Alexandra Sedlovskaya

• PhD, Yale University
• Harvard University

How does being motivated to avoid infectious disease affect the kinds of products people value and buy? Using population-level and experimental data, six studies converge to indicate that infectious disease cues can negatively impact evaluation of secondhand, but not new, products. Studies 1–2 demonstrate that used merchandise retailer revenues are...

This article addresses two fundamental questions about flexible scheduling: Do managers use ascriptive information in deciding which requests for flexible work scheduling to grant among employees? And, do employees comprehend this managerial bias in deciding whether to ask for flexible work arrangements? Study 1 found that managers were most likely...

The present studies are the first in which social psychological methods were used to test the popular claim that the experience of concealing a stigmatized social identity leads to a "divided self." For people with concealable stigmas, concealment in public settings makes the public-private dimension of self-expression particularly salient, leading...

Contemporary interpersonal biases are partially derived from psychological mechanisms that evolved to protect people against the threat of contagious disease. This behavioral immune system effectively promotes disease avoidance but also results in an overgeneralized prejudice toward people who are not legitimate carriers of disease. In three studie...

This study examined the retirement financial planning of gay and bisexual men. Unlike heterosexual adults, gay and bisexual men must consider the costs and benefits of disclosing sexual identity in the workplace. Concealing sexual identity tends to diminish the appeal of the workplace and thus may increase motivation to plan for life beyond work. A...

Previous research has demonstrated that directly challenging people's beliefs about immigrants may result in even stronger anti-immigration attitudes, especially among those higher in social dominance orientation (SDO). In addition, inducing the perception that immigrants are part of a larger ingroup does not modify immigration attitudes. In three...

People have been shown to delay decision making to wait for missing noninstrumental attribute information --- information that would not have altered their decision if known at the outset --- with this delay originally attributed to uncertainty obscuring one's true preference (Bastardi \& Shafir, 1998). To test this account, relative to an alternat...