About

I am an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the ILR School at Cornell University. My research focuses on managerial decision making, bias reduction in social evaluations, and perceptions of social and organizational hierarchy. My academic work has been published in various leading outlets in management and psychology, and my practitioner-focused writing has been published in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Algorithm Appreciation in Education: Educators Prefer Complex over Simple Algorithms

  2025-02-21 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Accuracy Neglect in Discrimination Reduction

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Organizations can use many different strategies to combat hiring discrimination. Previous research shows that both strategies addressing evaluator bias (preferences for/against certain groups of candidates) and evaluator error (insensitivity to candidate quality) effectively reduce discrimination. However, drawing from theories of discrimination prototypes, we propose that evaluator bias (vs. error) is seen as more prototypical of hiring discrimination and thus bias-focused strategies are perceived as more relevant to discrimination reduction. We find support for this prediction across samples of recruiters, hiring managers, and HR professionals. Notably, consistent with research on diversity initiative framing, we also find that hiring managers prefer to learn about error-reducing (vs. bias-reducing) hiring strategies, as error reduction is perceived as more relevant to organizational performance. Practically, our findings suggest that focusing on accuracy in hiring may be a neglected route to discrimination reduction and also one that may incite less resistance than a focus on bias.

  PublisherDOI

• Self-blinding and the benefits of willful ignorance

  Current Opinion in Psychology · 2025-07-02 · 1 citations

  review1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Experience of Disadvantage as an Antecedent to Personal White Privilege Awareness at Work

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  articleSenior author

  White people who acknowledge personal white privilege—unfair advantages experienced personally due to race—are particularly likely to support policies combatting racial inequity. However, white people confronted with evidence of racial privilege often deny it extends to them personally. Here, we identify a factor rooted in white people’s everyday, lived experience that may promote their recognition of personal white privilege—experience of disadvantage along another social category dimension. Across six studies (N = 4,865), we find that white men—a uniquely privileged group in the U.S.—who have (vs. have not) experienced social category-based disadvantage (e.g., due to religion) become more aware of the impact people’s social categories have on life outcomes and consequentially more aware of their personal white privilege at work. We discuss how these studies contrast with research showing that white people cite general hardship to deny personal privilege and further illuminate the psychology of everyday white privilege awareness.

  PublisherDOI

• A contest study to reduce attractiveness-based discrimination in social judgment.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2024-11-14 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  > 20,000). Using a signal detection theory approach to evaluate interventions, we identified two interventions that reduced discrimination by lessening both decision noise and decision bias, while two other interventions reduced overall discrimination by only lessening noise or bias. The most effective interventions largely provided concrete strategies that directed participants' attention toward decision-relevant criteria and away from socially biasing information, though the fact that very similar interventions produced differing effects on discrimination suggests certain key characteristics that are needed for manipulations to reliably impact judgment. The effects of these four interventions on decision bias, noise, or both also replicated in a different discrimination domain, political affiliation, and generalized to populations with self-reported hiring experience. Results of the contest for decreasing attractiveness-based favoritism suggest that identifying effective routes for changing discriminatory behavior is a challenge and that greater investment is needed to develop impactful, flexible, and scalable strategies for reducing discrimination. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Devaluation by Omission: Limited Identity Options Elicit Anger and Increase Identification

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article1st authorCorresponding

  From completing the census to filling out an employee engagement survey, people are often asked to provide demographic information about themselves, such as their gender, by selecting their identity from a list of options. However, the options provided in such situations are seldom unlimited—they typically reflect only a subset of possible identities. In the present research, we explored social identity threat caused by subtle acts of omission, specifically, situations in which social identity information is requested but one’s identity is not among the options provided. We predicted that being unable to identify with one’s group—e.g., in the demographics section of a job application form—may signal social identity devaluation, eliciting negative affect (e.g., anger), reducing anticipated organizational belonging, and increasing the importance of the omitted identity to group members’ sense of self. Six pre-registered experiments (N = 2,964 adults) sampling members of two minority identity groups (i.e., gender minorities and members of a minority political party) support these predictions. Our findings document the existence of a subtle but likely pervasive form of social identity threat. We discuss implications for organizations concerned with reducing social identity threat for employees.

  PublisherDOI

• Hierarchy as a signal of culture and belonging: Exploring why egalitarian ideology predicts aversion to hierarchical organizations

  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · 2024-10-29 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Devaluation by Omission: Limited Identity Options Elicit Anger and Increase Identification

  Psychological Science · 2024-01-29 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the present research, we explored social-identity threat caused by subtle acts of omission, specifically situations in which social-identity information is requested but one’s identity is not among the options provided. We predicted that being unable to identify with one’s group—that is, in the demographics section of a survey—may signal social-identity devaluation, eliciting negative affect (e.g., anger) and increasing the importance of the omitted identity to group members’ sense of self. Six preregistered experiments ( N = 2,964 adults) sampling members of two minority-identity groups (i.e., gender minorities and members of a minority political party) support these predictions. Our findings document the existence of a subtle but likely pervasive form of social-identity threat.

  PublisherDOI

• Encouraging self-blinding in hiring

  Behavioral Science & Policy · 2023-04-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  One strategy for minimizing bias in hiring is blinding—purposefully limiting the information used when screening applicants to that which is directly relevant to the job and does not elicit bias based on race, gender, age, or other irrelevant characteristics. Blinding policies remain rare, however. An alternative to blinding policies is self-blinding, in which people performing hiring-related evaluations blind themselves to biasing information about applicants. Using a mock-hiring task, we tested ways to encourage self-blinding that take into consideration three variables likely to affect whether people self-blind: default effects on choices, people’s inability to assess their susceptibility to bias, and people’s tendency not to recognize the full range of information that can elicit that bias. Participants with hiring experience chose to receive or be blind to various pieces of information about applicants, some of which were potentially biasing. They selected potentially biasing information less often when asked to specify the applicant information they wanted to receive than when asked to specify the information they did not want to receive, when prescribing selections for other people than when making the selections for themselves, and when the information was obviously biasing than when it was less obviously so. On the basis of these findings, we propose a multipronged strategy that human resources leaders could use to enable and encourage hiring managers to self-blind when screening job applicants.

  PublisherDOI

• Mindsets in the Management of Uncertainty at Work

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  Research on mindsets (a.k.a. implicit theories, or lay beliefs) about the fixedness or malleability of human attributes has proliferated in various fields of applied psychology—e.g., educational, social, organizational. Particularly in organizations, mindsets have increasingly been identified as a critical topic of research because not only of the possibility of shifting mindsets through experimental manipulation, but also the long-term and impactful consequences that mindsets can shape. Indeed, mindset manipulations and interventions have been developed, tested, and implemented—albeit mostly in non-organizational contexts—with successful outcomes in terms of reducing stress and conflict, enhancing self-efficacy and employee happiness—among others. The purpose of this symposium is to present new research that builds on and extends the mindsets literature by examining the effects of both established and previously unresearched mindsets in the modern workplace. Inspired by the Academy of Management 2023 theme, “Putting the Worker Front and Center,” these projects extend research and theory on how mindsets help individuals to manage and overcome challenges in times of uncertainty. Specifically, the research featured in the symposium highlights how mindsets can support individuals to yield more positive attitudinal and behavioral outcomes during stressful situations at work, shape more positive job search outlook and better mental health during employment uncertainty, as well as managers to support employees’ work efforts and performance in the workplace. In an era of unprecedented uncertainty and changing nature of work, we believe that researchers in organizational behavior must seize upon this moment of opportunity to accelerate the development of a substantial body of rigorous research on mindsets in organizational contexts. By elucidating the processes through which mindsets shape core aspects of outcomes in people’s careers and in the workplace (e.g., job search, well-being, performance), we contribute to a fascinating new area of mindsets research that promotes human flourishing in organizations. The Role of Stress Mindset in Shaping Responses to Challenging and Threatening Stress Author: Sean Barrett Fath; ILR at Cornell Author: Alia Joy Crum; Columbia Business School Mind the Unknown: Development and Validation of the Uncertainty Mindset Author: Federico Magni; ETH Zürich Author: Alina Gerlach; ETH-Zurich, Work & Organizational Psy Author: Julian Pfrombeck; Columbia Business School Author: Sara Zaniboni; U. of Bologna Author: Laura Elaine Strittmatter; ETH Zürich, D-MTEC Author: Gudela Grote; ETH Zürich Mindsets Shape Well-Being and Job Search Outlook during Employment Uncertainty Author: Eva Hsin-Lian Lin; London Business School Author: Aneeta Rattan; London Business School Managerial Growth Mindsets and Employee Efforts Towards Self-Improvement Author: Benjamin Alan Rogers; Boston College Author: Jessica Siegel Christian; U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Author: Elad Netanel Sherf; Kenan-Flagler Business School, U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Frequent coauthors

• Devon Proudfoot

  Cornell University

  7 shared

• Richard P. Larrick

  4 shared

• Irene Scopelliti

  St George's, University of London

  4 shared

• Jack B. Soll

  4 shared

• Kate M. Turetsky

  Barnard College

  4 shared

• John Angus D. Hildreth

  SC Johnson (United States)

  4 shared

• Carey K. Morewedge

  4 shared

• James G. Matusik

  University of Georgia

  3 shared