Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Assessments of how governments and international organiza­tions have dealt with global challenges often feature a familiar refrain: when it comes to funding, there was too little, too late. The costs of economic, social, and environmental problems compound over time, whether it's an Ebola outbreak that escalates to an epidemic, a flood of refugees that tests the strength of the EU, or the rise of social inequalities that reinforce poverty.

This paper presents an Agentic-Communal Model of Power as a means to understand how power shapes and guides consumer behavior. We present theoretical arguments and review empirical data that reveal how the possession of power can produce a more agentic orientation within consumers, whereas the lack of power can produce a more communal orientation within consumers. As a consequence of either an increased agentic or communal orientation, psychological states of power and powerlessness affect a wide variety of consumer behaviors ranging from gift giving to persuasion to consumer misconduct.

Although it is known that certain names gain popularity within a culture because of historical events, it is unknown how names become associated with different social categories in the first place. We propose that vocal cord vibration during the pronunciation of an initial phoneme plays a critical role in explaining which names are assigned to males versus females.

The past decade has seen a rise in both economic insecurity and frequency of physical pain. The current research reveals a causal connection between these two growing and consequential social trends. In five studies, we found that economic insecurity produced physical pain and reduced pain tolerance. In a sixth study, with data from 33,720 geographically diverse households across the United States, economic insecurity predicted consumption of over-the-counter painkillers.

The current research explores why people desire power and how that desire can be satisfied. We propose that a position of power can be subjectively experienced as conferring influence over others or as offering autonomy from the influence of others. Conversely, a low-power position can be experienced as lacking influence or lacking autonomy. Nine studies show that subjectively experiencing one’s power as autonomy predicts the desire for power, whereas the experience of influence over others does not.

In the experiments reported here, we integrated work on hierarchy, culture, and the enforcement of group cooperation by examining patterns of punishment. Studies in Western contexts have shown that having high status can temper acts of dominance, suggesting that high status may decrease punishment by the powerful. We predicted that high status would have the opposite effect in Asian cultures because vertical collectivism permits the use of dominance to reinforce the existing hierarchical order.

This research investigates the link between rivalry and unethical behavior. We propose that people will be more willing and likely to engage in unethical behavior when competing against their rivals than when competing against non-rival competitors. Further, we argue that rivalry may act as a mindset such that mere exposure to one’s rivals can be enough to incite unethical behavior even in domains unrelated to that rivalrous relationship.

Does making the first offer increase or impair a negotiator's outcomes? Past research has found evidence supporting both claims. To reconcile these contradictory findings, we developed and tested an integrative model — the Information-Anchoring Model of First Offers. The model predicts when and why making the first offer helps versus hurts. We suggest that first offers have 2 effects. First, they serve as anchors that pull final settlements toward the initial first-offer value; this anchor function often produces a first-mover advantage.