Modeling Expert Opinions on Food Healthfulness: A Nutrition Metric

Research during the last several decades indicates the failure of existing nutritional labels to substantially improve the healthfulness of consumers\u27 food/beverage choices. The present study aims to fill this void by developing a nutrition metric that is more comprehensible to the average shopper. The healthfulness ratings of 205 sample foods/beverages by leading nutrition experts formed the basis for a linear regression that places weights on 12 nutritional components (ie, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, total carbohydrate, dietary fiber, sugars, protein, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, and iron) to predict the average healthfulness rating that experts would give to any food/beverage. Major benefits of the model include its basis in expert judgment, its straightforward application, the flexibility of transforming its output ratings to any linear scale, and its ease of interpretation. This metric serves the purpose of distilling expert knowledge into a form usable by consumers so that they are empowered to make more healthful decisions

Signing at the beginning versus at the end does not decrease dishonesty

Honest reporting is essential for society to function well. However, people frequently lie when asked to provide information, such as misrepresenting their income to save money on taxes. A landmark finding published in PNAS [L. L. Shu, N. Mazar, F. Gino, D. Ariely, M. H. Bazerman, *Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA.* 109, 15197–15200 (2012)] provided evidence for a simple way of encouraging honest reporting: asking people to sign a veracity statement at the beginning instead of at the end of a self-report form. Since this finding was published, various government agencies have adopted this practice. However, in this project, we failed to replicate this result. Across five conceptual replications (*n* = 4,559) and one highly powered, preregistered, direct replication (*n* = 1,235) conducted with the authors of the original paper, we observed no effect of signing first on honest reporting. Given the policy applications of this result, it is important to update the scientific record regarding the veracity of these results

If you’re going to do wrong, at least do it right: The surprising effect of considering two moral dilemmas at the same time

We study how people reconcile conflicting moral intuitions by juxtaposing two versions of classic moral problems: the trolley problem and the footbridge problem. When viewed separately, most people favor action in the former and disapprove of action in the latter, despite identical consequences. The difference is often explained in terms of the intention principle – whether the consequences are intended or incidental. Our results suggest that when the two problems are considered together, a different judgment emerges: participants reject the intention principle and embrace either the principle of utilitarianism, which favors action in both problems, or the action principle, which rejects action in both problems. In subsequent studies, we find that when required to choose between two harmful actions, people prefer the action that saves more lives, despite its being more aversive. Our findings shed light on the formation of moral judgment under normative conflict, the conditions for preference reversal, and the potential polarization of moral judgment under joint evaluation. Organizational implications are discussed

Celebrating the Work of Keith Murnighan

In this tribute, four scholars highlight research published during the career of 2015 International Association for Conflict Management Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Keith Murnighan. In the four sections of the paper, each scholar highlights one of Keith’s published papers and discusses the impact it had on them, as well as the field of organizational behavior more generally. The authors close by going beyond each article to identify common themes that emerge across the works

How Misconduct Spreads: Auditors’ Role in the Diffusion of Stock-option Backdating

This paper explores the role of professional experts in the diffusion of innovative practices that subvert the interests of stakeholders. I do so by studying the role of external auditors in the diffusion of stock-option backdating in the United States. Practices that are eventually accepted as misconduct may emerge as liminal practices, not categorized as misconduct until social control agents notice, scrutinize, and react to them. I examine how the role of external auditors in the diffusion of stock-option backdating changed as the practice shifted from liminality to being illegal and illegitimate. The findings suggest that professional experts involvement in the diffusion of liminal practices is highly responsive to the institutional environment. Initially, professional experts diffuse these practices via local networks. However, when the legal environment becomes more stringent, implying that the practice will become illegitimate, these offices reverse their role and extinguish the practice. The larger network remains largely uninvolved in both the diffusion, and extinguishment, of the liminal practice

Social Preferences and the Efficiency of Bilateral Exchange

Under what conditions do social preferences, such as altruism or a concern for fair outcomes, generate efficient trade? I analyze theoretically a simple bilateral exchange game: Each player sequentially takes an action that reduces his own material payoff but increases the other player’s. Each player’s preferences may depend on both his/her own material payoff and the other player’s. I identify necessary conditions and sufficient conditions on the players’ preferences for the outcome of their interaction to be Pareto efficient. The results have implications for interpreting the rotten kid theorem, gift exchange in the laboratory, and gift exchange in the field

15 years of protest and media technologies scholarship: A sociotechnical timeline

This article investigates the relationship between the invention of new media technologies and scholarship concerning protest and political engagement. Building on an innovative approach that moves beyond a systematic literature review, this article contributes to our understanding of scholarship concerning digital communication technologies and how they may have been adopted and shaped protest movements and political engagement. Based on visualizations, we draw a sociotechnical timeline of protest and media technology scholarship within three dimensions: technological development, methods and techniques, and the social phenomena under investigation. The article concludes by identifying major trends in protest and media technologies scholarship over the past 15 years. The sociotechnical timeline enhances our understanding of academic discourse at the intersection of protest and media technologies by highlighting shortcomings and potential for future research

Can auditors be independent? – Experimental evidence on the effects of client type

Recent regulatory initiatives stress that an independent oversight board, rather than the management board, should be the client of the auditor. In an experiment, we test whether the type of client affects auditors’ independence. Unique features of the German institutional setting enable us to realistically vary the type of auditors’ client as our treatment variable: we portray the client either as the management preferring aggressive accounting or the oversight board preferring conservative accounting. We measure auditors’ perceived client retention incentives and accountability pressure in a post-experiment questionnaire to capture potential threats to independence. We find that the type of auditors’ client affects auditors’ behaviour contingent on the degree of the perceived threats to independence. Our findings imply that both client retention incentives and accountability pressure represent distinctive threats to auditors’ independence and that the effectiveness of an oversight board in enhancing auditors’ independence depends on the underlying threat

Maintaining faith in agency under immutable constraints: Cognitive consequences of believing in negotiable fate

Negotiable fate refers to the idea that one can negotiate with fate for control, and that people can exercise personal agency within the limits that fate has determined. Research on negotiable fate has found greater prevalence of related beliefs in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe and English-speaking countries. The present research extends previous findings by exploring the cognitive consequences of the belief in negotiable fate. It was hypothesized that this belief enables individuals to maintain faith in the potency of their personal actions and to remain optimistic in their goal pursuits despite the immutable constraints. The belief in negotiable fate was predicted to (a) facilitate sense-making of surprising outcomes; (b) increase persistence in goal pursuits despite early unfavorable outcomes; and (c) increase risky choices when individuals have confidence in their luck. Using multiple methods (e.g., crosscultural comparisons, culture priming, experimental induction of fate beliefs), we found supporting evidence for our hypotheses in three studies. Furthermore, as expected, the cognitive effects of negotiable fate are observed only in cultural contexts where the fate belief is relatively prevalent. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the intersubjective approach to understanding the influence of culture on cognitive processes (e.g., Chiu, Gelfand, Yamagishi, Shteynberg, & Wan, 2010), the sociocultural foundations that foster the development of a belief in negotiable fate, and an alternative perspective for understanding the nature of agency in contexts where constraints are severe. Future research avenues are also discussed.Psychology, MultidisciplinarySSCI5ARTICLE6463-4744