Asking for less (but receiving more): Women avoid impasses and outperform men when negotiators have weak alternatives.

Both research and conventional wisdom suggest that, due to their relational orientation, women are less likely than men to engage in agentic and assertive behaviors, leading them to underperform in zero-sum, distributive negotiations where one party's gain is equivalent to the other party's loss. However, past research tends to neglect the costs of reaching impasse by excluding impasses from measures of negotiation performance. Departing from this convention, we incorporate the economic costs of impasses into measures of negotiation performance to provide a more holistic examination of negotiation outcomes. In so doing, we reveal a reversal of the oft-cited male performance advantage when obtaining an impasse is especially economically costly (as is the case when negotiators have weak negotiation alternatives). Specifically, we predicted that female negotiators would make less assertive first offers than men due to their more relational orientation and that these gender differences in offer assertiveness should result in women avoiding impasse more often than men. Since avoiding impasses should improve negotiation performance when negotiators are able to obtain a deal that is more valuable than their negotiation alternative, women's tendency to avoid impasses should improve their performance when negotiators have weak (vs. strong) alternatives. These predictions were supported in eight studies (three preregistered) across various negotiation contexts, comprising data from the television show Shark Tank (Study 1), four incentive-compatible negotiation simulations (Studies 2 and 3, Supplemental Studies), and a multistudy causal experimental chain (Supplemental Studies 4a-c). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Tying the value of goals to social class.

Although everyone strives toward valued goals, we suggest that not everyone will be perceived as doing so equally. In this research, we examine the tendency to use social class as a cue to understand the importance of others' goals. Six studies find evidence of a goal-value bias: Observers perceive goals across a variety of domains as more valuable to higher class than to lower class individuals (Studies 1-6). These perceptions do not appear to reflect reality (pilot study), and those who are strongly motivated to justify inequality show the bias to a greater extent (Studies 5 and 6), suggesting a motivated pathway. We also explore implications of the bias, finding that Americans tend to offer better opportunities to, and prefer to collaborate with, higher class than lower class others, revealing discriminatory outcomes that are partially driven by perceived goal value (Studies 2, 3, 4, 6). Results suggest that Americans expect higher class individuals to value achieving goals more than their lower class counterparts, fueling increased support for those who are already ahead. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

"They're Everywhere!": Symbolically Threatening Groups Seem More Pervasive Than Nonthreatening Groups.

The meaning of places is socially constructed, often informed by the groups that seem pervasive there. For instance, the University of Pennsylvania is sometimes pejoratively called "Jew-niversity of Pennsylvania," and the city of Decatur, Georgia, is disparagingly nicknamed "Dyke-atur," connoting the respective pervasiveness of Jewish students and gay residents. Because these pervasiveness perceptions meaningfully impact how people navigate the social world, it is critical to understand the factors that influence their formation. Across surveys, experiments, and archival data, six studies (N = 3,039 American adults) revealed the role of symbolic threat (i.e., perceived differences in values and worldviews). Specifically, holding constant important features of the group and context, we demonstrated that groups higher in symbolic threat are perceived as more populous in a place and more associated with that place than groups lower in symbolic threat. Ultimately, this work reveals that symbolic threat can both distort how people understand their surroundings and shape the meaning of places.