RESEARCH

WORKING PAPERS

Leaning in Softly: On Gender and Self-Promotion 

(with Silvia Saccardo and Jana Gallus, R&R at Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics)

Abstract: Effectively signaling one’s skills and abilities is critical for visibility in the workplace, yet equally qualified individuals may differ in how often and how assertively they self-promote. Across a series of preregistered online experiments involving over 14,000 adults and adolescents, we investigate gender differences along two dimensions of self-promotion: the initial decision of whether to self-promote (extensive margin) and the related decision of how strongly to do so (intensive margin). Our data show that, on the extensive margin, women are less likely to opt to send a self-promotional message to an external evaluator, thereby withholding a signal of their abilities. Examining its relation to the intensive margin, we show that when prompted, women self-promote less assertively than men. Crucially, this difference persists even after accounting for selection on the extensive margin, suggesting that the two decisions are behaviorally distinct.  Additional waves of data show that these decisions respond differently to the information treatments we test, suggesting that interventions that appear ineffective on one dimension may meaningfully impact the other. The results underscore the importance of addressing both margins of self-promotion to reduce gender disparities in visibility and advancement.  

When Women Self-Promote: Evidence on Beliefs and Downstream Consequences 

(with Silvia Saccardo and Gretchen Chapman, link to paper draft)

Abstract: Conventional wisdom—along with supporting laboratory evidence—holds that women who draw attention to their achievements risk social and economic penalties. Consistent with this view, our survey data (N = 903) show that women expect lower returns to self-promotion for women than for men. Yet across three pre-registered experiments in field and laboratory settings, we find that self-promotion benefits career-relevant outcomes, with no evidence of differential returns by gender. In a large-scale field experiment involving academic help requests (N = 66,121), self-promotional language increases help rates by approximately 29%, with similar effects whether or not the team’s all-female composition is revealed. In an incentive-compatible online hiring experiment (N = 999), where evaluators receive noisy signals about candidates' performance, self-promoters are more likely to be hired, with similar effects for men and women. In a two-stage online experiment (total N = 1,304), self-promotion again improves hiring outcomes and does not lead to greater penalties when workers later underperform, for either women or men. Taken together, we find that self-promotion benefits men and women similarly even in settings where differential costs are anticipated, suggesting that gender-specific backlash may be less pervasive than commonly assumed.

Affective Altruism 

(with George Loewenstein, R&R at Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)

Abstract: People do not always help those who need it most. Across four pre-registered online studies (N = 3,004), we examine how misalignments between what people feel for others (sympathy) and what they believe about the severity of others' suffering (appraisal) can contribute to distortions in prosocial behavior. Both personal experience with a target’s situation and the extent to which the situation’s existence is visible to others are more strongly associated with sympathy than with appraisals of severity. Visibility has less impact among observers with relevant experience, suggesting that both factors may, in part, operate through similar mechanisms. In an incentive-compatible experiment, we test one such mechanism—vividness—and find that while vividness does not directly influence charitable giving, it significantly increases sympathy, which in turn predicts giving. Our results suggest that distortions in prosocial behavior emerge not merely because certain cases elicit stronger emotions, but because these reactions diverge from assessments of objective need.

Pre-hacking: Can behavioral experimenters make design decisions to get the results they want?

(with Nick Chater, Anna Dreber, George Loewenstein, Katherine Milkman, and Christophe van den Bulte; R&R at Nature) 

SELECTED WORKS IN PROGRESS

Intergenerational Understanding 

(with Erin Carbone and George Loewenstein, manuscript in preparation)

Abstract: In parent-child relationships, children often perceive that their parents fail to truly understand them. Yet it remains unclear whether understanding systematically differs within adult intergenerational relationships. Across three studies (N = 1,774), in which children and parents (and in one study, also grandparents) completed surveys asking about the other, we find consistent evidence contradicting the stereotype that children feel misunderstood.  Both parents and children actually believe, on average, that parents understand their children better than children understand their parents. These asymmetries extend to beyond perceived understanding to perceived interest in understanding: Parents report greater interest in their children than they believe their children exhibit toward them. However, although our final study, which examines 108 parent-child dyads, did uncover evidence of the predicted difference in interest, it found no consistent evidence that parents actually systematically understand their children better than children understand their parents. Taken together, these findings document interesting intergenerational differences, but suggest that popular perceptions of such differences may reflect, in part, biased perceptions rather than meaningful differences in actual insight.

How Awards Affect Confidence to Speak Up 

(with Silvia Saccardo and Jana Gallus, data collection in progress)

Where Do You Set the Bar? Gender Differences in Performance Standards and Self-Promotion 

(with Silvia Saccardo and Jana Gallus, data collection in progress)