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When to Make the First Move
When Michael Jordan’s agent set out to negotiate a new contract with the Chicago Bulls for his client back in the mid 90s, he anticipated that the team’s managing partner would lowball the salary offer. So the agent opted to move first and requested an ambitious $52 million per year for Jordan. After a series of back and forth talks, the parties settled for an annual paycheck just above $30 million. By making the first offer — and doing so aggressively, at that — Jordan’s agent landed his client the single highest annual salary in the history of the National Basketball Association.
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Dishonesty and Creativity: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
New research shows that lying about performance on one task may increase creativity on a subsequent task by making people feel less bound by conventional rules. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “The common saying that ‘rules are meant to be broken’ is at the root of both creative performance and dishonest behavior,” says lead researcher Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School.
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28th International Congress of Applied Psychology
The 28th International Congress of Applied Psychology is July 8–13, 2014, at the Palais des Congrès in Paris, France. 5,000 attendees are expected to attend. For more information, visit www.icap2014.com or email [email protected].
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When Faced With a Hard Decision, People Tend to Blame Fate
Life is full of decisions. Some, like what to eat for breakfast, are relatively easy. Others, like whether to move cities for a new job, are quite a bit more difficult. Difficult decisions tend to make us feel stressed and uncomfortable – we don’t want to feel responsible if the outcome is less than desirable. New research suggests that we deal with such difficult decisions by shifting responsibility for the decision to fate. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Fate is a ubiquitous supernatural belief, spanning time and place,” write researchers Aaron Kay, Simone Tang, and Steven Shepherd of Duke University.
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Talking About Social Class Boosts Grades of First-Generation College Students
A novel one-hour intervention focused on discussions of social class can significantly narrow the achievement gap between first-generation college students and students who have a least one parent with a college degree, researchers find. The study is forthcoming Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The key to the one-time intervention’s success was raising students’ awareness of the ways that social class shapes the college experience, according to Northwestern psychological scientist Nicole Stephens.
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How Your Culture Affects Your Work Attitude
After claiming to have fostered a million marriages, eHarmony is extending its online dating formula to employee recruitment, helping job-hunters and employers find the perfect match. It may be a stretch to liken a great job to a soulmate. But just as eHarmony tests potential matches on various dimensions of compatibility, so do organizational psychologists identify the seeds of an optimal employee-employer relationship. Researchers have amassed decades worth of data showing what makes a professional “match made in heaven.” They refer to this measure as person-environment (P-E) fit — the degree of compatibility between individuals and some aspect of their work environment.
