Do positive expectations and fantasies help you achieve goals?
sitive expectations do. Positive fantasies don't: Two forms of thinking about the future are distinguished: expectations versus fantasies. Positive expectations (judging a desired future as likely) predicted high effort and successful performance, but the reverse was true for positive fantasies (experiencing one's thoughts and mental images about a desired future positively). Participants were graduates looking for a job (Study 1), students with a crush on a peer of the opposite sex (Study 2), undergraduates anticipating an exam (Study 3), and…
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Being Ethical Can Hurt Your Income
is paper empirically investigates the link between ethics, earnings and gender. Using a self-reported measure from a longitudinal survey of registrants for the Graduate Management Admissions Test, we find that ethical character is negatively associated with males’ wages. For females, however, this relationship doesn’t hold. In addition, using measures of the degree to which ethics is emphasized in business school curricula as an indicator for enhancement of individual ethical standards of graduates, we investigate variation in the returns to an…
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Do hungry judges give harsher sentences?
e judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings. We test the common caricature of realism that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast” in sequential parole decisions…
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Here’s Why Married Men Earn More Than Single Men
is article investigates how marriage affects the wages of men in Germany. A variety of reasons have been proposed for why married men earn higher wages than single men; however, previous tests of the leading explanations have been inconclusive. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, it is found that married men enjoy a wage premium even after controlling for self-selection into marriage. In contrast to the popular household specialization hypothesis, men do not substantially reduce their housework time following…
1 min read
Here’s How Your Self-Esteem Affects Your Salary
cent research in economics suggests a positive association between self-esteem and earnings. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which administered the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale during its 1980 and 1987 interviews, I provide further evidence for the existence of a self-esteem premium by exploiting variation in these measures between the two years. I show that self-esteem in 1980 has a sizeable impact on wages 8 years later, controlling for a wide set of individual characteristics and addressing problems of…
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Are the unemployed discriminated against in hiring?
e were surprised to find that, all things being equal, unemployed applicants were viewed as less competent, warm and hireable than employed individuals," said lead researcher Geoffrey Ho, a doctoral student in human resources and organizational behavior at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. "We were also surprised to see how little the terms of departure mattered. Job candidates who said they voluntarily left a position faced the same stigma as job candidates who said they had been laid off…
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What can we tell about someone’s personality from their handshake?
examined whether handshakes improved the accuracy with which participants judged a set of targets. Handshakes are interpersonally coordinated behaviors that require motivation and practice to perform well. Therefore conscientiousness may predict how well handshakes are executed. If so, a person's conscientiousness may be more accurately perceived at zero-acquaintance through a handshake. Individual female and male participants rated the personality of five, same-gender targets after each had introduced herself or himself. Half of the targets offered and shook hands with…
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When faced with moral dilemmas, do we do what is ethically right or what is mentally easy?
e literature on how people solve moral dilemmas often focuses on situations in which individuals have to make a decision where different moral rules are in conflict. In some of these situations, such as in footbridge dilemmas, people have to choose between sacrificing a few people in order to save many. The present research focuses on how people decide what to do in dilemmas involving conflicting moral rules. We propose that the rule that is cognitively most accessible during the…
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