Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Six studies explored the overlap between racial and gender stereotypes, and the consequences of this overlap for interracial dating, leadership selection, and athletic participation. Two initial studies captured the explicit and implicit gender content of racial stereotypes: Compared with the White stereotype, the Asian stereotype was more feminine, whereas the Black stereotype was more masculine.

A common cliché and system-justifying stereotype is that power leads to misery and self-alienation. Drawing on the power and authenticity literatures, however, we predicted the opposite relationship. Because power increases the correspondence between internal states and behavior, we hypothesized that power enhances subjective well-being (SWB) by leading people to feel more authentic.

Social scientists have spent decades studying how individuals achieve status within organizational groups — that is, how they gain respect, prominence, and influence in the eyes of others. We know, for example, that demographics matter: People of the historically dominant race and gender and a respected age (white men over 40 in the western corporate world) are typically afforded higher status than everyone else.

A core theme surrounding consumption is that people do not consume products and services based solely on their functionality and for utilitarian purposes (Belk et al. 1982). One’s home, car, clothes, and music often hold additional psychological value to the consumer. As elegantly detailed throughout the book, such consumption opportunities serve as a reflecting pool for the self and one’s identity (Chapter 8 and Chapter 9, this volume).

In this chapter, we explore the relationship between counterfactuals and meaning. To do so, we have organized our thoughts into three sections. First, we review previous research on the role of counterfactual mind-sets, or cognitive orientations, in establishing causal relationships. Second, we explore the implications of the deliberate construction of counterfactuals for the emergence of personal meaning. We claim that the psychosocial construction of autobiographical life stories are inexorably linked with counterfactual thought.

Five studies explore observers' condemnation of passive victims. Studies 1 and 2 examine the role of observers' behavioral forecasts in condemning passive victims of sexual harassment. Observers generally predicted that they would engage in greater confrontation than victims typically do. More importantly, the more confrontation participants predicted they would engage in, the more they condemned the passive victim, and the less willing they were to recommend the victim for a job and to work with her.

Four studies explored whether perspective-taking and empathy would be differentially effective in mixed-motive competitions depending on whether the critical skills for success were more cognitively or emotionally based. Study 1 demonstrated that individual differences in perspective-taking, but not empathy, predicted increased distributive and integrative performance in a multiple-round war game that required a clear understanding of an opponent's strategic intentions.