Entrepreneurship & Innovation

We present six experiments that tested whether lacking control increases illusory pattern perception, which we define as the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions.

Research has yielded weak empirical support for the idea that creative solutions may be discovered through unconscious thought, despite anecdotes to this effect. To understand this gap, we examined the effect of unconscious thought on two outcomes of a remote-association test (RAT): implicit accessibility and conscious reporting of answers.

This chapter examines the relationship between the related yet distinct constructs of power and leadership. Although power (asymmetric control over valued resources) is often a foundation of leadership (influencing and motivating a group of individuals towards a common goal), we consider power to be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the emergence of leadership. We distinguish power from leadership along a number of dimensions and highlight that the relationship of power to leadership lies in power's psychological effects.

Three experiments explored the accessibility of stereotypes and counterstereotypes following stereotype suppression. Using a lexical decision task, experiment 1 demonstrated that the counterstereotype showed greater accessibility following stereotype suppression compared to stereotype expressers and no prime control participants. Using a person perception task, experiment 2 revealed that suppression can make both the stereotype and the counterstereotype more accessible.

Alcohol impairs cognition, but it may help build rapport. Here's how to decide whether to partake during the deal-making process.

Strategic requests for advice can transform disputes into amiable problem-solving ventures.

In the present research, the authors hypothesized that additive counterfactual thinking mind-sets, activated by adding new antecedent elements to reconstruct reality, promote an expansive processing style that broadens conceptual attention and facilitates performance on creative generation tasks, whereas subtractive counter-factual thinking mind-sets, activated by removing antecedent elements to reconstruct reality, promote a relational processing style that enhances tendencies to consider relationships and associations and facilitates performance on analytical problem-solving tasks.

We propose an analytically tractable continuous-time model of experimentation in which a risk-averse entrepreneur cannot fully diversify the idiosyncratic risk from his business investment. He makes consumption/savings and business exit decisions jointly, while learning about the unknown quality of the project over time.