The reputational and ethical consequences of deceptive chatbot use.

The use of chatbots is becoming widespread as they offer significant economic opportunities. At the same time, however, customers seem to prefer interacting with human operators when making inquiries and as a result are not as cooperative with chatbots when their use is known. This specific situation creates an incentive for organizations to use chatbots without disclosing this to customers. Will this deceptive practice harm the reputation of the organization, and the employees who work for them? Across four experimental studies, we demonstrate that prospective customers, who interact with an organization using chatbots, perceive the organization to be less ethical if the organization does not disclose the information about the chatbot to their customers (Study 1). Moreover, employees that work for an organization which requires them to facilitate the deceptive use of a chatbot exhibit greater turnover intentions (Study 2) and receive worse job opportunities from recruiters in both a hypothetical experimental setting (Study 3) and from professional job recruiters in the field (Study 4). These results highlight that using chatbots deceptively has far reaching negative effects, which begin with the organization and ultimately impact their customers and the employees that work for them.

How AI tools can-and cannot-help organizations become more ethical.

In this paper, we argue that we cannot expect that AI systems-even given more data or better computational resources-will be more ethical than the humans who develop, deploy and use them. As such, we advocate that it is necessary to retain the responsibility for ethical decision-making in human hands. In reality, however, human decision-makers currently do not have the ethical maturity to meaningfully take on this responsibility. So, what to do? We develop the argument that to broaden and strengthen the ethical upskilling of our organizations and leaders, AI has a crucial role to play. Specifically, because AI is a mirror that reflects our biases and moral flaws back to us, decision-makers should look carefully into this mirror-taking advantage of the opportunities brought about by its scale, interpretability, and counterfactual modeling-to gain a deep understanding of the psychological underpinnings of our (un)ethical behaviors, and in turn, learn to consistently make ethical decisions. In discussing this proposal, we introduce a new collaborative paradigm between humans and AI that can help ethically upskill our organizations and leaders and thereby prepare them to responsibly navigate the impending digital future.

No person is an island: Unpacking the work and after-work consequences of interacting with artificial intelligence.

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has arrived, as AI systems are increasingly being integrated across organizational functions into the work lives of employees. This coupling of employees and machines fundamentally alters the work-related interactions to which employees are accustomed, as employees find themselves increasingly interacting with, and relying on, AI systems instead of human coworkers. This increased coupling of employees and AI portends a shift toward more of an "asocial system," wherein people may feel socially disconnected at work. Drawing upon the social affiliation model, we develop a model delineating both adaptive and maladaptive consequences of this situation. Specifically, we theorize that the more employees interact with AI in the pursuit of work goals, the more they experience a need for social affiliation (adaptive)-which may contribute to more helping behavior toward coworkers at work-as well as a feeling of loneliness (maladaptive), which then further impair employee well-being after work (i.e., more insomnia and alcohol consumption). In addition, we submit that these effects should be especially pronounced among employees with higher levels of attachment anxiety. Results across four studies (N = 794) with mixed methodologies (i.e., survey study, field experiment, and simulation study; Studies 1-4) with employees from four different regions (i.e., Taiwan, Indonesia, United States, and Malaysia) generally support our hypotheses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The impact of leader depletion on leader performance: the mediating role of leaders' trust beliefs and employees' citizenship behaviors.

The leadership role can be demanding and depleting. Using self-regulation and social exchange theory as a framework, we developed a three-step sequential mediation model that explains how feelings of depletion can degrade leaders' own performance level, via the reciprocating behavior of their employees. Specifically, we hypothesized that leader depletion is negatively related to their trust beliefs. This lack of trust is expected to be reciprocated by employees in such a way that they display less citizenship behaviors towards their leader. These lowered citizenship behaviors are, in turn, predicted to negatively impact leader performance. Additionally, we hypothesized that these negative effects of feeling depleted are more pronounced for leaders who believe that their willpower is limited. Studies 1 and 2 illustrated that leader depletion indirectly influences their own performance level through leaders' trust beliefs and employees' leader-directed citizenship behaviors. Study 3 extended these findings from the inter-individual to the intra-individual level, and demonstrated the predicted moderating role of belief in limited willpower. Together, our studies provide new and useful insights in the broader, more distal implications of leader depletion, which have not yet been considered in existing self-regulation models.

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Punishment and Forgiveness in Organizational Contexts.

Punishment and forgiveness are two very different responses to a moral transgression that both have been argued to restore perceptions of moral order within an organization. Unfortunately, it is currently unclear what motivates organizational actors to punish or forgive a norm transgressor. We build on social cognitive theory to argue that punishment and forgiveness of a transgressor are both rooted in self-regulatory processes. Specifically, we argue that organizational actors are more likely to respond to intentional transgressions with punishment, and to unintentional transgressions with forgiveness. However, these effects of transgressor intentionality should be found in particular among actors for whom moral identity is central (vs. peripheral). We find support for these predictions in a laboratory experiment and a field study among organizational leaders. By simultaneously studying punishment and forgiveness in organizational settings, we provide crucial insight in their shared motivational bases, as well as into important differences between the two.

Using robots at work during the COVID-19 crisis evokes passion decay: Evidence from field and experimental studies.

The growing trend of introducing robots into employees' work lives has become increasingly salient during the global COVID-19 pandemic. In light of this pandemic, it is likely that organisational decision-makers are seeing value in coupling employees with robots for both efficiency- and health-related reasons. An unintended consequence of this coupling, however, may be an increased level of work routinisation and standardisation. We draw primarily from the model of passion decay from the relationship and clinical psychology literature to develop theory and test a model arguing that passion decays as employees increasingly interact with robots for their work activities. We demonstrate that this passion decay leads to an increase of withdrawal behaviour from both the domains of work and family. Drawing further from the model of passion decay, we reveal that employees higher in openness to experience are less likely to suffer from passion decay upon more frequent interactions with robots in the course of work. Across a multi-source, multi-wave field study conducted in Hong Kong (Study 1) and a simulation-based experiment conducted in the United States (Study 2), our hypotheses received support. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The road to a human-centred digital society: opportunities, challenges and responsibilities for humans in the age of machines.

The growing adoption of intelligent technologies has brought us to a crossroad. The creators of intelligent technologies are acquiring the power to influence a wide variety of outcomes that are important to human end-users. In doing so, those same intelligent technologies are being used to undermine and even actively harm the interests of those same end-users. In the absence of a recalibration, we are almost certainly headed down a path wherein intelligent technologies will primarily serve the interests of developers and owners of technology rather than humankind at large. In an attempt to push for such a recalibration, we present parallels between the 2008 financial crisis and the current state of affairs. Following which, we present a list of recommendations and implications to be used when in the pursuit of creating responsible and human-centred AI.

Robots at work: People prefer-and forgive-service robots with perceived feelings.

Organizations are increasingly relying on service robots to improve efficiency, but these robots often make mistakes, which can aggravate customers and negatively affect organizations. How can organizations mitigate the frontline impact of these robotic blunders? Drawing from theories of anthropomorphism and mind perception, we propose that people evaluate service robots more positively when they are anthropomorphized and seem more humanlike-capable of both agency (the ability to think) and experience (the ability to feel). We further propose that in the face of robot service failures, increased perceptions of experience should attenuate the negative effects of service failures, whereas increased perceptions of agency should amplify the negative effects of service failures on customer satisfaction. In a field study conducted in the world's first robot-staffed hotel (Study 1), we find that anthropomorphism generally leads to higher customer satisfaction and that perceived experience, but not agency, mediates this effect. Perceived experience (but not agency) also interacts with robot service failures to predict customer satisfaction such that high levels of perceived experience attenuate the negative impacts of service failures on customer satisfaction. We replicate these results in a lab experiment with a service robot (Study 2). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Coping with noise in social dilemmas: Group representatives fare worse than individuals because they lack trust in others' benign intentions.

Research on interindividual-intergroup discontinuity has illuminated distinct patterns of cognition, motivation, and behavior in interindividual versus intergroup contexts. However, it has examined these processes in laboratory environments with perfect transparency, whereas real-life interactions are often characterized by noise (i.e., misperceptions and unintended errors). This research compared interindividual and intergroup interactions in the presence or absence of noise. In a laboratory experiment, participants played 35 rounds of a dyadic give-some dilemma, in which they acted as individuals or group representatives. Noise was manipulated, such that players' intentions either were perfectly translated into behavior or could deviate from their intentions in certain rounds (resulting in less cooperative behavior). Noise was more detrimental to cooperation in intergroup contexts than in interindividual contexts, because (a) participants who formed benign impressions of the other player coped better with noise, and (b) participants were less likely to form such benign impressions in intergroup than interindividual interactions.

So Gross and Yet so Far Away: Psychological Distance Moderates the Effect of Disgust on Moral Judgment.

People morally evaluate norm violations that occur at various distances from the self (e.g., a corrupt politician vs. a cheating spouse). Yet, distance is rarely studied as a moderator of moral judgment processes. We focus on the influence of disgust on moral judgments, as evidence here has remained inconclusive. Based on feelings as information theory and the notion that disgust evolved as a pathogen avoidance mechanism, we argue that disgust influences moral judgment of psychologically distant (vs. near) norm violations. Studies 1 and 3 show that trait disgust sensitivity (but not trait anger and fear) more strongly predicts moral judgment of distant than near violations. Studies 2 and 4 show that incidental disgust affects moral judgment of distant (vs. near) violations and that the moderating role of distance is mediated by involvement of others (vs. the self) in the evaluator's conceptualization of the violation.

The trickle-down effects of perceived trustworthiness on subordinate performance.

We study when and why perceptions of trustworthiness trickle down the organizational hierarchy to influence the performance of subordinates. Building on social learning theory, we argue that when supervisors perceive their managers as trustworthy, subordinates are more likely to also perceive their supervisor as trustworthy, which in turn enhances subordinate performance. We further argue that this trickle-down effect of trustworthiness perceptions emerges especially when the manager invites the supervisor to participate in decision-making. Finally, we propose that social learning processes that lead to supervisors exhibiting more trusting behavior toward their subordinates mediate this trickle-down effect. We find support for our predictions across one multisource field study (Study 1) and two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) that both use a yoked design. This research represents the first attempt to examine trickle-down effects related to trustworthiness, its impact on performance, and the mediating mechanisms by which those effects emerge. This research also provides the first empirical evidence about the role that social learning processes play in explaining trickle-down processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Can education change the world? Education amplifies differences in liberalization values and innovation between developed and developing countries.

The present study investigated the relationship between level of education and liberalization values in large, representative samples administered in 96 countries around the world (total N = 139,991). These countries show meaningful variation in terms of the Human Development Index (HDI), ranging from very poor, developing countries to prosperous, developed countries. We found evidence of cross-level interactions, consistently showing that individuals' level of education was associated with an increase in their liberalization values in higher HDI societies, whereas this relationship was curbed in lower HDI countries. This enhanced liberalization mindset of individuals in high HDI countries, in turn, was related to better scores on national indices of innovation. We conclude that this 'education amplification effect' widens the gap between lower and higher HDI countries in terms of liberalized mentality and economic growth potential. Policy implications for how low HDI countries can counter this gap are discussed.

Ranking low, feeling high: How hierarchical position and experienced power promote prosocial behavior in response to procedural justice.

Research shows that power can lead to prosocial behavior by facilitating the behavioral expression of dispositional prosocial motivation. However, it is not clear how power may facilitate responses to contextual factors that promote prosocial motivation. Integrating fairness heuristic theory and the situated focus theory of power, we argue that in particular, organization members in lower (vs. higher) hierarchical positions who simultaneously experience a high (vs. low) sense of power respond with prosocial behavior to 1 important antecedent of prosocial motivation, that is, the enactment of procedural justice. The results from a multisource survey among employees and their leaders from various organizations (Study 1) and an experiment using a public goods dilemma (Study 2) support this prediction. Three subsequent experiments (Studies 3-5) show that this effect is mediated by perceptions of authority trustworthiness. Taken together, this research (a) helps resolve the debate regarding whether power promotes or undermines prosocial behavior, (b) demonstrates that hierarchical position and the sense of power can have very different effects on processes that are vital to the functioning of an organization, and (c) helps solve ambiguity regarding the roles of hierarchical position and power in fairness heuristic theory. (PsycINFO Database Record

Motivated reasoning during recruitment.

This research shows how job postings can lead job candidates to see themselves as particularly deserving of hiring and high salary. We propose that these entitlement beliefs entail both personal motivations to see oneself as deserving and the ability to justify those motivated judgments. Accordingly, we predict that people feel more deserving when qualifications for a job are vague and thus amenable to motivated reasoning, whereby people use information selectively to reach a desired conclusion. We tested this hypothesis with a 2-phase experiment (N = 892) using materials drawn from real online job postings. In the first phase of the experiment, participants believed themselves to be more deserving of hiring and deserving of higher pay after reading postings composed of vaguer types of qualifications. In the second phase, yoked observers believed that participants were less entitled overall, but did not selectively discount endorsement of vaguer qualifications, suggesting they were unaware of this effect. A follow-up preregistered experiment (N = 905) using postings with mixed qualification types replicated the effect of including more vague qualifications on participants' entitlement beliefs. Entitlement beliefs are widely seen as problematic for recruitment and retention, and these results suggest that reducing the inclusion of vague qualifications in job postings would dampen the emergence of these beliefs in applicants, albeit at the cost of decreasing application rates and lowering applicants' confidence. (PsycINFO Database Record

Understanding the positive effect of financial compensation on trust after norm violations: Evidence from fMRI in favor of forgiveness.

Norm violations are ubiquitous in organizations and often result in tangible harm and a loss of trust. One possible response to enhance trust involves the provision of financial compensation. Unfortunately, little is known about the processes that underlie the effect of such a tangible response to increase trust. We employed techniques in cognitive neuroscience (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to examine these processes. Participants placed in the scanner played the role of recipient in a series of dictator games with different allocators who (unknown to them) were preprogrammed. An unequal division of resources was used as a norm violation that resulted in a financial loss. Afterward the inflicted harm was restored through equal financial compensation. Our neuroimaging data indicate that financial compensation activates forgiveness-related brain areas and that this activation mediates the positive effect of financial compensation on trust. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of using tangible responses to increase trust in organizational settings. (PsycINFO Database Record

When the Heat Is On: The Effect of Temperature on Voter Behavior in Presidential Elections.

Hot temperatures lead to heightened arousal. According to excitation transfer theory, arousal can increase both antisocial and prosocial behavior, depending on the context. Although many studies have shown that hot temperatures can increase antisocial behavior, very few studies have investigated the relationship between temperature and prosocial behavior. One important prosocial behavior is voting. We analyzed state-level data from the United States presidential elections (N = 761). Consistent with excitation transfer theory, which proposes that heat-induced arousal can transfer to other activities and strengthen those activities, changes in temperature and voter turnout were positively related. Moreover, a positive change in temperature was related to a positive change in votes for the incumbent party. These findings add to the literature on the importance of non-ideological and non-rational factors that influence voting behavior.

Rejection in Bargaining Situations: An Event-Related Potential Study in Adolescents and Adults.

The neural correlates of rejection in bargaining situations when proposing a fair or unfair offer are not yet well understood. We measured neural responses to rejection and acceptance of monetary offers with event-related potentials (ERPs) in mid-adolescents (14-17 years) and early adults (19-24 years). Participants played multiple rounds of the Ultimatum Game as proposers, dividing coins between themselves and a second player (responder) by making a choice between an unfair distribution (7 coins for proposer and 3 for responder; 7/3) and one of two alternatives: a fair distribution (5/5) or a hyperfair distribution (3/7). Participants mostly made fair offers (5/5) when the alternative was unfair (7/3), but made mostly unfair offers (7/3) when the alternative was hyperfair (3/7). When participants' fair offers (5/5; alternative was 7/3) were rejected this was associated with a larger Medial Frontal Negativity (MFN) compared to acceptance of fair offers and rejection of unfair offers (7/3; alternative was 3/7). Also, the MFN was smaller after acceptance of unfair offers (7/3) compared to rejection. These neural responses did not differ between adults and mid-adolescents, suggesting that the MFN reacts as a neural alarm system to social prediction errors which is already prevalent during adolescence.

Out of control!? How loss of self-control influences prosocial behavior: the role of power and moral values.

Lack of self-control has been suggested to facilitate norm-transgressing behaviors because of the operation of automatic selfish impulses. Previous research, however, has shown that people having a high moral identity may not show such selfish impulses when their self-control resources are depleted. In the present research, we extended this effect to prosocial behavior. Moreover, we investigated the role of power in the interaction between moral identity and self-control depletion. More specifically, we expected that power facilitates the externalization of internal states, which implies that for people who feel powerful, rather than powerless, depletion decreases prosocial behavior especially for those low in moral identity. A laboratory experiment and a multisource field study supported our predictions. The present finding that the interaction between self-control depletion and moral identity is contingent upon people's level of power suggests that power may enable people to refrain from helping behavior. Moreover, the findings suggest that if organizations want to improve prosocial behaviors, it may be effective to situationally induce moral values in their employees.

Trust in decision-making authorities dictates the form of the interactive relationship between outcome fairness and procedural fairness.

Reactions to decisions are shaped by both outcome and procedural fairness. Moreover, outcome and procedural fairness interact to influence beliefs and behaviors. However, different types of "process/outcome" interaction effects have emerged. Many studies have shown that people react particularly negatively when they receive unfair or unfavorable outcomes accompanied by unfair procedures (the "low-low" interactive pattern). However, others find that people react especially positively when they receive fair or favorable outcomes accompanied by fair procedures (the "high-high" interactive pattern). We propose that trust in decision-making authorities dictates the form of the process/outcome interaction. Across three studies, when trust was high, the "low-low" interactive pattern emerged. When trust was low, the "high-high" interactive pattern emerged. The findings suggest that when people's experience of outcome and procedural fairness diverged from how they expected to be treated, they reacted in the direction of their experiences; otherwise, their reactions were consistent with their expectations.