Maia J. Young

• University of California, Los Angeles

Prior research has asserted that emotions affect anchoring bias in decision making through the emotion's certainty appraisal or through the emotion's action tendencies, but these prior studies investigate the role of each component—appraisal or action tendency—without accounting for potential effects of the other one. The current research investiga...

The current research investigates the effect of incidental anger on anchoring bias. We hypothesized that feeling angry will make people less influenced by other‐provided anchors because of the moving against action tendency associated with anger. That is, individuals in an angry state will be likely to perceive a given anchor as a viable target for...

Prior research has shown that Japanese blame organizational leaders more harshly than Americans: Americans blame organizational leaders based on the behavior of individual leaders, whereas Japanese blame leaders based both on the behavior of individual leaders and that of the organization. This finding can be explained by a cultural difference in c...

A large body of research has focused on how people exchange and use information during the negotiation process. This work tends to treat information as if it all were readily available upon request. The current research investigated how delays in the pursuit of missing information can influence people’s ex-ante priorities and the final settlements...

This research investigates a class of everyday inferences called quasi-magical explanations, which rest on the notion that imperceptible forces produce effects, as opposed to quasi-scientific explanations that are grounded in physical reality. I argue that quasi-magical explanations are likely to occur when an outcome is inexplicable in mechanistic...

Successful businesspeople are often attributed somewhat mystical talents, such as the ability to mesmerize an audience or envision the future. We suggest that this mystique – the way some managers are perceived by observers – arises from the intuitive logic that psychologists and anthropologists call magical thinking. Consistent with this account,...

The current research explored the effect of anger on hypothesis confirmation-the propensity to seek information that confirms rather than disconfirms one's opinion. We argued that the moving against action tendency associated with anger leads angry individuals to seek out more disconfirming information than sad individuals, attenuating the confirma...

Two studies examined how discrete emotions influence escalation of commitment. Study 1 demonstrated that anger was associated with more escalation of commitment than fear in a personnel hiring-appraisal context. In addition, it revealed the mediating effect of risk perception; angry compared to fearful individuals perceived lower risk in their init...

The current work explores the role of distinct negative emotions (anger and fear) on the propensity to negotiate. In particular, we were interested in whether emotions could alleviate the 'women don't ask' phenomenon (Babcock, Laschever, Gelfand, & Small, 2003). In a laboratory experiment, participants completed a performance task followed by an em...

The current studies investigate whether different forms of fatalistic thinking follow from the Christian and Hindu cosmologies. We found that fatalistic interpretations of one’s own life events center on deity influence for Christians, especially for those high in religiosity; however, Hindu interpretations of one’s own life emphasized destiny as m...

The current research explores the effect of anger on hypothesis confirmation — the propensity to seek information that confirms rather than disconfirms one’s opinion. We argue that the moving against action tendency associated with anger leads angry individuals to seek out disconfirming evidence, attenuating the confirmation bias. We test this hypo...

The current work seeks to understand the relationship between luck beliefs and achievement motivation. We hypothesized and found evidence that belief in stable rather than fleeting luck positively relates to achievement motivation (Study 1). Furthermore, belief in stable luck affects achievement motivation via personal agency beliefs (Study 2). The...

In 6 studies, the authors examined the perception of dominance complementarity, which is the perception of a target as different from the self in terms of dominance. The authors argue that these perceptions are motivated by the desire for positive task relationships. Because dominance complementarity bodes well for task-oriented relationships, seei...

We investigated two types of metaphors in stock market commentary. Agent metaphors describe price trajectories as volitional actions, whereas object metaphors describe them as movements of inanimate objects. Study 1 examined the consequences of commentators’ metaphors for their investor audience. Agent metaphors, compared with object metaphors and...

Results from two groups of biculturals (Hong Kong undergraduates. Chinese Americans) and a group of European Americans in two studies showed that in the presence of applicable cues of a culture, individuals with expert knowledge in the culture spontaneously make inferences about the culturees moral values, producing a Stroop-like effect. Although b...

The current research investigates whether observers blame leaders for organizational accidents even when these managers are known to be causally uninvolved. Past research finds that the public blames managers for organizational harm if the managers are perceived to have personally played a causal role. The present research argues that East Asian pe...

In a choice between two options, decision makers can often be roughly divided into three groups: those who strongly prefer the first option, those who strongly prefer the second option, and those whose choices are most sensitive to the specific conditions (Switchers). In any reference state, such as the experimental control, Switchers’ choices are...

This chapter takes the approach of cultural psychology in distinguishing patterns of beliefs, judgments, and decisions that reflect the shared mental models of cultural groups. We argue that cultural models are essential to understanding the ways in which people construct and sustain a view of existence as orderly and meaningful. We describe resear...

In a choice between any two options, decision makers can be divided into three segments: those who strongly prefer the first option, those who strongly prefer the second option, and those who might choose either option depending on the particular conditions (“switchers”). In any reference state, such as the experimental control, most switchers are...

In a choice between two options, decision makers can often be divided into three segments: those who strongly prefer the first option, those who strongly prefer the second option, and those who might choose either option depending on the particular conditions ("Switchers"). In any reference state, such as the experimental control, most Switchers ar...

In this commentary, we reiterate and build upon Early and Masokowski's call for cultural researchers to investigate underlying cognitive structures through which culture influences behavior, looking beyond the models of value-orientation that have dominated previous research. We assess evidence that tapping specific, knowledge structures — as oppos...