Autonomy promotes important psychological outcomes. Although cooperation and competition are the building blocks of social interactions, little is known about how they shape feelings of autonomy in dyads, teams, and work organizations. We hypothesize that cooperation liberates relative to competition and situations that are neither cooperative nor competitive. We theorize that this effect emerges because cooperation facilitates social support and psychological safety, whereas competition promotes social threat and stress. We found support for this hypothesis in nine studies (Ntotal= 16,669) that used survey, archival, and experimental methods, diverse samples, and different operationalizations of cooperative and competitive environments, as well as two kinds of environments that are neither cooperative nor competitive (i.e., independence and unknown interdependence). Studies 1 to 3 found that perceived situational cooperation correlated positively with feelings of autonomy among varsity athletes and employees. Study 3 also provided initial evidence for the proposed mechanisms. To provide causal evidence, Study 4 used an incentivized decision-making task in which we experimentally created cooperative, competitive, and independent situations. Participants felt greater autonomy under cooperative vs. competitive and independent incentive structures. Study 5 found evidence for our hypothesized mechanisms in an experiment conducted in the context of negotiation. Four supplemental studies replicated our experimental findings, extended them to another incentivized decision-making task, and established the causal effect of social threat and stress on autonomy. Overall, our findings underscore the liberating effects of cooperative situations relative to competitive situations and situations that are neither cooperative nor competitive, with consequences for people's feelings, motivation, and well-being.

Why, when, and how do strategic surprises emerge? Prevailing models trace the experience of strategic surprises to errors in information acquisition and utilization. They posit that we experience strategic surprises due to insufficient information, inattention to information, inaccurate information, inflexibility in updating beliefs, insufficient depth of reasoning, or interpretation errors. Here, we offer a novel and parsimonious explanation for strategic surprises concentrating on the nature of our mental representations. Building on construal level theory, we propose that strategic surprises emerge when individuals, organizations, and nations think too abstractly or too concretely during strategic interactions. We illustrate the broad applicability of our account across multiple domains, including close relationships, work organizations, financial markets, sports, politics, and national security. We provide novel insights into the nature of strategic surprises, outline promising directions for future research, and offer actionable recommendations for those looking to better prepare for undesirable strategic surprises. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Antisemitism, characterized by prejudice, discrimination, and hostility toward Jews, is marked by two enduring paradoxes. First, although people typically defer to powerholders, perceptions of Jews as powerful are associated with disdain rather than deference among antisemites. Second, antisemitism emerges among individuals with opposing ideological worldviews, those who strongly support societal hierarchies and those who vehemently oppose them. To explain these paradoxes, we introduce the Dual Threat Model of Antisemitism, which highlights the central role of perceived Jewish power in fueling antisemitism. The model posits that perceived Jewish power—defined as perceived control over valuable resources—elicits two distinct types of threat. For proponents of hierarchy, perceived Jewish power threatens in-group dominance, challenging their desire to maintain group superiority. For opponents of hierarchy, perceived Jewish power threatens egalitarian ideals, undermining their vision of a fair and equal society. Evidence from the US, Mexico, Australia, UK, Germany, and Poland lends cross-cultural support to the model. We discuss the implications of the model and the empirical evidence for designing interventions aimed at curbing antisemitism.

Mechanistic self-dehumanization—the experience of oneself as an emotionless, unreflective instrument—may facilitate intergroup violence by disengaging affect while preserving execution. Although prior qualitative interviews suggested its relevance in combat, its empirical validity had not been tested. We surveyed 503 Ukrainian combatants who had used lethal force to examine whether mechanistic self-dehumanization is distinct from related constructs and whether it predicts violence. Results showed that mechanistic self-dehumanization is empirically separable from other altered self-concepts and uniquely predicts a single-minded focus on killing and desires to commit war crimes. In contrast, animalistic self-dehumanization predicted a more emotionally volatile pattern marked by both attraction to and distress about violence. These findings establish the construct validity of mechanistic self-dehumanization and highlight distinct psychological pathways through which the self may be reshaped to enable violence.

Why, when, and to whom do we attribute superhuman characteristics? Seven studies establish the positivity of superhumanization, show that Black Americans superhumanize their ingroup more than White Americans, and find that exposure to media portrayals of highly successful Black Americans increases this tendency. Black Americans saw superhumanization as empowering more than White Americans, who in turn believed that superhumanizing their ingroup was inappropriate, insincere, and hurtful to others. Complementing conceptualizations of superhumanization as a stereotype of Black Americans held by White Americans, our findings suggest superhumanization also emerges as the product of a self-labeling process by Black Americans. This reinterpretation of superhumanization challenges and complements the prevailing view of this construct in the intergroup relations literature. The findings advance our understanding of identity management processes among minority group members. They also highlight the role of cultural appropriation concerns in majority group members' identity management.

Organizational brokers, such as producers, diplomats, and middle managers, connect people within and across organizations. Trust in brokers promotes their effectiveness in connecting unfamiliar counterparts and transferring information between disconnected parties. Often, however, the very conditions that create the need for brokering, such as the existence of structural holes, undermine trust in brokers. We introduce an organizing framework to explain how fundamental features of brokering processes shape the perceived trustworthiness of brokers. Specifically, we describe how individuals make inferences about brokers’ ability, benevolence, and integrity based on the horizontal and vertical distances they bridge, the extent to which their brokering involves in-role versus extra-role behavior, and the extent to which they facilitate indirect versus direct exchanges between counterparts. Our model links situational features of brokering processes with established antecedents of interpersonal trust, thereby identifying challenges and opportunities for brokers and organizations.

Gossip is both common and consequential. People often share reputational information about others in their absence, and this ubiquitous practice powerfully shapes impressions, interactions, and relationships among senders, receivers, and the targets of gossip. This paper addresses two open questions in the gossip literature: When and why do senders share inaccurate information, and to what extent do receivers rely on such information? We conceptualize letters of recommendation (LORs) as institutionalized gossip and study these questions in the context of labor markets, where senders choose how much to advocate for a job candidate and receivers decide whether to hire them. We propose that senders of LORs balance advocacy and accuracy based on the strength of their ties with the target and the receiver. Specifically, we predict that senders prioritize advocacy over accuracy when they are strongly connected to the target and weakly connected to the receiver; yet prioritize accuracy over advocacy when they are weakly connected to the target and strongly connected to the receiver. We report findings from two large experiments wherein we systematically manipulated the sender's tie strength with both the target and the receiver. In Experiment 1, participants made decisions within a novel economic game we devised to capture the accuracy-advocacy tradeoff. In Experiments 2a and 2b, participants assumed the roles of senders and receivers of LORs, respectively. These experiments show that the strength of senders' ties to others shape the (in)accuracy of their communications and that receivers tend to trust the information conveyed to them.

Intergroup conflict has been conceptualized as a strategic interaction (conflict-as-contest) and separately as a pathological condition (conflict-as-disease). We highlight how insights and tools from the former perspective can potentially inform the latter. Harnessing the science of strategic decision-making can facilitate the development of novel approaches for mitigating intergroup conflict.

Organizational secrecy is central to national security, politics, business, technology, healthcare, and law, but its effects are largely unknown. Keeping organizational secrets creates social divides between those who are required to keep the secret and those who are not allowed to know it. We demonstrate that keeping organizational secrets simultaneously evokes feelings of social isolation and status, which have opposing effects on employee well-being. Specifically, organizational secrecy harms hedonic well-being through increased work stress, yet enhances eudaimonic well-being through increased meaningfulness of work. Work stress and meaningfulness, in turn, have opposing effects on overall job satisfaction. These effects emerged across five main studies and two supplemental studies using correlational and experimental methods, spanning numerous empirical contexts (N = 12,211). Moreover, we replicated these effects using multiple operationalizations of our constructs and when accounting for important control variables.

Individuals often engage in brokering behaviors intended to influence other people's interactions and relationships. An open research question in the nascent literature on brokering as a social process concerns its situational antecedents. We introduce and test the novel hypothesis that employees' construal of the structure of work organizations as a hierarchy versus a network shapes the extent to which they judge different brokering behaviors as normative and useful for getting ahead at work. Converging evidence from three studies suggests that, relative to network construals, hierarchy construals inhibit intermediary and conciliatory brokering and facilitate divisive brokering. Our theory and findings identify a previously overlooked antecedent of brokering behavior and underscore the usefulness of social structure construals for explaining social relations in organizations.

Fear can undermine cooperation. It may discourage individuals from collaborating with others because of concerns about potential exploitation; prompt them to engage in defensive aggression by launching a preemptive strike; and propel power-seeking individuals to act dominantly rather than compassionately. Therefore, accumulated evidence requires a more contextualized consideration of the link between fear and cooperation in adults.

This symposium advances knowledge about increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations by examining data obtained from the field. The first half of the symposium will address factors determining support or decisions around organizational diversity efforts. The latter half will be devoted to field interventions that sought to promote diversity in organizational settings. The first paper investigates how female board directors’ network connectedness shapes the organization’s decisions on increasing future boardroom gender diversity. The second paper investigates the motivations behind the dominant group members’ engagement in allyship behaviors that often belie their own interests. The third paper examines how a 9-week debate training increases Asian employees’ leadership advancement. Finally, using a large-scale field experiment, the fourth paper explores how providing justifications of why one should attend DEI events differentially impact younger versus older individuals’ engagement with these events. The Effects of Female Network Connectedness on Gender Diversity Efforts Author: Jun Lin; Stanford Graduate School of Business Author: Julia D. Hur; New York U. Collective Self-Esteem and Dominant Group Allyship Author: Aastha Chadha; NYU Stern School of Business Author: L Taylor Phillips; NYU Stern Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling and Empowering Asians’ Leadership Advancement with Debate Training Author: Jackson Lu; MIT Sloan School of Management Author: Michelle Zhao; Washington U. in St. Louis Generational differences in responses to diversity rationales Author: Eileen Y. Suh; Boston U. Questrom School of Business Author: Evan P. Apfelbaum; MIT Sloan School of Management Author: Nir Halevy; Stanford U.

From job candidates to entrepreneurs, people often face an inherent tension between the need to share personal accomplishments and the need to avoid appearing arrogant. We propose that humorbragging-incorporating self-enhancing humor into self-promoting communications-can signal warmth and competence simultaneously, leading to instrumental benefits. Four studies explored humorbragging as a potential solution to the self-promotion paradox. Study 1 demonstrated that a humorbragging (vs. self-promoting) resume attracted more hiring interest from recruiters. Study 2 showed that perceived warmth and competence mediate the positive effect of humorbragging on hiring intentions. Study 3 found that humorbragging entrepreneurs achieved greater success securing funding compared to entrepreneurs who used other kinds of humor. Finally, Studies 4a to 4c established that the positive effect of humorbragging on hiring intentions is unique to self-enhancing humor. Overall, the current research establishes the instrumental benefits of humorbragging and explains why and when it functions as an effective impression management strategy.

How does the self-relevance of a social movement shape individuals' engagement with it? We examined the decision-making processes that underlie support for Black Lives Matter (BLM) among Black, Hispanic, Asian, and White Americans. We find significant between-group differences in levels of support for BLM, both in terms of past behavior (Study 1) and in terms of future intentions to support the movement (Study 2). These differences notwithstanding, thinking about how one's decisions impact others - which we label impact mindset - explains support for BLM across racial groups, cross-sectionally as well as longitudinally (over 8 months later). Our findings underscore the equivalence of the impact mindset construct across racial groups and its predictive power in the context of BLM. We conclude that, although the struggle for racial justice has different meanings for different racial groups, the same mindset underlies both in-group advocacy and allyship in the context of BLM.

The present symposium brings together a group of experts in moral psychology and organizational behavior to explore questions such as: What are the antecedents to (i) the development of a particular moral belief and (ii) the assigning of moral sacredness to an object (papers 1 and 2, respectively)? How can we best predict whether an individual will engage in a given moral behavior (paper 3)? What prompts individuals to judge (i) the spreading of falsehoods as more or less ethical and (ii) individuals in their ingroup who choose to cooperate with outgroup members on behalf of their ingroup (“intergroup brokers”) as ethical or unethical (papers 4 and 5, respectively)? Are individuals willing to have honest conversations with others about others’ (im)morality, and if not, why (paper 6)? We believe that a better understanding of moral psychology and how it relates to individuals’ belief formation, judgments of others, and moral conversations is critical when trying to Create a Better World Together. The Antecedents to Moralization: The Head, The Heart, and The Hands Presenter: Samantha Kassirer; Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Presenter: Isaac Smith; Brigham Young U. Collective Transcendence Beliefs Shape the Sacredness of Cultural Objects Presenter: Siyin Chen; U. of Toronto, Rotman School of Management Presenter: Rachel Lise Ruttan; U. of Toronto Presenter: Matthew Feinberg; U. of Toronto, Rotman School of Management The Conceptual and Empirical Value of Bivalent Moral Judgments Presenter: Hajin Kim; Stanford U. Presenter: Julian Jake Zlatev; Harvard Business School Presenter: Dale T. Miller; Stanford U. It Might Become True: How Prefactual Thinking Licenses Dishonesty Presenter: Beth Anne Helgason; London Business School Presenter: Daniel A. Effron; London Business School The Immorality of Boundary Spanning: Social Sanctioning of Intergroup Brokers Presenter: Adiel Moyal; Stanford Graduate School of Business Presenter: Dafna Goor; London Business School Presenter: Nir Halevy; Stanford U. Understanding the Reluctance to Deliver Moral Feedback Presenter: Yena Kim; U. Of Chicago Presenter: Emma Levine; U. Of Chicago

Whom do individuals blame for intergroup conflict? Do people attribute responsibility for intergroup conflict to the in-group or the out-group? Theoretically integrating the literatures on intergroup relations, moral psychology, and judgment and decision-making, we propose that unpacking a group by explicitly describing it in terms of its constituent subgroups increases perceived support for the view that the unpacked group shoulders more of the blame for intergroup conflict. Five preregistered experiments (N = 3,335 adults) found support for this novel hypothesis across three distinct intergroup conflicts: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, current racial tensions between White people and Black people in the United States, and the gender gap in wages in the United States. Our findings (a) highlight the independent roles that entrenched social identities and cognitive, presentation-based processes play in shaping blame judgments, (b) demonstrate that the effect of unpacking groups generalizes across partisans and nonpartisans, and (c) illustrate how constructing packed versus unpacked sets of potential perpetrators can critically shape where the blame lies.