Modupe Akinola

Columbia University | CU · Division of Management, Columbia Business School

Purpose To evaluate if nudges delivered by text message prior to an upcoming primary care visit can increase influenza vaccination rates. Design Randomized, controlled trial. Setting Two health systems in the Northeastern US between September 2020 and March 2021. Subjects 74,811 adults. Interventions Patients in the 19 intervention arms receive...

Nearly all students experience stress as they pursue important academic goals. Because stress can be magnified for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, it becomes important to identify interventions that can help mitigate this stress, particularly for these populations as they enter academic environments. We examine the effects of stress mindse...

Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment ( N = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findin...

There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we c...

The dominant cultural valuation of stress is that it is "bad for me." This valuation leads to regulatory goals of reducing or avoiding stress. In this article, we propose an alternative approach-stress optimization-which integrates theory and research on stress mindset (e.g., Crum, Salovey, & Achor, 2013) and stress reappraisal (e.g., Jamieson, Men...

Transient shifts in testosterone occur during competition and are thought to positively influence dominance behavior aimed at enhancing social status. However, individual differences in testosterone reactivity to status contests have not been well-studied in relation to real-time expressions of competitive behavior among men and women. This researc...

Transient shifts in testosterone occur during competition and are thought to positively influence dominance behavior aimed at enhancing social status. However, individual differences in testosterone reactivity to status contests have not been well-studied in relation to real-time expressions of competitive behavior among men and women. This researc...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195883.].

There is evidence that altering stress mindset—the belief that stress is enhancing vs. debilitating—can change cognitive, affective and physiological responses to stress. However individual differences in responsiveness to stress mindset manipulations have not been explored. Given the previously established role of catecholamines in both placebo ef...

Prior research has found inconsistent effects of diversity on group performance. The present research identifies hormonal factors as a critical moderator of the diversity-performance connection. Integrating the diversity, status, and hormone literatures, we predicted that groups collectively low in testosterone, which orients individuals less towar...

Across a field study and four experiments, we examine how social norms and scrutiny affect decisions about adding members of underrepresented populations (e.g., women, racial minorities) to groups. When groups are scrutinized, we theorize that decision makers strive to match the diversity observed in peer groups due to impression management concern...

Background: The dominant perspective in society is that stress has negative consequences, and not surprisingly, the vast majority of interventions for coping with stress focus on reducing the frequency or severity of stressors. However, the effectiveness of stress attenuation is limited because it is often not possible to avoid stressors, and avoid...

Existing research suggests that attaining passion for work involves engaging in activities that people both “like” and see as “important.” We show that these two components of work passion have opposing effects on whether people report passion gaps, defined as the experience of having less work passion than desired. Through five studies using corre...

Effectively delegating work to others is considered critical to managerial success, as it frees up managers' time and develops subordinates' skills. We propose that female leaders are less likely than male leaders to capitalize on these benefits of delegating. Although delegation has communal (e.g., relational) and agentic (e.g., assertive) propert...

Whereas past research has focused on the downsides of task switching, the present research uncovers a potential upside: increased creativity. In two experiments, we show that task switching can enhance two principal forms of creativity—divergent thinking (Study 1) and convergent thinking (Study 2)—in part because temporarily setting a task aside re...

Background and objectives: Prior research suggests that altering situation-specific evaluations of stress as challenging versus threatening can improve responses to stress. The aim of the current study was to explore whether cognitive, physiological and affective stress responses can be altered independent of situation-specific evaluations by chang...

Prior research suggests that stress can be harmful in high-stakes contexts such as negotiations. However, few studies actually measure stress physiologically during negotiations, nor do studies offer interventions to combat the potential negative effects of heightened physiological responses in negotiation contexts. In the current research, we offe...

This paper investigates how social influence can alter physiological, psychological, and functional responses to a placebo product and how such responses influence the ultimate endorsement of the product. Participants consumed a product, “AquaCharge Energy Water,” falsely-labeled as containing 200 mg of caffeine but which was actually plain spring...

Longitudinal regression model for changes in systolic blood pressure from min14 to min24, with time mean-centered at min14. (PDF)

All AquaChargeWater.com website pages. The AquaCharge Energy Water website was designed specifically for the purposes of study by Gibbs Graphics. The website for the fictional product AquaCharge Energy Water was removed from the Internet after the study was complete. All website pages are reprinted under a CC BY license, with permission from Gibbs...

Full single-level regression models for average post-consumption levels of subjective alertness. (PDF)

Full single-level regression models for post-consumption levels of subjective alertness, separately at min24 and min29. (PDF)

Effects of condition on subjective alertness: longitudinal analyses. (PDF)

Longitudinal regression model for changes in subjective alertness from min13 to min29. (PDF)

Longitudinal regression model for changes in systolic blood pressure from min14 to min24, with time mean-centered at min19. (PDF)

Full single-level regression models for post-consumption levels of cognitive interference. (PDF)

Full single-level regression models for post-consumption levels of product endorsement. (PDF)

Additional information on measures and model fitting. (PDF)

Significance Past research has focused primarily on demographic and psychological characteristics of group members without taking into consideration the biological make-up of groups. Here we introduce a different construct—a group’s collective hormonal profile—and find that a group’s biological profile predicts its standing across groups and that t...

Little is known about how discrimination manifests before individuals formally apply to organizations or how it varies within and between organizations. We address this knowledge gap through an audit study in academia of over 6,500 professors at top U.S. universities drawn from 89 disciplines and 259 institutions. In our experiment, professors were...

Despite the laws that protect employee rights, discrimination still persists in the workplace. This chapter examines individual- level factors that may influence subtle discrimination in the workplace. More specifically, it examines how social categories tend to perpetuate the use of stereotypes and reviews contemporary theories of subtle prejudice...

This research explores vagal flexibility—dynamic modulation of cardiac vagal control—as an individual-level physiological index of social sensitivity. In four studies, we test the hypothesis that individuals with greater cardiac vagal flexibility, operationalized as higher cardiac vagal tone at rest and greater cardiac vagal withdrawal (indexed by...

Intergroup researchers have the opportunity to access to a wide variety of methods to help deepen theoretical insights about intergroup relations. In this paper, we focus on neuroendocrine measures, as these physiological measures offer some advantages over traditional measures used in intergroup research, are noninvasive, and are relatively easy t...

Epidemiological and animal studies often find that higher social status is associated with better physical health outcomes, but these findings are by design correlational and lack mediational explanations. In two studies, we examine neurobiological reactivity to test the hypothesis that higher social status leads to salutary short-term psychologica...

Psychophysiological measurement is rapidly emerging as a new window into behavior in organizations. Such measures, which involve recording bioelectric event potentials on the surface of the skin, offer a novel way to examine variables that cannot be directly reported or observed. Within this domain, sophisticated cardiovascular measures such as hea...

Women and minorities remain underrepresented in faculty positions across nearly all academic disciplines despite efforts to bolster their numbers. Although bias against women and minorities has been documented in academia, little is known about which academic disciplines exhibit bias. We address this question through a field experiment in which 6,5...

Negative social feedback is often a source of distress. However, self-verification theory provides the counterintuitive explanation that negative feedback leads to less distress when it is consistent with chronic self-views. Drawing from this work, the present study examined the impact of receiving self-verifying feedback on outcomes largely neglec...

Through a field experiment set in academia (with a sample of 6,548 professors), we found that decisions about distant-future events were more likely to generate discrimination against women and minorities (relative to Caucasian males) than were decisions about near-future events. In our study, faculty members received e-mails from fictional prospec...

Previous research suggests that cortisol can affect cognitive functions such as memory, decision making, and attentiveness to threat-related cues. Here, we examine whether increases in cortisol, brought on by an acute social stressor, influence threat-related decision making. Eighty-one police officers completed a standardized laboratory stressor a...

Numerous studies have demonstrated that racial bias influences the decision to fire weapons for non-police officer samples. However, little evidence exists about how these biases operate under stressful situations. We investigated police officers’ decisions to shoot Black and White targets carrying guns or objects in a computer simulation. Officers...

This goal of this chapter is to build a bridge between psychophysiology and organizational behavior in an effort to extend organizational theories and enhance the precision of organizational research. The first section describes psychophysiological systems and theories that can inform organizational scholars' understanding of the biological bases o...

Historical and empirical data have linked artistic creativity to depression and other affective disorders. This study examined how vulnerability to experiencing negative affect, measured with biological products, and intense negative emotions influenced artistic creativity. The authors assessed participants' baseline levels of an adrenal steroid (d...

Thesis (A.B., Honors in Psychology)--Harvard University, 1996. Includes bibliographical references.