The word 'trauma' was originally used by psychiatrists to describe horrific events such as rape and torture that characteristically provoke extreme emotional distress. Both colloquially and clinically, the concept of psychological trauma has broadened considerably. Although many clinical scientists have expressed concern about the broadening of the concept of trauma, it remains unclear how and why this concept expansion occurs. We present two experiments in which US adults (N = 276, 267) sequentially classified descriptions of events (e.g., "broke a leg in a bicycle accident") as either 'trauma' or 'not trauma'. In the first experiment, we manipulated the frequency of serious and nonserious events. In the second experiment, we manipulated the total range of events (i.e., participants viewed only nonserious or only serious events). Together, the experiments suggest that participants' frame of reference for events (i.e., the perceived range of event seriousness) plays a relatively more important role.

Effective collaboration among individuals within organizations is essential for the successful operation of organizations. However, individuals often face significant impediments to successful collaboration, even when they share common goals. This symposium seeks to understand and identify impediments to three types of collaboration that are particularly relevant to improving individual performance and decision-making within organizations: advice, feedback, and favors. The papers provide novel insights into both individual and interpersonal factors that influence the processes of advice, feedback, and favors with the goal of informing strategies that will allow for more successful collaboration among individuals within organizations. Racial Minorities Receive More Conflicting Feedback Author: Ting Zhang; Harvard Business School Author: Michael White; Columbia Business School Author: Tuna Cem Hayirli; Harvard Business School Author: Modupe Akinola; Columbia U. Anchoring the Advisor: Do Advice-Seekers Induce Cognitive Biases in their Advisors? Author: Jessica Reif; Fuqua School of Business, Duke U. Author: Richard Paul Larrick; Duke U. Author: Jack Soll; Duke U. Advisor Performance Distorts Perceived Advice Quality and Utilization Author: David Levari; Harvard Business School Author: Jacqueline Feffer; Harvard U. When Flattery Fails: Flattery Perceived as Inauthentic Reduces Responses to Help Requests Author: Hayley Blunden; American U., Kogod School of Business Author: Erika Kirgios; U. of Chicago Booth School of business Author: Aneesh Rai; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Author: Edward Chang; Harvard Business School People are less likely to ask Gossips for Advice Author: Alexis Gordon; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Author: Maurice Schweitzer; U. of Pennsylvania

Mentoring is an important organizational process that contributes to career development and personal growth. Mentors are uniquely positioned to provide opportunities for learning by sharing important feedback with their mentees, and research on mentoring has demonstrated its ability to help mentees cope with major organizational shocks. The goals of this symposium are to explore new insights and identify communication behaviors that can enable the creation of more positive workplace mentorship relationships. In pursuit of these two missions, in the proposed symposium we bring together four papers to reveal novel theoretical directions and important empirical insights about factors that may aid or hamper beneficial work mentoring relationships. Our discussant, Taya Cohen, will help integrate these papers and facilitate discussion. We hope the findings presented will reveal novel and important empirical insights, and aid business organizations and managers of the future in creating beneficial work mentoring relationships. The Detrimental Effects of High-Status Mentors for Low Performers Presenter: Jennifer Abel; Harvard Business School Presenter: Paul Isaac Green; U. of Texas at Austin Presenter: Ting Zhang; Harvard Business School Presenter: Francesca Gino; Harvard Business School Tips from the Top: Do the Best Performers Really Give the Best Advice? Presenter: David Levari; Harvard Business School Presenter: Daniel Gilbert; Harvard U. Presenter: Timothy Wilson; U. of Virginia The Importance of Honest and Benevolent Feedback in the Workplace Presenter: Kori Krueger; Carnegie Mellon U. - Tepper School of Business Presenter: Binyamin Cooper; Carnegie Mellon U. Presenter: Emma Levine; U. Of Chicago Presenter: Taya R. Cohen; Carnegie Mellon U. - Tepper School of Business Overcoming Interpersonal Hesitance to Give Honest Feedback Through Benevolent Candor Presenter: Ariella Kristal; Harvard Business School Presenter: Michael Yeomans; Imperial College Business School

In a 2011 article in this journal entitled “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing” ( Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 215–218), Norton and Sommers assessed Black and White Americans’ perceptions of anti-Black and anti-White bias across the previous 6 decades—from the 1950s to the 2000s. They presented two key findings: White (but not Black) respondents perceived decreases in anti-Black bias to be associated with increases in anti-White bias, signaling the perception that racism is a zero-sum game; White respondents rated anti-White bias as more pronounced than anti-Black bias in the 2000s, signaling the perception that they were losing the zero-sum game. We collected new data to examine whether the key findings would be evident nearly a decade later and whether political ideology would moderate perceptions. Liberal, moderate, and conservative White (but not Black) Americans alike believed that racism is a zero-sum game. Liberal White Americans saw racism as a zero-sum game they were winning by a lot, moderate White Americans saw it as a game they were winning by only a little, and conservative White Americans saw it as a game they were losing. This work has clear implications for public policy and behavioral science and lays the groundwork for future research that examines to what extent racial differences in perceptions of racism by political ideology are changing over time.

Effective collaboration is essential and ubiquitous in the modern workplace, whether between teammates, managers and their subordinates, or mentors and their mentees. All of these situations bring together individuals with diverse experiences and specialized skills who need to work together to achieve shared goals in performance and development. While collaboration would seem like an ideal environment for individuals to grow and learn, it also brings unique tensions that can undermine not only learning, but group success. In this symposium, we will explore the promises and challenges that collaboration presents for performance and learning, focusing on how group performance and individual learning can be easily helped or hindered by tensions that reside at the individual and collective levels. These papers provide new insights and tools for organizations to foster both performance and learning outcomes from collaborations, so that organizations can help individuals and teams reach their full potential. Familiar Faces in New Places: How Pre-Existing Relationships Affect Individual and Team Performance Presenter: Emma Zhao; U. of Virginia - McIntire School of Commerce Presenter: Catherine Shea; Carnegie Mellon U. - Tepper School of Business Presenter: Seth Li; William and Mary, Mason School of Business Paying it Forward: How Previous Protégé Experiences Contribute to Social Class Gaps in Mentorship Presenter: Kathy Vo; Emory U., Goizueta Business School Presenter: Andrea Dittmann; Emory U., Goizueta Business School Leader Care as a Relational Driver for Employee Learning and Development Presenter: Grace Cormier; Harvard Business School Presenter: Ting Zhang; Harvard Business School Presenter: Bradley R. Staats; U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Presenter: Francesca Gino; Harvard Business School Crooked Teams: Coordination for Deviant Purposes Presenter: Marlys K. Christianson; U. of Toronto Presenter: Katherine Ann DeCelles; U. of Toronto Presenter: Rebecca Hinds; Stanford U. The Takeover Toll: When Taking Over for Teammates Hurts Task Performance Presenter: David Levari; Harvard Business School Presenter: Adam Mastroianni; Columbia Business School Presenter: Jacob Verrey; Harvard U. Presenter: Daniel Gilbert; Harvard U.

Prevalence-induced concept change describes a cognitive mechanism by which someone's definition of a concept shifts as the prevalence of instances of that concept changes. While this phenomenon has been established in young adults, it is unclear how it affects older adults. In this study, we explore how prevalence-induced concept change affects older adults' lower-level, perceptual, and higher-order, ethical judgements. We find that older adults are less sensitive to prevalence-induced concept change than younger adults across both domains. Using computational modeling, we demonstrate that these age-related changes in judgements reflect more cautious and deliberate responding in older adults. Based on these findings, we argue that while overly cautious responding by older adults may be maladaptive in some cognitive domains, in the case of prevalence-induced concept change, it might be protective against biased judgements.

Social interactions are dynamic and unfold over time. To make sense of social interactions, people must aggregate sequential information into summary, global evaluations. But how do people do this? Here, to address this question, we conducted nine studies (N = 1,583) using a diverse set of stimuli. Our focus was a central aspect of social interaction—namely, the evaluation of others' emotional responses. The results suggest that when aggregating sequences of images and videos expressing varying degrees of emotion, perceivers overestimate the sequence's average emotional intensity. This tendency for overestimation is driven by stronger memory of more emotional expressions. A computational model supports this account and shows that amplification cannot be explained only by nonlinear perception of individual exemplars. Our results demonstrate an amplification effect in the perception of sequential emotional information, which may have implications for the many types of social interactions that involve repeated emotion estimation. Goldenberg et al. show that we tend to overestimate the average intensity of a sequence of emotional expressions and that this is caused by increased memory for stronger expressions.

Why would concepts seem to grow when their instances become rare? Human observers can respond to decreases in stimulus prevalence by expanding their conceptual boundaries of those stimuli. This prevalence-induced concept change may have serious social consequences, since many real-world detection tasks demand consistent judgments over time. The current work aims to identify the computational process that produces prevalence-induced concept change. I review some plausible models from the cognitive and social sciences that could account for this phenomenon, and then use trial-level computational modeling to see how well each model predicts actual human data, finding that they are best explained as a range-frequency compromise in judgment. Finally, I test an intervention that successfully eliminates prevalence-induced concept change by making stimuli more intense as they become rare.

How does the prevalence of a target influence how it is perceived and categorized? A substantial body of work, mostly in visual search, shows that a higher proportion of targets are missed when prevalence is low. This classic low prevalence effect (LPE) involves a shift to a more conservative decision criterion that makes it less likely that observers will call an ambiguous item a target. In contrast, Levari et al. (Science, 360[6396], 1465-1467, 2018) recently reported the opposite effect in a simple categorization task. In their hands, at low prevalence, observers adopted a more liberal criterion, making observers more likely to label ambiguous dots on a blue-purple continuum "blue." They called this "prevalence-induced concept change" (PICC). Here, we report that the presence or absence of feedback is critical. With feedback, observers become more conservative at low prevalence, as in the LPE. Without feedback, they become more liberal, identifying a wider range of stimuli as targets, as in Levari's PICC studies. Stimuli from a shape continuum ranging from rounded ("Bouba") to bumpy ("Kiki") shapes produced similar results. Other variables: response type (2AFC vs. go/no-go), color (blue-purple vs. red-green), and stimuli type (solid color vs. texture) did not influence the criterion shifts. Understanding these effects of prevalence and ways they can be controlled illuminates the context-specific nature of perceptual decisions and may be useful in socially important, low prevalence tasks like cancer screening, airport security, and disease diagnosis in pathology.

We present a dataset containing participants’ ratings (n = 250) of 600 written descriptions of events ranging from benign (‘witnessed a leaf falling from a tree’) to potentially distressing and/or injurious (‘was stabbed by a close friend’). Participants were randomly assigned to rate a subset of events on a 7-point Likert scale from “Not at all traumatic” to “Extremely traumatic”. Participants were also assessed in terms of demographic characteristics (gender, race, ethnicity, previous trauma exposure, psychiatric diagnosis, religiosity, political orientation, age). The data are suitable for various purposes, including as stimuli for experimental paradigms or for descriptive analysis.

How does the prevalence of the target influence perceptual decisions? Levari et al (2018) made 2AFC decisions as to whether a dot on a blue-purple continuum was blue. When blue items were less prevalent, observers were more likely to call ambiguous stimuli “blue”. They expanded their concept of blue (more liberal criterion). In contrast, Wolfe et al. find that observers become more conservative at low prevalence and find fewer targets in visual search experiments. What determines whether observers’ decision criteria become more liberal or more conservative when prevalence is low? In a series of replications of Levari’s study, we tested the effect of the response type (2AFC vs. Go/No-Go), color (blue-purple vs. red-green continua), stimuli type (solid color vs texture), and trial-by-trial feedback. Feedback appears to be the critical variable. In the presence of feedback, observers become more conservative at low prevalence. In the absence of feedback, they become more liberal, broadening the definition of less common target categories. Similar results were obtained with a shape continuum from rounded (“Bouba”) to spiky (“Kiki”). When Boubas are rare, ambiguous stimuli are called “Bouba” when there is no feedback. They are more likely to be called “Kiki” when there is feedback. There appear to be two, prevalence-based forces pushing and pulling decision criteria. These effects of prevalence have practical implications for low prevalence tasks like cancer screening. Do the pressures of prevalence cause experts to incorrectly categorize ambiguous stimuli as abnormal? In other work, multiple labs have shown that low prevalence causes experts to miss more targets. We will discuss whether category broadening and elevated miss errors might (unfortunately) coexist at low prevalence.

Prevalence-induced concept change describes a cognitive phenomenon whereby judgements about concepts shift as the prevalence of exemplars of that concept changes. For instance, in a task where people have to judge whether the colour of an ambiguously-coloured dot is blue or purple, if the frequency of objectively blue dots in the environment decreases, people judge more dots to be blue than they did initially. While this phenomenon has been explored in young adults, it is unclear how it affects older adults. Past work suggests that older adults simultaneously rely less on internal representations, but that they also tend to perseverate more on cognitive tasks. Thus, the question arises: Do older adults outsource control and their decisions become more susceptible to change or are they more rigid in their judgements than younger and resistant to prevalence-induced concept change? In the current study, we explore how prevalence-induced concept change affects older adults’ lower-level, perceptual, and higher-order, ethical, decision-making. We find that older adults are less sensitive to prevalence-induced concept change than younger adults across both domains. An exploratory analysis is conducted on response times to help elucidate the mechanism(s) underlying these differences. These analyses demonstrate that older adults respond more slowly than younger adults in both tasks. We offer two interpretations of this finding, both with implications for prevalence-induced concept change research more broadly: general slowing and/or a speed-accuracy trade-off. Overall, our results suggest that older adults’ judgements about concepts may be less flexible than younger adults’ when faced with a changing world.

Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This "prevalence-induced concept change" occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.