Crafting high-quality ideas is crucial for entrepreneurs to succeed, yet evidence about the factors that shape the idea-generation process is scarce. A long-standing question is whether differences across entrepreneurs in market judgment—the ability to evaluate business ideas—explain differences in ideas’ quality and composition. We conduct an experiment with an intervention that improves subjects’ ability to evaluate an idea’s market potential, finding that improved judgment leads subjects to generate ideas 15% higher in quality and more complete, with stronger effects among initially poorly-calibrated subjects. Our results support a potential mechanism: individuals with developed judgment mentally test more ideas and better filter them before committing to one. Simple training can improve judgment and idea quality, complementing ex-post, experimental methods by reducing the costs of testing ideas.

In this symposium, we seek to bring together a collection of papers that not only broaden our understanding of self-oriented research in organizations, but also that highlight the ways in which these self- processes—some of which have been considered as largely positive and others as negative—may have unexpected upsides and downsides. In our first presentation, Chon, Sitkin, and Wiesenfeld propose that conceptions of self-awareness should distinguish among its three distinct focal targets (internal, external, and social) and present a new measure grounded in these distinctions through the lens of experienced (self-reported) and perceived (other-reported) self- awareness. The authors then use this reframing to challenge lay beliefs regarding the positive influence of self-awareness. In our second presentation, Wald and Chaudhry examine how self-awareness affects interpersonal judgment. They find that in some cases, self- awareness actually lowers trust, and that this effect is strongest when the target’s behavior is perceived as easy to change (i.e., highly mutable). In our third presentation, Brockner and Van Dijke examine how self-affirmation can affect workplace behavior. They find that self-affirmation and work engagement interactively influence employees’ return to work behavior. In our fourth presentation, Schaumberg and Chavez disentangle the consequences of shame, a self- conscious emotion. They find that the affective core of shame proneness relates positively to task performance, but that avoidance tendencies in response to transgressions are unrelated or negatively related to performance. Finally, in our fifth presentation, Newark and Dane examine the upside of abandoning a self-narrative. They consider why and how one might do so – and what one may stand to gain when one does. A Preliminary Examination of the Dark Side of Self-Awareness Presenter: Danbee Chon; Stanford U. Presenter: Sim B. Sitkin; Duke U. Presenter: Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld; New York U. People are More Trusting of Others Who are Unaware (vs. Aware) of their own Negative Behavior Presenter: Kristina Wald; U. of Chicago Booth School of business Presenter: Shereen J. Chaudhry; U. of Chicago Booth School of business The Interactive Effect of Self-affirmation and Work Engagement on the Decision to Return to Work Presenter: Joel Brockner; Columbia U. Presenter: Marius Van Dijke; Erasmus U. Rotterdam Shame Predicts Success: When and Why Shame Proneness Relates Positively to Task Performance Presenter: Rebecca Schaumberg; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Presenter: Koji Chavez; Indiana U. When Your Tale Becomes Untenable: Abandoning Self-Narratives for an Unnarrated Self Presenter: Daniel Newark; HEC Paris Presenter: Erik Ian Dane; Washington U. in St. Louis

In navigating the complexities of work and life, people frequently turn to others for advice. Prior advice research has primarily focused on how advice seekers recruit and use the guidance they receive to make more accurate decisions. Yet, there are a host of other advice seeking and giving outcomes, beyond decision accuracy, about which people are likely to care. This symposium is designed to advance research on advice by focusing on previously unexplored consequences of seeking and giving advice. The projects consider an array of advice giving and seeking outcomes spanning several levels of consideration, from intrapersonal feelings, to dyadic perceptions, to firm- and network-level effects. The presentations were also selected to showcase the breadth of methodologies that are being applied to consider previously unexamined outcomes of advice seeking. The papers include findings from surveys, lab experiments, longitudinal data analysis, interviews, and ethnographic work. Together, these presentations offer new perspectives on the potential consequences of giving and seeking advice, advancing theory and yielding practical implications for conducting this ubiquitous interpersonal exchange. Not Shooting the Advisor: People Blame Themselves After Soliciting and Following Meaningless Advice Presenter: Kaitlin Woolley; Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Presenter: Sunita Sah; Cornell SC Johnson College of Business The Downside of Delegation: The Interpersonal Consequences of Decision Support Choices Presenter: Hayley Blunden; Harvard Business School Presenter: Mary Steffel; - Reverse Advising: What Goes Down When Advice Goes Up the Hierarchy Presenter: Ting Zhang; Harvard Business School Presenter: Michael North; New York U. Prospecting for Gold: How Ventures use Advice When Taking Strategic Action Presenter: Amisha Miller; Boston U. Questrom School of Business Presenter: Siobhan O'Mahony; Boston U. Seeking Advice from High Status Contacts Benefits Women Less than Men Presenter: Siyu Yu; New York U. Presenter: Catherine Shea; Carnegie Mellon U. - Tepper School of Business

Food production is a major cause of energy use and GHG emissions, and therefore diet change is an important behavioural strategy for reducing associated environmental impacts. However, a severe obstacle to diet change may be consumers’ underestimation of the environmental impacts of different types of food. Here we show that energy consumption and GHG emission estimates are significantly underestimated for foods, suggesting a possible blind spot suitable for intervention. In a second study, we find that providing consumers with information regarding the GHG emissions associated with the life cycle of food, presented in terms of a familiar reference unit (light-bulb minutes), shifts their actual purchase choices away from higher emission options. Thus, although consumers’ poor understanding of the food system is a barrier to reducing energy use and GHG emissions, it also represents a promising area for simple interventions such as a well-designed carbon label.

The authors investigated the effectiveness of aggregating over potential non-contingent collective action (“If X people all do Y action then Z outcomes will be achieved”) to increase pro-social behavior. They carried out six experiments encouraging four different pro-social activities and found that aggregating potential benefits over 1,000 people produced more prosocial intentions and actions than aggregating over 1 person. The authors further showed that aggregating potential benefits over 1,000 people produced more pro-social intentions than aggregating benefits over 1,000 days. This collective aggregation effect was due to the presentation of larger aggregated benefits (Experiment 1-6), attenuation of psychological discounting (Experiment 4), and increased perceptions of outcome efficacy (Experiment 5-6). The effect was not due to social norms (Experiment 3), nor a simple anchoring process (Experiments 4-5). Often individual contributions to societal ills seem like mere “drops in a bucket”; collective aggregation helps by making individual actions seem bucket-sized, immediate, important, and effective.

Gift-giving is common practice in business, but gifts can elicit feelings of reciprocity that create managerial conflicts of interest. Organizations often try to guard against unwanted influence by...

In this article, we ask how well people fulfill informational motives by using the judgments of others. We build on advice-taking research from the judgment and decision making literature, which has developed a distinct paradigm to test how accurately people incorporate information from others. We use a literature review to show that people have mixed success in fulfilling informational motivesthey increase their accuracy through the use of advice, but not as much as they could. We develop insights about how people perceive advisors and try to pursue adviceand where their perceptions may lead them astray. We conclude by proposing that future work further investigate the reasons people fail to use advice by building on the current advice taking paradigm used in judgment and decision making, but with a richer understanding of advice taking as a dynamic process that often entails complex decisions and normative motives.

The past 40 years of psychological research on decision making has identified a number of important cognitive biases. However, the psychological study of decision making tends to focus on individuals making decisions in isolation. This article explores the social context of individual decision making by considering three lenses: individual contributions in social decision processes, individuals as social products, and individuals as sources of social preferences. The social context of decision making both improves decision making by allowing diverse knowledge to be pooled and creates shared perspectives-including shared blind spots. The article offers conjectures on managerial insight about social settings that can inform future research.

Erectile dysfunction is a major complication affecting the quality of life of patients and partners after radical prostatectomy. Evolving evidence suggests that early penile rehabilitation may provide better erectile function after surgery. Phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE-5) inhibitors are routinely considered a first-line treatment option in most algorithms for penile rehabilitation owing to their efficacy, ease of use, wide availability and minimal morbidity. Tadalafil is a long-acting, potent PDE-5 inhibitor for erectile dysfunction, with demonstrated effect in animal studies at preserving penile smooth muscle content and prevention of fibrosis of cavernosal tissue. This article evaluates the existing literature on tadalafil and critically analyzes its impact on erectile function following radical prostatectomy.

Social psychologists have long recognized the power of statisticized groups. When individual judgments about some fact (e.g., the unemployment rate for next quarter) are averaged together, the average opinion is typically more accurate than most of the individual estimates, a pattern often referred to as the wisdom of crowds. The accuracy of averaging also often exceeds that of the individual perceived as most knowledgeable in the group. However, neither averaging nor relying on a single judge is a robust strategy; each performs well in some settings and poorly in others. As an alternative, we introduce the select-crowd strategy, which ranks judges based on a cue to ability (e.g., the accuracy of several recent judgments) and averages the opinions of the top judges, such as the top 5. Through both simulation and an analysis of 90 archival data sets, we show that select crowds of 5 knowledgeable judges yield very accurate judgments across a wide range of possible settings-the strategy is both accurate and robust. Following this, we examine how people prefer to use information from a crowd. Previous research suggests that people are distrustful of crowds and of mechanical processes such as averaging. We show in 3 experiments that, as expected, people are drawn to experts and dislike crowd averages-but, critically, they view the select-crowd strategy favorably and are willing to use it. The select-crowd strategy is thus accurate, robust, and appealing as a mechanism for helping individuals tap collective wisdom.

Some environments constrain the information that managers and decision makers can observe. We examine judgment in censored environments where a constraint, the censorship point, systematically distorts the observed sample. Random instances beyond the censorship point are observed at the censorship point, whereas uncensored instances are observed at their true value. Many important managerial decisions occur in censored environments, such as inventory, risk taking, and employee evaluation decisions. In this research, we demonstrate a censorship bias—individuals tend to rely too heavily on the observed censored sample, biasing their belief about the underlying population. We further show that the censorship bias is exacerbated for higher degrees of censorship, higher variance in the population, and higher variability in the censorship points. In four studies, we find evidence of the censorship bias across the domains of demand estimation and sequential risk taking. The bias causes individuals to make costly decisions and behave in an overly risk-averse manner. This paper was accepted by Teck Ho, judgment and decision making.

This research demonstrates how promoting the environment can negatively affect adoption of energy efficiency in the United States because of the political polarization surrounding environmental issues. Study 1 demonstrated that more politically conservative individuals were less in favor of investment in energy-efficient technology than were those who were more politically liberal. This finding was driven primarily by the lessened psychological value that more conservative individuals placed on reducing carbon emissions. Study 2 showed that this difference has consequences: In a real-choice context, more conservative individuals were less likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was labeled with an environmental message than when it was unlabeled. These results highlight the importance of taking into account psychological value-based considerations in the individual adoption of energy-efficient technology in the United States and beyond.

Intergenerational decisions affect other people in the future. The combination of intertemporal and interpersonal distance between decision makers in the present and other people in the future may lead one to expect little intergenerational generosity. In the experiments reported here, however, we posited that the negative effect of intertemporal distance on intergenerational beneficence would be reversed when people were primed with thoughts of death. This reversal would occur because death priming leads individuals to be concerned with having a lasting impact on other people in the future. Our experiments show that when individuals are exposed to death priming, the expected tendency to allocate fewer resources to others in the future, as compared with others in the present, is reversed. Our findings suggest that legacy motivations triggered by death priming can trump intergenerational discounting tendencies and promote intergenerational beneficence.

The way a choice is presented influences what a decision-maker chooses.This paper outlines the tools available to choice architects, that is anyone who present people with choices. We divide these tools into two categories: those used in structuring the choice task and those used in describing the choice options. Tools for structuring the choice task address the idea of what to present to decision-makers, and tools for describing the choice options address the idea of how to present it. We discuss implementation issues in using choice architecture tools, including individual differences and errors in evaluation of choice outcomes. Finally, this paper presents a few applications that illustrate the positive effect choice architecture can have on real-world decisions.

In this study, we analyzed data from 57,293 Major League Baseball games to test whether high temperatures interact with provocation to increase the likelihood that batters will be hit by a pitch. Controlling for a number of other variables, we conducted analyses showing that the probability of a pitcher hitting a batter increases sharply at high temperatures when more of the pitcher's teammates have been hit by the opposing team earlier in the game. We suggest that high temperatures increase retaliation by increasing hostile attributions when teammates are hit by a pitch and by lowering inhibitions against retaliation.

The scales used to describe the attributes of different choice options are usually open to alternative expressions, such as inches versus feet or minutes versus hours. More generally, a ratio scale can be multiplied by an arbitrary factor (e.g., 12) while preserving all of the information it conveys about different choice alternatives. We propose that expanded scales (e.g., price per year) lead decision makers to discriminate between choice options more than do contracted scales (e.g., price per month) because they exaggerate the difference between options on the expanded attribute. Two studies show that simply increasing the size of an attribute's scale systematically changes its weight in both multiattribute preferences and willingness to pay: Expanding scales for one attribute shifts preferences to alternatives favored on that attribute.