the consequences of such self-labeling for both the self and observers.

Perspective taking is often the glue that binds people together. However, we propose that in competitive contexts, perspective taking is akin to adding gasoline to a fire: It inflames already-aroused competitive impulses and leads people to protect themselves from the potentially insidious actions of their competitors. Overall, we suggest that perspective taking functions as a relational amplifier.

Although previous research has shown that making the first offer leads to a distributive advantage in negotiations, the current research explored how the timing of first offers affects the creativity of negotiation agreements. We hypothesized that making the first offer later rather than earlier in the negotiation would facilitate the discovery of creative agreements that better meet the parties' underlying interests. Experiment 1 demonstrated that compared with early first offers, late first offers facilitated creative agreements that better met the parties' underlying interests.

Integrating recent work on emotional communication with social science theories on unpredictability, we investigated whether communicating emotional inconsistency and unpredictability would affect recipients' concession-making in negotiation. We hypothesized that emotional inconsistency and unpredictability would increase recipients' concessions by making recipients feel less control over the outcome. In Experiment 1, dyads negotiated face-to-face after one negotiator within each dyad expressed either anger or emotional inconsistency by alternating between anger and happiness.