Krishna Savani

• Nanyang Technological University

When interacting with others in unfamiliar sociocultural settings, people need to learn the norms guiding appropriate behavior. The present research investigates an individual difference that helps this kind of learning: stress reactivity. Interactions in an unfamiliar sociocultural setting are stressful, particularly when the actor fails to follow...

Although individuals of Latin American heritage ( Latin Americans in short) are considered interdependent, they also value traits like uniqueness and positivity, like individuals of European American cultural heritage, who are considered independent. It remains unclear whether this inclination toward positivity extends to a bias in self-perception...

This research examines the cultural generalizability of a well-established memory phenomenon, the part-list cuing impairment, in which people who receive a subset of a studied list as hints recall fewer items than those who do not. Extensive research conducted in North America and Europe has documented this impairment. Our investigation focused on...

Although individuals of Latin American heritage (Latin Americans in short) are considered interdependent, they also value traits like uniqueness and positivity, like individuals of European American cultural heritage, who are considered independent. It remains unclear whether this inclination toward positivity extends to a bias in self-perception k...

Although artificial intelligence and machine learning have been around for more than 70 years, their use in academia and industry has grown exponentially in the last decade.

This research investigates how formal versus informal supervisor support behaviours shape employees' affect‐ and cognition‐based trust across cultures of varying power distance. Using data from in‐depth interviews, Study 1 found that trust‐enhancing supervisor behaviours were more formal, status conscious and imposing in India (a high power distanc...

Evidence suggests that Latin Americans display elevated levels of emotional expressivity and positivity. Here, we tested whether Latin Americans possess a unique form of interdependence called expressive interdependence, characterized by the open expression of positive emotions related to social engagement (e.g., feelings of closeness to others). I...

Extensive research has documented organizational decision-makers’ preference for men over women when they evaluate and select candidates for leadership positions. We conceptualize a novel construct—mindsets about the universality of leadership potential—that can help reduce this bias. People can believe either that only some individuals have high l...

How should managers supervising multiple teams allocate bonuses—based on each team's size or based on each team's contribution? According to the commonly accepted equity norm for allocating rewards, managers should distribute bonuses based on the relative contributions of the team. In contrast, we propose that managers are instead distracted by the...

We present a case study of a black-box artificial intelligence-based COVID-19 detection product, GeNose C-19, developed by the Indonesian government. We find that explaining how GeNose works using functional analogies increases both Indonesian and American lay consumers’ trust in GeNose.

Despite the rapid adoption of technology in human resource departments, there is little empirical work that examines the potential challenges of algorithmic decision-making in the recruitment process. In this paper, we take the perspective of job applicants and examine how they perceive the use of algorithms in selection and recruitment. Across fou...

Cultural psychology-the research field focusing on the mutual constitution of culture and the mind-has made great strides by documenting robust cultural variations in how people think, feel, and act. The cumulative evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Westerners are independent, whereas those in the rest of the world are interdependent....

According to the theory of mutual constitution of culture and psyche, just as culture shapes people, individuals’ psychological states can influence culture. We build on compensatory control theory, which suggests that low personal control can lead people to prefer societal systems that impose order, to examine the mutual constitution of personal c...

Approximately 44% of U.S. workers are low-wage workers. Recent years have witnessed a raging debate about whether to raise their minimum wages. Why do some decision-makers support raising wages and others do not? Ten studies (four preregistered) examined people’s beliefs about the malleability of intelligence as a key antecedent. The more U.S. huma...

This research challenges the idea that teams from more collectivistic cultures tend to perform better. We propose that in contexts in which there are tradeoffs between group goals (i.e., what is best for the group) and relational goals (i.e., what is best for one’s relationships with specific group members), people in less collectivistic cultures p...

The tension between self-interest and the collective good is fundamental to human societies. We propose that the idea of choice is a key lever that nudges people to act in a self-interested manner because it leads people to value independence. Making one inconsequential choice at the beginning of an incentive-compatible lab experiment made people 4...

In the context of COVID-19 government-ordered lockdowns, more individualistic people might be less willing to leave their homes to protect their own health, or they might be more willing to go out to relieve their boredom. Using an Australian sample, a pilot study found that people’s lay theories were consistent with the latter possibility, that in...

Investors frequently rely on individual analysts’ stock price targets. Aggressive price targets often reflect analysts’ attempts to strategically influence investors. Therefore, investors’ welfare may be compromised if they take aggressive price targets at face value. In this study we examine conditions under which investors are more likely to infe...

High levels of income inequality can persist in society only if people accept the inequality as justified. To identify psychological predictors of people’s tendency to justify inequality, we retrained a pre-existing deep learning model to predict the extent to which World Values Survey respondents believed that income inequality is necessary. A fea...

Six experiments test whether people are sensitive to variations in the sample size or relatively insensitive to sample sizes varying by one or two orders of magnitude. We posit that past studies found that people are increasingly confident in the sample mean as the sample size increases because variations in the sample size were likely highlighted...

Implicit morality theories refer to people’s beliefs about whether individuals’ moral character is fixed or malleable. Drawing on the social cognitive theory of morality, we examine the relationship between employees’ implicit morality theories and their organizational citizenship behaviors toward coworkers (OCBC) and coworker-directed deviance (CD...

People are excessively confident that they can judge others’ characteristics from their appearance. This research identifies a novel antecedent of this phenomenon. Ten studies (N=2,967, four pre-registered) find that the more people believe that appearance reveals character, the more confident they are in their appearance-based judgments, and there...

Building on past research in risky decision making, the present research investigated whether the cancellation heuristic is evident in intertemporal choice. Specifically, the cancellation heuristic posits that whenever choice options are partitioned into multiple components, people ignore seemingly identical components and compare the non-identical...

How should I greet her? Should I do what he requests? Newcomers to a culture learn its interpersonal norms at varying rates, largely through trial-and-error experience. Given that the culturally correct response often depends on conditions that are subtle and complex, we propose that newcomers’ rate of acculturation depends on not only their explic...

This study examines people’s intention to get COVID-19 vaccines and some of the psychological factors, that can facilitate the vaccination process. Using the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a theoretical framework, we hypothesized that the key constructs of TPB (attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control) would explain people’...

What attitudes, values, and beliefs serve as key markers of cultural change? To answer this question, we examined 221,485 respondents from the World Values Survey, a multiwave cross-country survey of people's attitudes, values, and beliefs. We trained a machine learning model to classify respondents into seven waves (i.e., periods). Once trained, t...

What attitudes, values, and beliefs serve as key markers of cultural change? To answer this question, we examined 221,485 respondents from the World Values Survey, a multi-wave cross-country survey of people’s attitudes, values and beliefs. We trained a machine learning model to classify respondents into seven waves (i.e., periods). Once trained, t...

Significance These studies find that choice—an increasingly salient feature of many cultural contexts—is linked with an array of previously undocumented behavioral consequences. When people think of their actions as choices, they feel larger and stronger than others, are attracted to ideas of independence, and feel empowered to voice their opinions...

Theories in cultural psychology assume that emotions disrupt social harmony, and thus, emotion moderation is a hallmark of interdependence. However, this assumption is based exclusively on research on East Asians. Here, we tested the hypothesis that Latin Americans are as interdependent as East Asians and more so than European Americans. However, L...

How can we nudge people to not engage in unethical behaviors, such as hoarding and violating social-distancing guidelines, during the COVID-19 pandemic? Because past research on antecedents of unethical behavior has not provided a clear answer, we turned to machine learning to generate novel hypotheses. We trained a deep-learning model to predict w...

Purpose This paper aims to examine gender gaps in work-related outcomes in the context of Covid-19. The authors hypothesized that the Covid-19 pandemic would create a gender gap in perceived work productivity and job satisfaction. This is because when couples are working from home the whole day and when schools are closed, women are expected to dev...

Scholars have long debated the function of free will beliefs—whether free will beliefs exist ‎primarily to stimulate prosociality, enforce societal rules, or to help individuals pursue their ‎own goals. There are findings consistent with each of these views, as researchers have found ‎that the more people endorse free will beliefs, the more likely...

When employers make hiring decisions, they often pass over highly qualified candidates belonging to minority groups. This research identified a choice-architecture intervention to nudge people to select more diverse candidates. Partitioning job candidates by gender (Study 1), nationality (Study 2), or university (Study 3) led people to choose more...

[This corrects the article on p. 2354 in vol. 10, PMID: 31780977.].

The proliferation of products and services, together with the rise of social media, affords people the opportunity to make more choices than ever before. We suggest here that the requirement to think in terms of choice, or to use a choice mindset, has an array of powerful but unexamined consequences for judgment and decision making in general and a...

Is cultural knowledge unique to a culture and inaccessible to other cultures, or is it a tool that can be recruited by individuals outside of that culture when the situation renders it relevant? As one test of this idea, we explored whether the applicability and benefits of a lay belief that originated from Chinese collective wisdom extends beyond...

Drawing on self-determination theory, this research investigates whether the motivation behind employees’ helping behaviors is associated with their positive affect and their subsequent help provision, and whether citizenship pressure moderates these relationships. A recall-based experiment and an experience-sampling study capturing helping episode...

We investigated the role of metacognition in the process by which people learn new cultural norms from experiential feedback. In a lab paradigm, participants received many trials of simulated interpersonal situations in a new culture, each of which required them to make a choice, and then provided them with evaluative feedback about the accuracy of...

When it comes to infrastructure investment, Asia is the destination of choice for top luxury conglomerates such as LVMH, Richemont, and Kering. Any why not, the strong growth in high income households across Asian cities in the next 15 years translates into a hugely lucrative long term opportunity (Finews, 2016). Japan has been a consistent luxury...

Extensive research has shown that when a social identity is made salient, people tend to embrace positive identities (e.g., being a voter) and shy away from negative identities (e.g., being a cheater). The present research proposes that this effect of identity salience could be reversed for identities that cannot be attained or rejected by engaging...

In Western theories of motivation, autonomy is conceived as a universal motivator of human action; enhancing autonomy is expected to increase motivation panculturally. Using a novel online experimental paradigm that afforded a behavioral measure of motivation, we found that, contrary to this prevailing view, autonomy cues affect motivation differen...

The current research examines the conditions under which cross-cultural teams can realize their creative potential—a consequence of their cultural diversity. We propose that in more culturally diverse teams, team members are less open when communicating with each other, which impairs the team's ability to elaborate on the information contributed by...

This research examines an element of choice architecture that has received little attention—whether options are presented simultaneously or sequentially. Participants were more likely to choose dominating options when the options were presented simultaneously rather than sequentially, both when the dominance relationship was transparent (Experiment...

The present research tested two competing hypotheses: (1) as money cues activate an exchange orientation to social relations, money cues harm prosocial responses in communal and collectivistic settings; (2) as money can be used to help close others, money cues increase helping in communal or collectivistic settings. In a culture, characterized by s...

The fields of judgment and decision making (JDM) and cultural psychology have not seen much overlap, but recent research at the intersection of culture and JDM has provided new insights for both fields. This chapter reviews recent advances, with a focus on how studying cultural variations in JDM has yielded novel perspectives on basic psychological...

Given the paucity of research on poaching (hiring employees who are already employed by another, sometimes competitor, company) in India, this study used an experimental design with data from 164 Indian managers and professionals working in a variety of industries, to examine their perceptions of employees who are poached, of companies who engage i...

Four experiments investigate the effect of choosing among simultaneously (versus sequentially) presented options. Findings suggest that people are more likely to choose the normatively best option when they view the options simultaneously. Mediation analysis reveals that greater deliberation, when considering options simultaneously, may be a possib...

People view the same decision as better when it is followed by a positive outcome than by a negative outcome, a phenomenon called the outcome bias. Based on the idea that a key cause of the outcome bias is people’s failure to appreciate that outcomes are in part determined by external forces, three studies tested a novel method to reduce the outcom...

Organizational researchers have investigated the relationship between cultural values and diverse outcomes at the level of individuals, firms, and nations. Yet we know much less about the processes through which cultural values influence nationally diverse work teams. This symposium contributes to the second generation of research on national cultu...

Implicit theories refer to people’s beliefs about whether a given characteristic (e.g., intelligence, leadership ability) is fixed and stable or can be developed. Although a wealth of research in psychology has demonstrated the importance implicit theories on people’s motivation and behavior, little research has applied this theoretical framework i...

Learning requires acquiring and using knowledge. How do individuals acquire knowledge of another culture? How do they use this knowledge in order to operate proficiently in a new cultural setting? What kinds of training would foster intercultural learning? These questions have been addressed in many literatures of applied and basic research, featur...

This symposium showcases new research on particular types of inequality that are most relevant for organizations—inequality in employees’ wages, benefits, and hiring—to answer the questions: how much wage inequality is acceptable (Paper 1), what exacerbates vs. undermines people’s acceptance of wage inequality (Papers 2-4) , and how can low-wage wo...

With globalization, cross-cultural competence is increasingly important to effective policies in international relations, business, and even in our schools and communities. Can we assess the skills and attributes relevant to gaining proficiency in other cultures? What kinds of training can help people toward this goal? Evidence on the assessment qu...

An implicit premise in the Western worldview is that individuals’ behaviors arise primarily from their personal values and goals; this conceptual individualism may have seeped into management research, a predominantly Western cultural product, and may have blinded us to some of the ways in which social norms shape employees’ behavior. In the presen...

This study proposes a dynamic reparatory model of voluntary work behavior. We test the hypothesis that when people are made aware of their high level of negative behavior at work (i.e., counterproductive work behavior) and are informed that their behavior is counternormative and undesirable, the knowledge that they violated social norms induces gui...

Individuals can negotiate with fate for control through exercising personal agency within the limits that fate has determined, a belief that is referred to as negotiable fate. The current study examined: (a) the social ecological factors that contribute to the prevalence of this belief in negotiable fate and; (b) the psychological functions it serv...

Wealth inequality has significant psychological, physiological, societal, and economic costs. In six experiments, we investigated how seemingly innocuous, culturally pervasive ideas can help maintain and further wealth inequality. Specifically, we tested whether the concept of choice, which is deeply valued in American society, leads Americans to a...

Online communities enable people to easily connect and share knowledge across geographies. Mobile phones can enable billions of new users in emerging countries to participate in these online communities. In India, where social hierarchy is important, users may over-value institutionally-recognized authorities relative to peer-sourced content. We te...

Analytic visual processing and holistic visual processing have been conceptualized in terms of attention to focal objects vs. the background. We expand the study of perceptual biases associated with these attentional patterns using the multiple object tracking task, which measures people's ability to track multiple moving target objects amidst othe...

This paper tests whether people can exercise self-control in limiting consumption of unwanted food and whether they can pre-empt their future lack of self-control by restricting the availability of food. An experiment was conducted with Stanford University undergraduates over a period of 7 weeks in which some participants were given a fixed number...