About

Erica Boothby is a Senior Lecturer at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches a Negotiations course that draws heavily on her expertise in social psychology, including her research on decision-making and social influence. Her research focuses on the psychological processes that shape individuals’ often erroneous beliefs about their effects on others through daily interactions such as conversations, shared experiences, and acts of kindness. Her work has been published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Science, and has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and NPR's Hidden Brain. Prior to her position at Wharton, Erica completed her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Yale University and was a Fellow at Cornell University’s Behavioral Economics and Decision Research Center. She holds a degree in Philosophy and Italian from Boston University. Her research includes a focus on negotiation as a social interaction, examining the complex and unpredictable nature of human negotiations, and exploring how features such as emotion, trust, and social dynamics influence negotiation processes and outcomes. Erica Boothby has received recognition for her teaching, including the Wharton Teaching Excellence award, and was named one of Poets&Quants’ 50 Best Professors of 2023.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Cognitive psychology
• Communication

Selected publications

• Negotiation

  2025-05-01

  book-chapter

  Many of our most consequential outcomes derive from negotiations—from the price we pay for homes and cars, to the salaries we earn, to quotidian outcomes such as which household chores we perform, where we go on vacation, and what vegetables our children eat.

  PublisherDOI

• More real together: conversation predicts realness through shared reality

  Self and Identity · 2025-12-09

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Theory of collective mind

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences · 2023-07-31 · 51 citations

  reviewOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social Pitfalls At Work: Mistaken Beliefs About Maximizing Workplace Social Value

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  Much of employees’ professional success and emotional well-being comes from their social interactions in the workplace. Unfortunately, employees sometimes fail to socialize as effectively as they could, reducing their social capital at work and limiting the potential benefits they could gain from building strong social connections in the workplace. This symposium demonstrates four new ways that employees fail to maximize their social value at work, and additionally suggests a reason why they do so: workers have mistaken forecasts regarding their social interactions. In particular, the symposium showcases four distinct contexts of social interactions – talking to dissimilar others, seeking help, gossiping, and being humorous – and suggests methods for improving social capital and consequently career success. Taken together, these symposium presentations shed light on the various pitfalls, mistaken beliefs, and surprising ignorance we have when it comes to optimal workplace socialization. The research findings will encourage people to examine their own assumptions regarding social interactions at work, so that they can create more effective connections and uplifting moments, and achieve greater social capital for themselves in the workplace. A Closer Look at Homophily: Why Do People Avoid Talking to Dissimilar Others? Author: Erica Boothby; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Author: Gus Cooney; Harvard U. Should I Ask Over Zoom, Phone, Email, or In-Person? Communication Channel and Predicted Compliance Author: Vanessa Bohns; Cornell U. Author: Mahdi Roghanizad; Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan U. Gossipers Beware: Gossipers Underestimate the Negative Reputational Consequences of Gossiping Author: Andrew Choi; U. of California, Berkeley Author: Sonya Mishra; U. of California, Berkeley Author: Juliana Schroeder; U. of California, Berkeley The First Laugh: It is Easier Than We Think to Attempt Humor with Strangers Author: Elizabeth Jiang; UCLA Author: Sanford Ely DeVoe; UCLA

  PublisherDOI

• Pessimistic assessments of ability in informal conversation

  Journal of Applied Social Psychology · 2023-01-10 · 12 citations

  article

  Abstract Conversation is one of the most common ways of establishing social connection and satisfying the need to belong. But despite spending considerable time talking to others, many people report that engaging in informal conversation with anyone other than close friends and family makes them anxious. In this research, we explored people's assessments of their conversational ability. In Studies 1a–1c, we found that people are relatively pessimistic about their skills in conversation when compared to other common activities. We also provide support for the hypothesis that this pessimism is driven by a tendency to not engage in the usual pattern of self‐serving attributions when it comes to the positive and negative moments of conversations. Instead, people attribute the low points of a conversation more to themselves than to the other person (Studies 2 and 3). We discuss the origins of this attributional pattern, as well as other potential mechanisms underlying conversational pessimism, in the General Discussion.

  PublisherDOI

• Talking to strangers: A week-long intervention reduces psychological barriers to social connection

  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · 2022 · 42 citations

  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  Although people derive substantial benefit from social connection, they often refrain from talking to strangers because they have pessimistic expectations about how such conversations will go (e.g., they believe they will be rejected or not know what to say). Previous research has attempted but failed to get people to realize that their concerns about talking to strangers are overblown. To reduce people's fears, we developed an intervention in which participants played a week-long scavenger hunt game that involved repeatedly finding, approaching, and talking to strangers. Compared to controls, this minimal, easily replicable treatment made people less pessimistic about the possibility of rejection and more optimistic about their conversational ability—and these benefits persisted for at least a week after the study ended. Daily reports revealed that people's expectations grew more positive and accurate by the day, emphasizing the importance of repeated experience in improving people's attitudes towards talking with strangers.

  PublisherDOI

• Embracing Complexity: A Review of Negotiation Research

  Annual Review of Psychology · 2022-09-21 · 52 citations

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this review, we identify emerging trends in negotiation scholarship that embrace complexity, finding moderators of effects that were initially described as monolithic, examining the nuances of social interaction, and studying negotiation as it occurs in the real world. We also identify areas in which research is lacking and call for scholarship that offers practical advice. All told, the existing research highlights negotiation as an exciting context for examining human behavior, characterized by features such as strong emotions, an intriguing blend of cooperation and competition, the presence of fundamental issues such as power and group identity, and outcomes that deeply affect the trajectory of people's personal and professional lives.

  PublisherDOI

• Generalized Shared Reality Self-Report Measures

  PsycTESTS Dataset · 2021-01-01

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• The thought gap after conversation: Underestimating the frequency of others’ thoughts about us.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2021-10-21 · 17 citations

  article

  in a variety of contexts, including field conversations in a dining hall (Study 1), "getting acquainted" conversations in the lab (Study 2), intimate conversations among friends (Study 3), and arguments between romantic partners (Study 4). Several additional studies investigated a possible explanation for the thought gap: the asymmetric availability of one's own thoughts compared with others' thoughts. Accordingly, the thought gap increased when conversations became more salient (Study 4) and as people's thoughts had more time to accumulate after a conversation (Study 6); conversely, the thought gap decreased when people were prompted to reflect on their conversation partners' thoughts (Study 5). Consistent with our proposed mechanism, we also found that the thought gap was moderated by trait rumination, or the extent to which people's thoughts come easily and repetitively to mind (Study 7). In a final study, we explored the consequences of the thought gap by comparing the effects of thought frequency to thought valence on the likelihood of reconciliation after an argument (Study 8). Collectively, these studies demonstrate that people remain on their conversation partners' minds more than they know. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Talking to strangers - A week-long intervention reduces psychological barriers to social connection

  2021-11-11 · 8 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Although people derive substantial benefit from social connection, they often refrain from talking to strangers because they have pessimistic expectations about how such conversations will go (e.g., they believe they will be rejected or not know what to say). Previous research has attempted but failed to get people to realize that their concerns about talking to strangers are overblown. To reduce people’s fears, we developed an intervention in which participants played a week-long scavenger hunt game that involved repeatedly finding, approaching, and talking to strangers. Compared to controls, this minimal, easily replicable treatment made people less pessimistic about the possibility of rejection and more optimistic about their conversational ability—and these benefits persisted for at least a week after the study ended. Daily reports revealed that people’s expectations grew more positive and accurate by the day, emphasizing the importance of repeated experience in improving people’s attitudes toward talking with strangers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Margaret S. Clark

  Yale University

  12 shared

• John A. Bargh

  11 shared

• Vanessa K. Bohns

  9 shared

• Gus Cooney

  William P. Wharton Trust

  9 shared

• Gillian M. Sandstrom

  6 shared

• Leigh K. Smith

  Brigham Young University

  5 shared

• Daniel A. Newark

  HEC Paris

  5 shared

• Maya Rossignac‐Milon

  EAE Business School

  3 shared

Labs

• Operations, Information and Decisions DepartmentPI

Awards & honors

• Wharton Teaching Excellence award