Academic Publications

When confronting acts of prejudice in the workplace, allies may seek help from marginalized group members, thereby involving them (potentially against their will) in the confrontation. Across three pre-registered studies (N = 1447) and three supplemental studies—using multiple prejudice confrontation and help-seeking situations and different marginalized groups (i.e., women and racially marginalized individuals)—we find that allies' help-seeking has negative affective consequences for the marginalized group member and negative evaluative consequences for the ally. Specifically, members of marginalized groups whose help is directly solicited (versus not directly solicited) by an ally during a prejudice confrontation experience more emotional burden; in turn, they view the ally as less deserving of status and seek to minimize their future exposure to the ally. These findings highlight the theoretical value and practical importance of examining prejudice confrontations from the marginalized group member's perspective.

A central finding in the power literature is that experiencing elevated power facilitates employees’ goal-relevant cognitions and behaviors. In this work, we suggest that the relationship between power and goal pursuit is more complex than previously assumed. Specifically, we examine how experiencing power fluctuation—alternating states of high and low power during the workday—can uniquely promote employees’ goal-relevant behaviors beyond the effect of static power. Integrating insights from the Dynamic Equilibrium Model of Organizing (DEMO) and the Model of Proactive Motivation (MPM), our work demonstrates that power fluctuation can facilitate employees’ cognitive energy, in a way that enhances their goal-relevant cognitions and behaviors (goal clarity, resource acquisition, personal initiative, and goal progress). Furthermore, our work considers for whom these benefits are most pronounced, showing that power fluctuation is more strongly associated with cognitive energy (and subsequent goal-relevant outcomes) for employees higher (vs. lower) in trait mindfulness. Taken together, our findings offer new insights and challenge traditional static conceptions of power by illustrating how daily fluctuations in power can serve as a motivational force that enhances goal pursuit in the workplace.

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.

This research addresses the long-standing debate about the determinants of sex/gender differences. Evolutionary theorists trace many sex/gender differences back to natural selection and sex-specific adaptations. Sociocultural and biosocial theorists, in contrast, emphasize how societal roles and social power contribute to sex/gender differences beyond any biological distinctions. By connecting two empirical advances over the past two decades—6-fold increases in sex/gender difference meta-analyses and in experiments conducted on the psychological effects of power—the current research offers a novel empirical examination of whether power differences play an explanatory role in sex/gender differences. Our analyses assessed whether experimental manipulations of power and sex/gender differences produce similar psychological and behavioral effects. We first identified 59 findings from published experiments on power. We then conducted a P-curve of the experimental power literature and established that it contained evidential value. We next subsumed these effects of power into 11 broad categories and compared them to 102 similar meta-analytic sex/gender differences. We found that high-power individuals and men generally display higher agency, lower communion, more positive self-evaluations, and similar cognitive processes. Overall, 71% (72/102) of the sex/gender differences were consistent with the effects of experimental power differences, whereas only 8% (8/102) were opposite, representing a 9:1 ratio of consistent-to-inconsistent effects. We also tested for discriminant validity by analyzing whether power corresponds more strongly to sex/gender differences than extraversion: although extraversion correlates with power, it has different relationships with sex/gender differences. These results offer novel evidence that many sex/gender differences may be explained, in part, by power differences.

Power and gratitude are universal features of social life and impact a wide range of intra- and interpersonal outcomes. Drawing on the social distance theory of power, we report four studies that examine how relative power influences feelings and expressions of gratitude. An archival analysis of author acknowledgements in published academic articles (N = 1,272) revealed that low-power authors expressed more gratitude than high-power authors. A pre-registered experiment (N = 283) involving live conversations online found that having relatively low power caused increased feelings and expressions of gratitude after benefiting from a favor. Another pre-registered experiment (N = 356) demonstrated that increased interpersonal orientation among lower power individuals and increased psychological entitlement among higher power individuals drove these effects. Finally, an archival analysis of conversational exchanges (N = 136,215) among Wikipedia editors revealed that relational history moderated the effect of relative power on gratitude expression. Overall, our findings highlight when and why relative power influences feelings and expressions of gratitude.

Based on an autoethnographic field study involving 130 h of work as a food delivery driver in the on-demand economy, semi-structured interviews (N = 40), and observations in company meetings and online forums, I developed a model specifying how the sociotechnical context of app-work (independent contracting, technologically-mediated task environment, no coworkers) simultaneously threatens workers’ ability to constitute and animate their narrative identities and creates conditions for workers to attenuate that threat. Specifically, the same characteristics that workers experienced as depersonalizing reduced interpersonal accountability concerns, allowing workers to self-servingly construe identity-implicating experiences through narrative flexing, a form of narrative identity work that workers enacted intrapersonally (through narrative structuring, fantasizing, rationalizing) and interpersonally (through storytelling in online communities). Overall, this work reveals how certain technological and social constraints and opportunities affect the identity dynamics of a vast, yet understudied class of workers who are neither fully tethered to nor fully untethered from traditional organizations.

Researchers disproportionately develop and test research questions aimed at understanding the effects of extreme—compared to intermediate or fluctuating—positions and states. Commonly applied theoretical frameworks and methodological tools reflect and serve to perpetuate this binary focus on extreme effects. Here, I attempt to lay the foundation for researchers to more rigorously and consistently study middle-range effects in the psychological sciences in general and in the social power literature in particular. In proposing three different conceptualizations of “middle power,”—power fluctuation, power tension, and medium power—I identify theoretical and methodological obstacles and opportunities related to studying middle power. Overall, I argue that the landscape between a construct's poles is neither vacuous nor hypothetical space. Rather, it is potentially fertile, yet largely unharvested, scholarly terrain. Simply put, the middle matters, and deserves greater attention.

The current research explores how local racial diversity affects Whites’ efforts to structure their local communities to avoid incidental intergroup contact. In two experimental studies (N = 509; Studies 1a-b), we consider Whites’ choices to structure a fictional, diverse city and find that Whites choose greater racial segregation around more (vs. less) self-relevant landmarks (e.g., their workplace and children’s school). Specifically, the more time they expect to spend at a landmark, the more they concentrate other Whites around that landmark, thereby reducing opportunities for incidental intergroup contact. Whites also structure environments to reduce incidental intergroup contact by instituting organizational policies that disproportionately exclude non-Whites: Two large-scale archival studies (Studies 2a-b) using data from every U.S. tennis (N = 15,023) and golf (N = 10,949) facility revealed that facilities in more racially diverse communities maintain more exclusionary barriers (e.g., guest policies, monetary fees, dress codes) that shield the patrons of these historically White institutions from incidental intergroup contact. In a final experiment (N = 307; Study 3), we find that Whites’ anticipated intergroup anxiety is one driver of their choices to structure environments to reduce incidental intergroup contact in more (vs. less) racially diverse communities. Our results suggest that despite increasing racial diversity, White Americans structure local environments to fuel a self-perpetuating cycle of segregation.

Social power research has been limited by theoretical and methodological traditions that prioritize static comparisons of high and low-power states. This is a crucial limitation given power's inherently dynamic nature. Accordingly, Anicich and Hirsh (2017a) recently developed a theoretical framework related to the consequences of vertical code-switching – i.e., the act of alternating between behavioral patterns directed toward higher-power and lower-power interaction partners – known as the approach-inhibition-avoidance (AIA) theory of power. Across five main studies and two supplemental studies, we empirically test this theory using a mix of survey, experimental, and experience-sampling methods. We demonstrate that power fluctuation – i.e., the extent to which one subjectively perceives oneself as alternating between psychological states of high and low power (or vice versa) across situations – is associated with two indicators of reduced well-being at work – psychological distress and somatic symptoms. We further show that these effects are mediated by role tensions (role conflict and role overload), and are weaker for individuals in routine task environments compared to individuals in non-routine task environments. Finally, we develop and validate methodological tools that researchers can use to extend our findings including the Power Fluctuation Scale (PFS, Study 1), laboratory and online experimental paradigms (Studies 2 and 3), and a simple measure to assess power fluctuation in everyday life (i.e., SD of reports of momentary power, Study 4). Overall, we provide the first set of studies highlighting the negative emotional and physiological consequences of experiencing a fluctuating sense of power.

Jargon is commonly used to efficiently communicate and signal group membership. We propose that jargon use also serves a status compensation function. We first define jargon and distinguish it from slang and technical language. Nine studies, including experiments and archival data analyses, test whether low status increases jargon use. Analyses of 64,000 dissertations found that titles produced by authors from lower-status schools included more jargon than titles from higher-status school authors. Experimental manipulations established that low status causally increases jargon use, even in live conversations. Statistical mediation and experimental-causal-chain analyses demonstrated that the low status → jargon effect is driven by increased concern with audience evaluations over conversational clarity. Additional archival and experimental evidence found that acronyms and legalese serve a similar status-compensation function as other forms of jargon (e.g., complex language). These findings establish a new driver of jargon use and demonstrate that communication, like consumption, can be both compensatory and conspicuous.

We investigate the psychological recovery process of full-time employees during the 2-week period at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Past research suggests that recovery processes start after stressors abate and can take months or years to unfold. In contrast, we build on autonomy restoration theory to suggest that recovery of impaired autonomy starts immediately even as a stressor is ongoing. Using growth curve modeling, we examined the temporal trajectories of two manifestations of impaired autonomy—powerlessness and (lack of) authenticity—to test whether recovery began as the pandemic unfolded. We tested our predictions using a unique experience-sampling dataset collected over a 2-week period beginning on the Monday after COVID-19 was declared a “global pandemic” by the World Health Organization and a “national emergency” by the U.S. Government (March 16–27, 2020). Results suggest that autonomy restoration was activated even as the pandemic worsened. Employees reported decreasing powerlessness and increasing authenticity during this period, despite their subjective stress-levels not improving. Further, the trajectories of recovery for both powerlessness and authenticity were steeper for employees higher (vs. lower) in neuroticism, a personality characteristic central to stress reactions. Importantly, these patterns do not emerge in a second experience-sampling study collected prior to the COVID-19 crisis (September 9–20, 2019), highlighting how the pandemic initially threatened employee autonomy, but also how employees began to recover their sense of autonomy almost immediately. The present research provides novel insights into employee well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic and suggests that psychological recovery can begin during a stressful experience.

Decades of research have demonstrated that having or lacking power can influence how people think and behave in organizations. By contrasting the experiences associated with high- and low-power states, however, this research has neglected the psychological and behavioral correlates of middle power, which is the subjective sense that one’s power is neither consistently higher nor lower than the power of one’s interaction partners. In this article we propose that middle-power positions and mindsets lead to frequent vertical code-switching—the act of alternating between behavioral patterns that are directed toward higher-power and lower-power interaction partners. We draw from identity and role transition theories to develop propositions specifying when frequent vertical code-switching will, in turn, result in heightened role conflict. We further situate our theoretical analysis by updating and extending the approach/inhibition theory of power on the basis of insights from revised reinforcement sensitivity theory to introduce an integrative framework called the approach/inhibition/avoidance theory of power. Overall, we highlight the promise of conceptualizing power in terms of the stability of one’s vertical orientation, offering novel predictions about the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral effects of power.

A crucial element of navigating group conflict is how group members manage stigma imposed on them by other groups. Across three experiments, we propose that group identification is a cause and consequence of self-labeling with stigmatizing group labels, a practice known to reduce stigma. Experiment 1 found that group identification increased self-labeling with a stigmatizing group label. In Experiment 2, individuals who self-labeled with a stigmatizing group label felt more identified with their group, which reduced the label’s perceived negativity; they also persisted longer on an in-group helping task, an effect that was partially mediated by group identification. In Experiment 3, observers perceived self-labelers as more identified with their group and as viewing the label less negatively; perceived group identification mediated the relationship. Group identification is a critical component in reappropriating stigmatizing labels and provides insight into how highly identified members can navigate group conflict by negotiating their group’s identity.

Stigma devalues individuals and groups, producing social and economic disadvantages through two distinct but reinforcing processes: direct discrimination (e.g., a White person not hiring a Black person based on race) and stigma internalization (e.g., women believing men are more qualified for leadership positions). We review strategies that individuals can use to not only cope with but also challenge their stigma. We discuss how attempts to escape stigma can be effective at the individual level but may leave the stigma itself unchanged or even reinforced. We then identify two ways individuals can reappropriate and take ownership of their stigma to weaken it: reframing and self-labeling. Reframing highlights stereotypic characteristics as assets rather than liabilities—for example, framing stereotypically feminine traits (e.g., social intelligence) as essential for effective negotiations or leadership. Self-labeling involves referring to oneself with a group slur. We discuss ways to utilize these reappropriation strategies as well as how to handle potential pitfalls.

Leveraging the social hierarchy literature, the present research offers a role-based account of the antecedents of interpersonal conflict. Specifically, we suggest that the negative feelings and emotions resulting from the experience of occupying a low-status position interact with the action-facilitating effects of power to produce vicious cycles of interpersonal conflict and demeaning behavior. Five studies demonstrate that power without status leads to interpersonal conflict and demeaning treatment, both in specific dyadic work relationships and among organizational members more broadly. Study 1 provides initial support for the prediction that employees in low-status/high-power roles engage in more conflict with coworkers than all other combinations of status and power. In Studies 2a and 2b, a yoked experimental design replicated this effect and established low-status/high-power roles as a direct source of the interpersonal conflict and demeaning treatment. Study 3 used an experimental manipulation of relative status and power within specific dyadic relationships in the workplace and found evidence of a vicious cycle of interpersonal conflict and demeaning treatment within any dyad that included a low-status/high-power individual. Finally, Study 4 utilized survey and human resource data from a large government agency to replicate the power without status effect on interpersonal conflict and demonstrate that power interacts with subjective status change to produce a similar effect; increasing the status of a high-power role reduces conflict whereas decreasing its status increases conflict. Taken together, these findings offer a role-based account of interpersonal conflict and highlight the importance of making a theoretical distinction between status and power.

Functional accounts of hierarchy propose that hierarchy increases group coordination and reduces conflict. In contrast, dysfunctional accounts claim that hierarchy impairs performance by preventing low-ranking team members from voicing their potentially valuable perspectives and insights. The current research presents evidence for both the functional and dysfunctional accounts of hierarchy within the same dataset. Specifically, we offer empirical evidence that hierarchical cultural values affect the outcomes of teams in high-stakes environments through group processes. Experimental data from a sample of expert mountain climbers from 27 countries confirmed that climbers expect that a hierarchical culture leads to improved team coordination among climbing teams, but impaired psychological safety and information sharing compared with an egalitarian culture. An archival analysis of 30,625 Himalayan mountain climbers from 56 countries on 5,104 expeditions found that hierarchy both elevated and killed in the Himalayas: Expeditions from more hierarchical countries had more climbers reach the summit, but also more climbers die along the way. Importantly, we established the role of group processes by showing that these effects occurred only for group, but not solo, expeditions. These findings were robust to controlling for environmental factors, risk preferences, expedition-level characteristics, country-level characteristics, and other cultural values. Overall, this research demonstrates that endorsing cultural values related to hierarchy can simultaneously improve and undermine group performance.

Interpreting scholarly contributions solely on the basis of the number, and not nature, of citations is inherently flawed because contradictory as well as confirmatory findings feed into the same metric, capturing popularity at the expense of precision. I propose a citation and indexing procedure that would conveniently integrate information about research trends while imposing minimal burden on the producers and consumers of research. Under the proposed system, citations appearing in the reference list of research reports would be superscripted with letters corresponding to one of the following six categories: references to findings that are Consistent with the current findings, are Replicated by the current findings, are Inconsistent with the current findings, Failed to be replicated by the current findings, were used to build Theory, or were used to cite Methodologies. I explain how the resulting CRIF-TM data could be summarized and perpetually updated by an online indexing service. I provide an example to demonstrate how these superscripts could be conveniently and unobtrusively presented in the reference list of forthcoming articles. Finally, I examine the anticipated benefits, limitations, and implementation challenges of the proposed citation and indexing procedure.

Five studies examined the relationship between talent and team performance. Two survey studies found that people believe there is a linear and nearly monotonic relationship between talent and performance: Participants expected that more talent improves performance and that this relationship never turns negative. However, building off research on status conflicts, we predicted that talent facilitates performance—but only up to a point, after which the benefits of more talent decrease and eventually become detrimental as intrateam coordination suffers. We also predicted that the level of task interdependence is a key determinant of when more talent is detrimental rather than beneficial. Three archival studies revealed that the too-much-talent effect emerged when team members were interdependent (football and basketball) but not independent (baseball). Our basketball analysis also established the mediating role of team coordination. When teams need to come together, more talent can tear them apart.

We present a theoretical model of reappropriation—taking possession of a slur previously used exclusively by dominant groups to reinforce another group’s lesser status. Ten experiments tested this model and established a reciprocal relationship between power and self-labeling with a derogatory group term. We first investigated precursors to self-labeling: Group, but not individual, power increased participants’ willingness to label themselves with a derogatory term for their group. We then examined the consequences of such self-labeling for both the self and observers. Self-labelers felt more powerful after self-labeling, and observers perceived them and their group as more powerful. Finally, these labels were evaluated less negatively after self-labeling, and this attenuation of stigma was mediated by perceived power. These effects occurred only for derogatory terms (e.g., queer, bitch), and not for descriptive (e.g., woman) or majority-group (e.g., straight) labels. These results suggest that self-labeling with a derogatory label can weaken the label’s stigmatizing force.

Two experiments examined the psychological and biological antecedents of hierarchical differentiation and the resulting consequences for productivity and conflict within small groups. In Experiment 1, which used a priming manipulation, hierarchically differentiated groups (i.e., groups comprising 1 high-power-primed, 1 low-power-primed, and 1 baseline individual) performed better on a procedurally interdependent task than did groups comprising exclusively either all high-power-primed or all low-power-primed individuals. There were no effects of hierarchical differentiation on performance on a procedurally independent task. Experiment 2 used a biological marker of dominance motivation (prenatal testosterone exposure as measured by a digit-length ratio) to manipulate hierarchical differentiation. The pattern of results from Experiment 1 was replicated; mixed-testosterone groups achieved greater productivity than did groups comprising all high-testosterone or all low-testosterone individuals. Furthermore, intragroup conflict mediated the productivity decrements for the high-testosterone but not the low-testosterone groups. This research suggests possible directions for future research and the need to further delineate the conditions and types of hierarchy under which hierarchical differentiation enhances rather than undermines group effectiveness.