Ting Zhang

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Business School

Although mentorship is vital for individual success, potential mentors often view it as a costly burden. To understand what motivates mentors to overcome this barrier and more fully engage with their mentees, we introduce a new construct, learning direction, which captures the beliefs people have about which individuals within a hierarchy—upward, l...

Common wisdom suggests that older is wiser. Consequently, people rarely give advice to older individuals—even when they are relatively more expert—leading to missed learning opportunities. Across six studies ( N = 3,445), we explore the psychology of advisers when they are younger (reverse advising), the same age (peer advising), or older (traditio...

We identify and document a novel construct—pettiness, or intentional attentiveness to trivial details—and examine its (negative) implications in interpersonal relationships and social exchange. Seven studies show that pettiness manifests across different types of resources (both money and time), across cultures with differing tolerance for ambiguit...

Dilemmas featuring competing moral imperatives are prevalent in organizations and are difficult to resolve. Whereas prior research has focused on how individuals adjudicate among these moral imperatives, we study the factors that influence when individuals find solutions that fall outside of the salient options presented. In particular, we study mo...

The majority of studies in moral psychology have confounded unethical behavior with selfish behavior. We conceptually distinguish between unethicality and selfishness by analyzing the four distinct categories of behavior that these two con- structs combine to produce: selfish/unethical, selfish/ethical, unself- ish/ethical, and unselfish/unethical...

Contrary to the tendency of mediators to defuse negative emotions between adversaries by treating them kindly, we demonstrate the surprising effectiveness of hostile mediators in resolving conflict. Hostile mediators generate greater willingness to reach agreements between adversaries (Experiment 1). Consequently, negotiators interacting with hosti...

Ethics research developed partly in response to calls from organizations to understand and solve unethical behavior. We examine two approaches to mitigating unethical behavior: (1) values-oriented approaches that broadly appeal to individuals’ preferences to be more moral, and (2) structure-oriented approaches that redesign specific incentives, tas...

Although documenting everyday activities may seem trivial, four studies reveal that creating records of the present generates unexpected benefits by allowing future rediscoveries. In Study 1, we used a time-capsule paradigm to show that individuals underestimate the extent to which rediscovering experiences from the past will be curiosity provoking...

People often make the well-documented mistake of paying too much attention to outcome information, even when good process data is available—an error known as the outcome bias. This error has important implications for organizations, as it may lead employers to reward lucky employees and punish unlucky ones. In three laboratory studies, we examine w...