Associate Professor, Management of Organizations, Harold Furst Chair in Management Philosophy and Values
Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley
Schroeder, J., & Fishbach, A. (2024). Feeling known predicts relationship satisfaction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 111, 104559. [Science Direct Link]
Short Summary: This paper finds that feeling known by a relationship partner is a stronger predictor of a person's relationship satisfaction than the feeling of knowing the partner (11 studies).
Bluvstein, S., Zhao, X., Barasch, A., & Schroeder, J. (2023). Imperfectly human: The humanizing potential of (corrected) errors in text-based communication. Automation in Marketing and Consumption, 9(3). [Article Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that online communicators (e.g., customer service agents) who make and then correct typos are seen as more likely to be human (vs. AI) than communicators who don't make any typos or make but don't correct their typos (7 experiments).
Minson, J. A., Bendersky, C., de Dreu, C., Halperin, E., & Schroeder, J. (2023). Experimental studies of conflict: Challenges, solutions, and advice to junior scholars. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 177, 104257. [Science Direct Link]
Short Summary: This editorial presents a taxonomy of successful experimental approaches to the study of conflict and offers advice to researchers seeking to make impactful contributions to this area.
Schroeder, J. (in press). The ordinary and extraordinary struggle of social life: Perceiving, understanding, and connecting with other minds. In Carlston, D., Johnson, K., & Hugenberg, K. (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition.
Short Summary: This chapter highlights challenges and opportunities for mind perception (how people attribute mental capacity to others) and mind reading (how people assess others’ mental states) through the lens of six different types of “minds.” Three minds illustrate forms of mind perception—invisible minds, those we cannot directly experience, dehumanized minds, those that seem weaker than our own, and anthropomorphized minds, those that we perceive but may not actually exist. The other three illustrate mind reading—misread and misunderstood minds, those that are apparent but not accurately inferred, and unlocked minds, those that can be accurately read using effective communication.
Abel, J. E., Vani, P., Abi-Esber, N., Blunden, H., & Schroeder. J. (2022). Kindness in short supply: Evidence for inadequate prosocial input. Current Opinion in Psychology, 48, 101458. [Science Direct Link]
Short Summary: This paper documents when and why people fail to give “prosocial input” (i.e., (information intended to benefit others), noting that potential givers overestimate the costs of doing so (e.g., making recipients uncomfortable) and underestimate the benefits (e.g., being helpful) for at least four psychological reasons.
Ernstoff, R., Blakey, W., Womick, J., Bail, C., Finkel, E., Han, H., Sarrouf, J., Schroeder, J., Sheeran, P., Van Bavel, J., Willer, R., & Gray, K. (2022). Interventions to reduce partisan animosity. Nature Human Behavior, 6, 1194-1205. [Nature Link]
Short Summary: This paper reviews interventions designed to reduce partisan animosity (i.e., negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward a political outgroup). It introduces the TRI framework (Thoughts - correcting misconceptions and highlighting commonalities; Relationships - building dialogue skills and fostering positive contact; Institutions - changing public discourse and transforming political structures).
Epley, N., Kardas, M., Zhao, X., Atir, S., & Schroeder, J. (2022). Undersociality: Miscalibrated social cognition can inhibit social connection. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26, 406-418. [Article link]
Short Summary: This paper proposes that people are less social than is optimal for their own and others’ well-being (i.e., “undersocial”). It reviews the empirical literature demonstrating that people are undersocial and suggests 3 reasons for why people are undersocial.
Awad, E., Levine, S., Anderson, M., Anderson, S. L., Conitzer, V., Crockett, M. J., Everett, J. A. C., Evgeniou, T., Gopnik, A., Jamison, J. C., Kin, T. W., Liao, S. M., Lin, P., Meyer, M. N., Mikhail, J., Opoku-Agyemang, K., Schaich Borg, J., Schroeder, J., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Slavkovik, M., & Tennenbaum, J. B. (2022). Computational ethics. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5, 388-405. [Article link]
Short Summary: This paper proposes a framework – computational ethics – that specifies how the ethical challenges of AI can be addressed better by incorporating the study of how humans make moral decisions.
Lieberman, A., Schroeder, J., & Amir, O. (2022). A voice inside my head: The psychological and behavioral consequences of auditory technologies. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 170, 104133. [Science Direct Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that listening to a message using headphones, compared to using speakers, increases a listener's felt closeness to the communicator(s) of the message because headphones localize sound inside a listener’s head (5 experiments).
Abi-Esber, N., Abel, J. E., Schroeder, J., & Gino, F. (2022). “Just letting you know...” Underestimating others’ desire for constructive feedback. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123, 1362–1385. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that people tend to underestimate how much others want to receive constructive feedback (5 studies). This helps to provide one possible reason why people sometimes avoid giving feedback to others even when the feedback would help fix a problem immediately.
Martin, S. R., Harrison, S. H., Hoopes, C., Schroeder, J., & Belmi, P. R. (2022). Talking shop: An exploration of how talking about work affects our initial interactions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 168. [Science Direct Link]
Short Summary: This paper explores the linguistic cues that distinguish conversations about work topics from conversations about non-work topics and how those differences affect conversation partners (1 field experiment and 1 lab experiment).
Stein, D. H., Schroeder, J., Hobson, N. M., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2022). When alterations are violations: Moral outrage and punishment in response to (even minor) alterations to rituals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123, 123–153. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper documents the sacrosanct nature of rituals: Because group rituals symbolize sacred group values, even minor alterations to them provoke moral outrage and punishment. We find that the more that ingroup members believe their rituals symbolize their sacred group values, the more they protect their rituals— by punishing those who violate them (7 primary studies, 3 supplemental studies).
Kardas, M., Schroeder, J., & O'Brien, E. (2022). Keep talking: (Mis)understanding the hedonic trajectory of conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123, 717–740. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that people misunderstand the hedonic trajectory of conversation. They expect their enjoyment to decline as a conversation continues but instead experience stable or increasing enjoyment in reality (5 experiments).
Schroeder, J., Lyons, D., & Epley, N. (2021). Hello, stranger? Pleasant conversations are preceded by concerns about starting one. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(5), 1141–1153. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper suggests a reason for why people may avoid even potentially pleasant conversations with strangers: they expect starting the conversation to be relatively unpleasant (2 field experiments).
Kim, T., Sezer, O., Schroeder, J., Risen, J., Gino, F., & Norton, M.I. (2021). Work group rituals enhance the meaning of work. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 165, 197-212. [Science Direct Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows groups that perform more ritualistic behaviors together can feel their group work is more meaningful, which is associated with more organizational citizenship behaviors (5 studies).
Schroeder, J. (2021). Ending conversation is a fraught endeavor. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(7), 552-553. [Cell Press Link]
Short Summary: This is a commentary discussing the provocative conclusion from Mastroianni et al. (2021) that “conversations rarely end when people want them to end.”
Stein, D. H., Hobson, N. M., & Schroeder, J. (2021). A sacred commitment: How rituals promote group survival. Current Opinion in Psychology, 40, 114-120. [Science Direct Link]
Short Summary: This paper proposes that rituals enhance religious group survival not only by signaling external commitment but also by fostering internal commitment toward the group in three ways: (1) enhancing belief in the group’s values (‘committed cognition’), (2) increasing the desire to maintain membership in the group (‘committed affect’), and (3) increasing contributions to the welfare of the group (‘committed behavior’).
Belmi, P., & Schroeder, J. (2021). Human “resources”? Objectification at work. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120, 384-417. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that people engage in more objectification—treating people akin to objects—in work contexts than in non-work contexts because people engage in more calculative and strategic thinking at work (7 studies).
Listen to Dr. Peter Belmi talk about this research and its implications here →
White, S., Schroeder, J., & Risen, J. L. (2021). When “enemies” become close: Relationship formation among Palestinians and Jewish Israelis at a youth camp. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121, 76-94. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper uses 7 years of data from Jewish Israeli and Palestinian teenagers attending a three-week summer camp (Seeds of Peace) to show that propinquity (here, being quasi-randomly assigned to share an activity group together) increases the formation of outgroup relationships more than ingroup relationships (1 longitudinal field study). Thus, at least in this setting, propinquity counteracted homophily.
Note regarding data: Due to confidentiality concerns from the Institutional Review Board, we cannot publicly post data. Interested researchers can contact jschroeder@berkeley.edu directly to learn more about the data, and to submit a joint IRB protocol for access to the data.
Habbert, R., & Schroeder, J. (2020). To build efficacy, eat the frog first: People misunderstand how the difficulty-ordering of tasks influences efficacy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 91, 104032. [Science Direct Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that completing tasks in increasing-easiness order builds efficacy more than increasing-difficulty (or randomized) order, but people prefer to complete tasks in the opposing order in part because they inaccurately believe that doing so will enhance their efficacy (7 experiments).