In explaining the prevalence of the overconfident belief that one is better than others, prior work has focused on the motive to maintain high self-esteem, abetted by biases in attention, memory, and cognition.An additional possibility is that overconfidence enhances the person’s social...

Dozens of studies in different nations reveal that socioeconomic status only weakly predicts an individual’s subjective well-being (SWB). These effects suggest that although the pursuit of social status is a fundamental human motivation, achieving high status has little impact on...

Functional theories of reputation imply that individuals’ reputations are tied to their history of behavior. However, indirect evidence suggests that the link between reputation and behavior may be tenuous at best. In three studies we tracked the development of reputations over time among...

Scholars have recently proposed that overconfidence pervades self-judgment because of the social benefits it provides individuals, such as higher status in groups (Anderson, Brion, & Moore, 2010). A counter-argument to this social-functional account of overconfidence is that the possible social...

Individuals who occupy positions of high status and authority tend to engage in overconfidence more than others. While prior work suggests that this excessive overconfidence is partly a product of their elevated status, the current research tested whether overconfidence can also lead to status:...

Recent research on status and group productivity has highlighted that status hierarchies encourage contributions to group efforts by rewarding contributors with enhanced status. However, that and other work has typically assumed that status hierarchies are widely agreed-upon among group...

Across five studies, we investigate the use of appeals to the moral emotion of sympathy in negotiations. We find that negotiators who actively appeal to the sympathy of their counterparts achieve improved outcomes, both in terms of distributive value claiming as well as integrative value...

Although negotiation experiences can affect a negotiator's ensuing attitudes and behavior, little is known about their long-term consequences. Using a longitudinal survey design, we test the degree to which economic and subjective value achieved in job offer negotiations predicts employees'...

We investigate rivalry as a driver of unethical behavior. We first distinguish it from general competition, both conceptually and in terms of its consequences for behavior. Then, across four experiments and one archival study, we find evidence that rivalry fuels greater unethical behavior than...