Generalized trust is diminished among black Americans firsthand by experiences of bias and from contending with social and physical disorder in their neighbourhoods, then secondhand through bias socialization.

Something I found particularly interesting:  Racial minorities tend to be lower in generalized trust, and those who are lower in generalized trust are less likely to act as brokers to connect those in their social networks with jobs they’ve heard about. Interesting challenge in terms of equality/diversity in labour markets. 

(Gated PDF at Annual Reviews in Sociology)

“Trusting behavior is distinct from a more general tendency to take risks”

Trust is often described in terms of your willingness to make yourself vulnerable to others.  It’s a type of risk-taking.  But some recent research by Derfler-Rozin, Pillutla and Thau (gated PDF at OBDHP) adds to the evidence that trusting as social risk-taking is completely different from asocial (non-trust-related) risk taking.

They found that when people were made to worry about being socially excluded, they became risk-averse, shying away from risky plays in a game.  But despite their risk-aversion, they became far more trusting in social versions of the same game:  They didn’t like risk, but they would take lots of risks if it was seen as a way to build social connections with others.

Economists often see trust as simply a way of reducing the transaction costs associated with getting the material outcomes we need.  But this research affirms that we also trust as a way of seeking social connections with others.

“I would go into a lunch of stockbrokers who would be coming to listen to the business philosopher, and I felt so nervous because I thought I was supposed to tell them where they should be putting their clients’ money on the basis of my knowledge of the history of ideas. I felt such a failure because I didn’t know what they should do with their clients’ funds.”

— John Armstrong, the ‘philosopher in residence’ at Melbourne Business School, in a self-deprecating interview about philosophy and business education

Evidence-based policy bloggers Evidence Soup called shenanigans this week on a consortium of firms and advocacy groups for asking US President Obama to make a goal of giving consumers more feedback on their energy usage.  Why?  Because, Evidence Soup argues, the letter’s authors don’t muster any specific evidence to support their stand, despite vague references to ‘studies and experience’ in support of their position:

Too often, statements that “studies show” are accepted without challenge. These claims are poorly disguised as evidence-based management, when in fact they are the enemy.

In fact, Evidence Soup grumbles, there isn’t enough data to declare a verdict on energy feedback yet.  They point to a review (PDF) that they describe as highlighting the problems with existing pilot programs of in-home energy consumption displays.  The studies (which have wildly different effects, from a trivial 2.7% to an impressive 18%) just don’t “rise to the scientific standard of reproducible results,” Evidence Soup writes.

In general, many of these pilots are quasi-experiments at best.  Many are underpowered, beset by confounds (like weather), and lack control groups.

Fair enough:  Some of them are promising, but they’re just not well-designed enough to rule out plausible alternate explanations.  And we don’t want utilities to spend their conservation-promotion dollars sending out in-home displays that don’t actually work.

So what’s the problem?

The problem, as I see it, is that the review (and Evidence Soup) turn a blind eye to decades of well-designed, empirical, experimental research on this very topic:

Let’s have a look.  Seligman and Darley (in 1977!) conducted a field experiment (with random assignment and a control condition), and found that feedback on usage (even four times a week) shaved consumption by 10%.  Becker, a year later, found evidence that feedback had to be paired with goal-setting to unlock conservation efforts.  In the early 80s, Midden et al added further experimental evidence that individual feedback helps reduce energy use, in contrast to ineffective approaches like providing general information.  In the late 1980s, Houwelingen and Van Raaij found that immediate read-out displays got people conserving — and kept them conserving, relative to control (but that the advantage of daily over monthly feedback was primarily in the short run).  Around the same time, Sexton et al. changed the nature of the goal in a study, giving people feedback about the cost of their energy, which varied by time of day:  Again, feedback changed behaviour – this time, toward changing time-of-day usage rather than overall conservation.  Siero and colleagues (1996) found that feedback on consumption helped, but not as much as feedback with a basis for comparison (in their industrial context, employees got feedback on their own consumption, plus information about another unit’s consumption).

This is not even close to the totality of the literature on the topic.  Abrahamse et al. (2005) review some thirty-eight studies on energy consumption and conclude that feedback, especially when frequent, has a reliably positive effect on consumption.  Are there moderators at play that change the effectiveness of these kinds of programs? Darn skippy.  Does feedback probably work best when paired with other interventions like goal-setting or social comparison?  Sure.

But when you pair the tidily-designed (but small scale) experiments in these papers with a track record of success in (admittedly poorly designed) utility pilot programs, I find it hard to muster as much skepticism as Evidence Soup has about this kind of intervention.

Photo:  Probably the wrong type of energy usage feedback, via Passive Aggressive Notes.

Edit:  Evidence Soup responded to my post.  Her view isn’t necessarily that energy feedback isn’t effective, but rather that advocates owe us the duty to present the evidence — not just wave their hands around and mention unnamed ‘studies’.

About a year ago, I wrote a short post discussing the role of negotiation in the wage gap.  Short version:  Women don’t tend to negotiate as frequently or view as many situations as ‘negotiable’.  When it comes to the labour market, the difference between those who negotiate employment terms and those who don’t is a yawning gulf.  A gender difference in attitudes about negotiation is one contributing factor to the persistent within-occupation wage gap.

But negotiating is fraught with peril for professional women.  Research by Bowles, Babcock & Lai (2006, free abstract/gated PDF here) shows that women are often penalized for ‘asking’.  Where men are positively perceived for negotiating, women are negatively perceived for the same practice.

Sam Ladner and I chatted about this on Twitter after she linked to an HBR blog post titled, “Can ‘Nice Girls’ Negotiate?”  Ever the optimist about negotiation education, I argued that this underscored a need for a particular type of negotiation training.  In the experiments conducted by Bowles et al., the backlash women faced from men for negotiating was mediated through perceptions that the negotiating women were more demanding and less ‘nice’.  Women who negotiate with the type of dinosaurs that don’t like women to negotiate need to be master integrators, find solutions that create value for both sides and efficiently trading (or ‘logroll’) issues.

Sam (rightly) squinted at this answer:  Wait, she asked, doesn’t ‘training’ women imply that women are the problem, rather than sexism?

After all, the idea that women don’t advance because they don’t ask places responsibility for the wage gap on those who are the victims of the wage gap.  The idea that women not only have to be negotiators, but better negotiators (creating and claiming value without seeming demanding or looking anything less than perfectly ‘nice’) places an additional set of demands on the victim.  And, of course, prescribing different approaches for negotiation to women might serve to legitimate the idea that women ought to negotiate differently.  (You can just imagine the Sociological Images post on the guide for Negotiating Like A Woman!)

But on the flip side, there is empirical evidence suggesting that there are strategies that may help women soften the negative impact of asking (and particularly, of using leverage from competing offers and other similar techniques).  In a working paper by Bowles and Babcock (2008, ungated abstract + PDF here), they found a technique women could use in order to negotiate without their male counterparts treating their requests as illegitimate or imposing a social cost for having negotiated.  The two successful techniques were to frame their negotiation as an aptitude they brought to the job (the ‘skill contribution’ excuse), or to claim that they were negotiating because someone else had suggested they do so (the ‘mentorship’ excuse).  So should we teach this stupid (but apparently effective) interpersonal tapdance to young professional women?

Similarly, there may be means by which women can help keep stereotype endorsement from rearing its head in negotiation situations.  When these stereotypes are activated, a broad range of biases, misperceptions and errors in judgment can occur (see the review in Kray and Thompson, 2005; Google Books partial preview here).  One study by Kray, Thompson and Galinsky (ungated PDF here) found that the playing field could be levelled if a shared, non-gender-related shared identity could be emphasized.  ”The effect of achieving a superordinate identity,” they write, “is similar to the effect of negotiating with a same-sex partner.”

Here’s my perspective:

1. Our first priority has to be teaching men. Not only is their stereotype endorsement (and negativity toward stereotype-disconfirming female negotiators) a cause of the within-occupation wage gap, but it is also damaging to the organizations they work for.  Just because women won’t (or can’t) negotiate to get an acceptable deal doesn’t mean they’ll stay working under unacceptable terms.  If you don’t want your most valuable talent walking wordlessly to the door at the first chance, negotiate.
2. But yes, teach women to negotiate. It’s clear that women must go through some inane theatrics in order to negotiate their employment terms.  Given the long-term importance of negotiating at the individual level (career progress) and societal level (wage gap), this may be worthwhile.  But more importantly, in Bowles and Babcock’s studies, it wasn’t just male evaluators who punished females for negotiating — along almost every variable, women were just as punitive in their perceptions of women who negotiate.  Breaking this stereotype is important for women as employers, not just women as prospective employees.
3. Don’t entirely replace negotiation with policy. One of the ways to end run this problem is to try and tightly bind up employment terms in mountains of policy and paperwork.  Nothing’s negotiable; everything’s set by managerial fiat.  Women and men get the same terms, no matter what – or at least, that’s the myth.  In reality, people (again, disproportionately men) will find ways of negotiating around these policies.  Even if they work, they tend to create inefficient deals that are sub-par for both sides, and they lose the chance to find tailored ‘ideosyncratic deals’ that leave people feeling satisfied and valuing their work.

Image source: Google/LIFE

Interesting post this evening over at Regret The Error describing how a Washington Post journalist got skewered over a copy editor’s mistake in the WaPo “9/11 is a joke” corrections miniscandal.

For those who missed it, a Post story referred to that classic Public Enemy jawn as if it were about the 9/11 terrorist attacks rather than the 9-1-1 emergency system.   Hilarity ensued, including the establishment of a satirical #washingtonpostcorrections tag on Twitter (“Boyz II Men is not a mentoring program”; “Father MC is not Catholic, as previously reported”).

Regret The Error notes that the WaPo’s corrections policy didn’t mention that it was a copy editor’s mistake, rather than the writer’s:

“Dickson was mortified. “You want to be able to defend yourself and you can’t,” she told me.”

Sounds horrific, right?  The reason Dickson wasn’t cleared was because of the WaPo’s corrections policy:

“We do not assign internal blame for a mistake, such as distinguishing between reporting and editing errors. Ours is a collective enterprise; we share responsibility for our successes, and for our errors. However, corrections that result from our receipt of incorrect information from outside sources can explain that fact to readers.”

Regret The Error’s stance on the matter is that the policy is fundamentally broken, lacking the transparency a modern news organization needs.

However, I think that there’s a lot to praise in this policy.

Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer argued that a lot can be inferred about an organization from how it deals with SNAFUs:

“The best single question for testing an organization’s character is: What happens when people make mistakes?”

The spirit of the Post’s policy is that individuals shouldn’t be pilloried in public when a mistake is made, and that responsibility for a jointly-produced product is shared by those who had a hand in making it.

Blaming one person is easy and satisfying.  It’s the go-to choice for leaders looking to shift blame away from dysfunctional cultures and systems.  But more often than not, canning one person won’t keep similar errors from being made.

In fact, when others are individually singled out and shamed in public for their errors, it can demoralize others in the group:  It can lead to perceptions of unfairness, negative attitudes toward the organization and resentment toward the disciplineer, as Atwater and colleagues (2001) found.

So what should the Post’s corrections blurbs look like if their purpose (beyond making factual corrections) is to encourage fewer errors and higher quality in future work?

I think it should look very much like it currently does.

Social learning in the wake of failure can happen through punishment events (Schnake, 1986).  But in complex, interdependent work, avoiding failure isn’t usually a simple matter of keeping people fearful of slacking off.  It requires that people work together to develop novel solutions, establish new norms, improve old processes and set more demanding goals.  I find it difficult to imagine how calling out an individual copy editor in public will achieve any of those goals.  It may be satisfying to writers angry at having their work brutalized — but I sincerely doubt it will do much to avoid similar mistakes recurring in the future.

The Crunchpad, a tablet PC project spearheaded by Michael Arrington, based on the feedback of the TechCrunch user community and engineered by FusionGarage, has spectacularly imploded over the last couple weeks.

I’ve been interested to read about how seemingly ‘underpapered’ this deal was:  FusionGarage claims there simply was no contract between them and TechCrunch.  The general reaction from observers seems to be somewhere between confusion and horror.  Why would such an important project be run on the trust between the partners?  Why wouldn’t this undertaking be wrapped up in ironclad legalese and staffed on both sides by razor-toothed lawyers?

The notion that contracting must underlie every deal to avoid TechCrunch style nightmares is pervasive.  In a 2002 study, Manigart, Korsgaard, Folger, Sapienza and Baeyens presented investors with hypothetical investment opportunites.  When responding to these paper vignettes, investors claimed to want bulletproof contracting even in the presence of trust.  In theory, people want to have their cake and eat it, too:  They want relationships based on mutual trust but underpinned with contracting, incentives, monitoring and punishment.  The pervasive view in business seems to echo Reagan:  ”Trust, but verify.”

The problem is, verification isn’t free.

Not only does contracting cost time and money, but trust researchers Davis, Schoorman and Donaldson (1997) warn that contracting may also have the effect of diminishing trust.  ”Control,” they wrote, “can be potentially counterproductive, because it undermines pro-organizational behaviour.”  Swiss economist Bruno Frey has made a similar point, suggesting that in some situations contracting can ‘crowd out’ trust in relationships by cheapening longstanding, “personalized” relationships.

In some ways, parties in business partnerships suffer much the same dilemma faced by fiancés considering a prenuptial agreement:  Contracting is useful and helps avoid the risk of opportunism, but it communicates considerable skepticism and distrust to the other party.

There’s a lot to be said, in other words, about wild, precipitous acts of trust.  But as TechCrunch has learned, there is also much to be lost.  Here are four ways of distinguishing the constructive from the calamitous when it comes to using trust instead of contracting:

1. Clarify the details. One of the things contracts are useful for is making expectations perfectly clear.  If you don’t have a contract, make sure that you are still clearly talking through each side’s assumptions and expectations.  These are difficult conversations, but important ones.
2. Build a shared identity.  The psychology of identity can be really powerful.  If both sides in a partnership see themselves as attached to a common project, and invest their self of self into a shared group, they tend to behave more cooperatively.  They don’t draw as sharp a distinction between their own outcomes and the group’s outcome.  They think of the group’s successes as their own, and are less prone to act out of raw self-interest.  Being part of a group that trusts one another and acts in the service of the collective can also provide a motivational and emotional boost that can be an end in itself (and serve to further discourage opportunism).  This argument, for those interested, is far better articulated in Rod Kramer and colleagues’ 2001 chapter in Groups at Work:  Theory and Research.
3. Depend on each other. In the Crunchpad partnership, TechCrunch was entirely reliant on FusionGarage, while FusionGarage seems capable of going it alone without TechCrunch’s ongoing involvement.  ’Undercontracted’ partnerships are more successful when there is mutual and symmetric dependence — where each player brings something unique and hard-to-replace to the table.  (A caveat here:  The only time this doesn’t work is when both parties are the monopoly providers of their piece of the partnership; see that Nobel-winnin’ Williamson fella on the risks of bilateral monopoly).  But the overall message remains:  If you want to depend on trust rather than contracts, don’t set up a situation where one side risks everything and the other risks nothing.
4. Let the future cast a shadow on the present. Okay, I’m stealing Robert Axelrod’s phrase, but it’s a good one:  People tend to cooperate more when it’s not a one-shot game.  If you plan to work on more than one project together, and if there are ways for each party’s reputation to travel, it helps keep people honest.  Contracting can be a (costly) substitute for some of these things, but it’s ideal to create a situation where the short-term gains of opportunism are outweighed by long-lasting reputations and relationships.

Here’s a bit of the writeup in the Telegraph (hat tip to @aaker for the link):

“Men are so devastated by the break up of a marriage that it feels as though they have lost £61,500.

For women, however, the pain is less traumatic – and leaves them feeling as if they had lost only a measly £5,000.”

I had to wonder about this.  I couldn’t find the paper in question on Paul Frijters’ website, but I flipped through one of his other papers from this line of research.  The clever way they go about making these estimates allows you to identify the ‘momentary impact’ of an event, separate from the build-up and fade-out.  In other words, the effect of divorce as an event in time, distinct from marital resentment and other sources of dissatisfaction in the lead-up to the ‘event’ of divorce.

Interesting stuff, though it probably won’t do much to combat the stereotypes of economists:

“So, what do you do for a living?”

— “Oh, I put dollar values on the joy of birth and the misery of death.”

“It’s probably wrong to pillage the planet in celebration of Christmas, but if pillage we must, we should at least do it efficiently.”

Wharton’s Joel Waldfogel’s work on the economic waste and inefficiency of Christmas gifts is featured in the Globe today.

I’ve been reading quite a bit about gift-giving as part of a paper that deals with the notion of favours and gifts in trust building.  One of the reasons I suspect we’ll never see Waldfogel’s perfectly logical prescriptions broadly adopted is that gift-giving is not just an act of exchange:  It is a language.

Theodore Caplow (as part of the Middletown III studies) investigated Christmas gift-giving in an average middle American town.  He concluded:

“Gift exchange, in effect, is a language that employs objects instead of words as its lexical elements. In this perspective, every culture… has a language of prestation to express important interpersonal relationships on special occasions, just as it has a verbal language to create and manage meaning for other purposes.

Visualizing Christmas gift giving as a language – or, more precisely, as a dialect or code – helps to explain, among other matters, the insistence on wrapping and other signs to identify the objects designated for lexical use and the preference for the simultaneous exchange of gifts at family gatherings rather than in private.

Gift messages are due from every person in a parent-child relationship to every other. The individual message says “I value you according to the degree of our relationship” and anticipates the response “I value you in the same way.” But the compound message that emerges from the unwrapping of gifts in the presence of the whole gathering allows more subtle meanings to be conveyed. It permits the husband to say to the wife “I value you more than my parents” or the mother to say to the daughter-in-law “I value you as much as my son so long as you are married to him” or the brother to say to the brother “I value you more than our absent brothers, but less than our parents and much less than my children.” These statements, taken together, would define and sustain a social structure, if only because, by their gift messages, both parties to each dyadic relationship confirm that they have the same understanding of the relationship and the bystanders, who are interested parties, endorse that understanding by tacit approval.”

There is no question that Christmas gift-giving involves extraordinary waste and inefficiency in economic terms:  But any ‘solution’ to this social problem must address our tendency to use gifts to convey sophisticated, compound signals about our relationships with others.  I’m not convinced that Waldfogel’s clever notion of charity gift cards serves this purpose.

Caplow, T. (1984).  Rule enforcement without visible means: Christmas gift giving in Middletown.  American Journal of Sociology 89(6), 1306-1323.  [Link]

Here’s a brief excerpt from a Globe and Mail article titled, ‘Green consumers more likely to steal and lie’:

“Pop quiz: You need $20 for lunch and can only ask one person for a loan.
Do you ask a) the eco-conscious vegetarian who only buys green cleaning products, or b) the Hummer-driving meathead who says Al Gore is overrated.
If you choose person A – assuming she cares as much for fellow human beings as she does for the planet – you could end up hungry.
Green consumers are more likely to steal, lie and hoard their money compared with those who are exposed to environmentally friendly products but don’t buy them, according a new study by University of Toronto researchers to be published in the journal Psychological Science.”

This paragraph (along with the title, lede, and, well, the rest of the article in its entirety) would lead you to believe that there’s something about the ecologically-minded that make them deviant.

But take a look at the paper they’re talking about in the article, in press at Psych Science and available on Nina Mazer’s website (link).

In fact, the participants in the experiment weren’t split into Prius and Humvee drivers.  Instead, they were randomly assigned to shop at a rigged store:  Some went to a store where the lion’s share of products were ‘green’, while others shopped at a store whose selection was gerrymandered to include very few green products.  They then were given $25 to shop for items (and were not allowed to pick more than one of the same item).  This gave participants the illusion of choice — but in reality, they were being steered to buy green or conventional products.

Once the people who were led to feel that they had made a socially-conscious choice were let loose in other tasks, they cheated and lied:  They divvied up money inequitably and claimed credit for wrong answers on a task.  This is another twist on the licensing effect.

So what’s wrong with the headline and the Globe article?  The folks who bought green products cheated and lied!

The problem, of course, is that it’s not ‘green consumers’ who cheat and lie.  Green consumers will be more likely to feel licensed to be dishonest after buying green products.  But they’re no more or less likely to lie or cheat than anyone else.   The same effect is found anytime that people are made to feel good about themselves.  For instance, I have no doubt that you could elicit the same effect after getting conservatives to volunteer to attend an anti-Kyoto protest.

So the real lesson, returning to the Globe and Mail’s question, isn’t that you should hit up the Humvee driver for lunch money.  It’s that you really ought to avoid asking a favour of anyone too chuffed with their own sense of morality.  In other words, it’s not just disposition – it’s situation.

So what can we do about this?  We certainly don’t want to discourage people from ‘greening’ their consumption, but at the same time, we’d rather avoid giving people the sense that they’re entitled to a little deception and dishonesty because of their electric car or organic banana.

Thankfully, there are some instances where people get into a pattern of doing good on a regular basis, rather than acting as ‘moral thermometers’, alternating between being nice and being lousy.  For instance, doing nice things in video games leads us to do nice things in real life.  People who can be cajoled into voting once will then get into a habit of voting in the future. Forgiving someone can lead us to give more to charity.  The list goes on.  Aristotle wasn’t wrong:  In some cases, virtuous living seems to be a matter of getting into a habit.

So why do we become habitual do-gooders in some situations, but mercurially alternate between prosociality and antisociality in other cases?   How could these findings be reconciled?

Nina Mazar, & Chen-Bo Zhong (2009). Do Green Products Make Us Better People? Psychological Science.  (Link)